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Groovy for Domain-Specific Languages, Second Edition

Groovy for Domain-Specific Languages, Second Edition

By : Dearle
4.7 (3)
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Groovy for Domain-Specific Languages, Second Edition

Groovy for Domain-Specific Languages, Second Edition

4.7 (3)
By: Dearle

Overview of this book

The times when developing on the JVM meant you were a Java programmer have long passed. The JVM is now firmly established as a polyglot development environment with many projects opting for alternative development languages to Java such as Groovy, Scala, Clojure, and JRuby. In this pantheon of development languages, Groovy stands out for its excellent DSL enabling features which allows it to be manipulated to produce mini languages that are tailored to a project’s needs. A comprehensive tutorial on designing and developing mini Groovy based Domain Specific Languages, this book will guide you through the development of several mini DSLs that will help you gain all the skills needed to develop your own Groovy based DSLs with confidence and ease. Starting with the bare basics, this book will focus on how Groovy can be used to construct domain specific mini languages, and will go through the more complex meta-programming features of Groovy, including using the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). Practical examples are used throughout this book to de-mystify these seemingly complex language features and to show how they can be used to create simple and elegant DSLs. Packed with examples, including several fully worked DSLs, this book will serve as a springboard for developing your own DSLs.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
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1
1. Introduction to DSLs and Groovy
13
Index

What is a closure?


Closures are such an unfamiliar concept to begin with that it can be hard to grasp initially. Closures have characteristics that make them look like a method in so far as we can pass parameters to them and they can return a value. However, unlike methods, closures are anonymous. A closure is just a snippet of code that can be assigned to a variable and executed later:

def flintstones = ["Fred","Barney"]
def greeter = { println "Hello, ${it}" }
flintstones.each( greeter )
greeter "Wilma"
greeter = { }
flintstones.each( greeter )
greeter "Wilma"

Because closures are anonymous, they can easily be lost or overwritten. In the preceding example, we defined a variable greeter to contain a closure that prints a greeting. After greeter is overwritten with an empty closure, any reference to the original closure is lost.

Tip

It's important to remember that greeter is not the closure. It is a variable that contains a closure, so it can be supplanted at any time.

Given that greeter is a...

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Groovy for Domain-Specific Languages, Second Edition
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