Chapter 1, Introduction to DSLs and Groovy, discusses how DSLs can be used in place of general-purpose languages to represent different parts of a system. You will see how adding DSLs to your applications can open up the development process to other stakeholders in the development process. You'll also see how, in extreme cases, the stakeholders themselves can even become co-developers of the system by using DSLs that let them represent their domain expertise in the code.

Chapter 2, Groovy Quick Start, covers the basics of installing Groovy and running simple Groovy scripts.

Chapter 3, Essential Groovy DSLs, covers two essential Groovy-based tools, Gradle and Spock. Gradle is a build, test, and deployment automation tool, which is powered by a Groovy DSL. Spock is a unit testing and specification framework built over JUnit. Both tools are used extensively throughout the book.

Chapter 4, The Groovy Language, covers a whistle-stop tour of the Groovy language. It also touches on most of the significant features of the language as a part of this tour.

Chapter 5, Groovy Closures, covers closures in some depth. It covers all of the important aspects of working with closures. You can explore the various ways to call a closure and the means of passing parameters. You will see how to pass closures as parameters to methods, and how this construct can allow the adding of mini DSL syntax to our code.

Chapter 6, Example DSL – GeeTwitter, focuses on how we can start with an existing Java-based API and evolve it into a simple user-friendly DSL that can be used by almost anybody. You'll learn the importance of removing boilerplate code and how you can structure our DSL in such a way that the boilerplate is invisible to our DSL users.

Chapter 7, Power Groovy DSL Features, covers all of the important features of the Groovy language, and looks in depth at how some of these features can be applied to developing DSLs.

Chapter 8, AST Transformations, covers how to use the Groovy abstract syntax tree (AST) transformations. AST transformations are a mechanism for us to hook into the Groovy compilation process. Here we look at compile time metaprogramming and see how we can use AST transformations to build code on the fly during the compilation process.

Chapter 9, Existing Groovy DSLs, discusses some existing Groovy DSLs that are in current use and are free to download.

Chapter 10, Building a Builder, explains how Groovy provides two useful support classes that make it much simpler to implement our own builders than if we used the MOP. You'll see how to use BuilderSupport and FactoryBuilderSupport to create our own builder classes.

Chapter 11, Implementing a Rules DSL, takes a look at Groovy bindings to see how they can be used in our DSL scripts. By placing closures strategically in the binding, you can emulate named blocks of code. You can also provide built-in methods and other shorthand by including closures and named Boolean values in the binding. These techniques can be used to great effect to write DSL scripts that can be read and understood by stakeholders outside of the programming audience.

Chapter 12, Integrating It All, takes all the knowledge from the previous chapters and builds a fully functioning web application based on a simple Game Engine DSL for Tic Tac Toe.

It is highly recommended that you download the example code to use while you read the book. You will also need to download and install three key pieces of software, Groovy, Spock, and Gradle. Download and installation instructions for these are included in Chapter 2, Groovy Quick Start, and Chapter 3, Essential Groovy DSLs.

This book is for any software developers who have an interest in building domain scripting into their applications. No knowledge of Groovy is required, although it will be helpful. This book will not teach Groovy, but will quickly introduce the basic ideas of Groovy. An experienced developer should have no problems with this and will move quickly onto the more involved aspects of creating DSLs with Groovy. No experience of creating a DSL is required.

The book should also be useful for experienced Groovy developers who have so far only used Groovy DSLs, such as Groovy builders, and would like to start building their own Groovy-based DSLs.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Before you go to the Groovy documentation for MarkupBuilder to look for the book, author, and surname methods in MarkupBuilder, let me save you the effort."

A block of code is set as follows:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<book>
   <author>
              <first_name>Fergal</first_name>
              <surname> Dearle</surname>
   </author>
   <title>Groovy for DSL</title>
</book>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

Hello, World!
Goodbye, World!

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on the button to Create New App, then complete the form to create you app."

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To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

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