Book Image

Groovy 2 Cookbook

Book Image

Groovy 2 Cookbook

Overview of this book

Get up to speed with Groovy, a language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that integrates features of both object-oriented and functional programming. This book will show you the powerful features of Groovy 2 applied to real-world scenarios and how the dynamic nature of the language makes it very simple to tackle problems that would otherwise require hours or days of research and implementation. Groovy 2 Cookbook contains a vast number of recipes covering many facets of today's programming landscape. From language-specific topics such as closures and metaprogramming, to more advanced applications of Groovy flexibility such as DSL and testing techniques, this book gives you quick solutions to everyday problems. The recipes in this book start from the basics of installing Groovy and running your first scripts and continue with progressively more advanced examples that will help you to take advantage of the language's amazing features. Packed with hundreds of tried-and-true Groovy recipes, Groovy 2 Cookbook includes code segments covering many specialized APIs to work with files and collections, manipulate XML, work with REST services and JSON, create asynchronous tasks, and more. But Groovy does more than just ease traditional Java development: it brings modern programming features to the Java platform like closures, duck-typing, and metaprogramming. In this new book, you'll find code examples that you can use in your projects right away along with a discussion about how and why the solution works. Focusing on what's useful and tricky, Groovy 2 Cookbook offers a wealth of useful code for all Java and Groovy programmers, not just advanced practitioners.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Groovy 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Adding a caching functionality around methods


We have already encountered AST transformations in Chapter 3, Using Groovy Language Features, in the form of out-of-the-box annotations available in Groovy. In this recipe, we will show how to create a brand-new AST transformation to apply to your code.

But first, we'll see some theory as this is required before you dive into AST transformations. An AST transformation is a clever mechanism to modify the bytecode generation at compile time, hence the association with the broader term compile-time metaprogramming.

By modifying the bytecode, we can augment our code with additional features that are added transparently during compilation time; for example, adding getters and setters to a class.

In Java and other languages, it is relatively easy to generate source code, think of domain entity classes generated out of database tables.

But, compile-time metaprogramming goes to the next level and directly generates bytecode that is loaded directly into the...