
Groovy Now Runs on Android - DanielRibeiro
http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/06/groovy-android
======
vorg
It's great the Codehaus implementation of Groovy has finally come to Android,
but there's no mention of this on the Groovy users or development mailing
lists at
[http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com](http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com)

Groovy users around the world would appreciate being told first, instead of
needing to attend a conference, or follow online rags like infoQ or people's
personal blogs. And users subscribed to their developers list should be told
in advance what's in the pipeline rather than being sprung with a change of
plans this suddenly. We're all expecting Groovy 3 with the meta-object
protocol rewrite and Java 8 lambda retrofit to come next, and now we find out
on Hacker News of all places that Groovy 2.4 is next.

~~~
meddlepal
This has always been a problem with Groovy; terrible communication from the
core language developers. It's unfortunate because I think Groovy could be a
lot more popular than it is but I think most developers are unaware of its
existence even on just the stock JVM.

~~~
coldtea
Well, the fact that I can't recall ANY Groovy core developer answering a
comment on HN ever, also speaks volumes. Or even some devoted Groovy
contributor.

~~~
mindcrime
To be fair, which languages _do_ have their core developers posting here, and
especially on a regular basis? Maybe I just don't pay enough attention, but I
don't really recall that many. Walter Bright is the primary name that jumps to
mind, and I'm actually having trouble coming up with many others.

~~~
coldtea
Well, I've seen contributors and core team people from .NET (and Azure), Java,
Go, Rust, Arc (well, duh), Haskell, Clojure, Julia, Coffeescript and lots of
other languages...

Some of them on a regular basis (Rust and Go people especially), others
frequently pop up when their languages are discussed.

~~~
mindcrime
OK, now that you mention it, I do recall the Rust folks. Some of the others I
don't remember, but I'm sure you're right. I probably just don't pay enough
attention to that sort of thing. :-)

------
msgilligan
Here is Cedric Champeau's blog post "Groovy on Android" which contains the
slides to his presentation:
[http://melix.github.io/blog/2014/06/grooid.html](http://melix.github.io/blog/2014/06/grooid.html)

Work towards running Groovy on Android has been going on for years, but with
this new PR <[https://github.com/groovy/groovy-
core/pull/436>](https://github.com/groovy/groovy-core/pull/436>) and the
(unofficial?) announcement of Groovy 2.4 it looks like it's finally here.

~~~
vorg
Champeau didn't say anything about performance. Last year Laforge said it took
20 secs to startup a simple Hello World program [1]. Is performance now
better?

[1]
[http://groovy.codehaus.org/GSoC+2013](http://groovy.codehaus.org/GSoC+2013)

~~~
msgilligan
I'm an iOS user/developer and Groovy developer that's thinking about dabbling
with Android. I haven't tried it yet, but I know they've done a lot of
performance work in the last year.

There's an app in the Google Play store that you can try out:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.champeau.gr...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.champeau.gr8confagenda.app)

------
zmmmmm
I'd be over the moon if Groovy becomes practical for Android development. It
would really ease the pain of not having recent versions of Java available.

A lot remains to be seen though - a lot of these Java alternatives turn out to
be pretty flaky with weird unsupported corners of functionality, poor
integration with IDEs, debuggers, etc., and when you have weird bugs you're in
an extremely small isolated minority in trying to figure it out. There's a
whole lot more to it than just getting it to compile / run.

~~~
pjmlp
I learned a few decades ago that staying out of official supported languages
in OS vendors SDKs is opening the doors to extra working hours as you add
another layer to the tooling.

So I do it for learning purposes, but for work we just use officially
supported languages.

------
jaxytee
For those interested in other Java alternatives on Android, check out Scaloid:
[https://github.com/pocorall/scaloid](https://github.com/pocorall/scaloid).

------
TeamMCS
I'm really excited to see this. When Android was first released I was over-
the-moon thinking about all the various applications I could build. As I
started building a few all the noise of Java and the poor testing and tooling
was really getting on my nerves.

My most popular release is very event centric which means tons of anonymous
inner classes polluting the code and making the entire thing quite
aesthetically displeasing.

With Android Studio (IntellJ), Gradle and hopefully Groovy a lot of that noise
and pain can be removed. I would be dubious moving over to that or Scala until
the Big G approves but it speaks reams for the future.

I does sadden me that Groovy has fallen by the wayside these years (as
primarily Groovy developer) given it is such a jump over Java. Scala looks
great but for the type of apps (web/mobile) it still is rather verbose and
slow to compile - not ideal for RAD imo. With Java 8 coming it's good to see
they've taking Lambas over, even if it's a bit clunky.

------
pjmlp
I wonder how well it runs under ART.

------
visualR
This is really cool.

