Java is Dead, Long Live Groovy!

Many industry pundits now talk about Java as a venerable "has been" language, no longer trendy enough for the "young guns" out there and no longer suited to modern, agile development practices. The cleverer industry pundits talk about Groovy! This session will introduce the Groovy language and associated “goodnesses.” You will learn that Groovy is an agile and dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine that builds upon the strengths of Java but has additional power features inspired by languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk. You will see how Groovy makes modern programming available to Java developers via a very small learning curve. You will see how Groovy amplifies the use of commonplace technologies such as XML and Jakarta Ant. Best of all, you will see how Groovy keeps the best bits of Java intact, so that you can move forward without having to retool and throw away past investments.