Groovy Patterns

A few days ago I had been attending an evening talk about Groovy organized by the Java User Group Hamburg (JUGHH). Dierk König (Canoo Engineering AG, Basel) was talking about the application of Groovy by means of seven application patterns. He got the patterns across very well and by the way he gave a brief but good insight into the Groovy language without going to much into detail.

Although I had some years of experience in the Smalltalk language, I was often wondering of concrete use cases where the application of modern scripting languages will really be an option. Apart from other dis-/advantages of scripting languages one of its main drawbacks in my opinion is the lack of type safety that could lead to very ugly runtime errors. But my Smalltalk experience is more than 10 years ago and modern development processes based on unit tests and continuous integration may avoid such errors as far as possible.
Furthermore Dierk gave me some concrete ideas of Groovy use cases and now I'm sure that Groovy could really be a language option. I'm also amazed about the elegance and functionality of Groovy - based on Java libraries and its own extensions - and the variety of the Groovy universe.

Dierk talked about the Hackergarten (open source coding) events that are organized by Canoo. I find it a very amazing and interesting idea and would be happy if some day such an event would take place in Hamburg (or somewhere in the north of Germany).

Thanks to the JUGHH and Dierk for this really interesting evening.