This week I came across an article called Why Test Engineers Should Learn Groovy (http://testerstories.com/2013/08/why-test-engineers-should-learn-groovy/).

Groovy is a lightweight, object-oriented language that runs on the JVM and it follows Java semantics. It is particularly useful for writing test scripts. The one thing that I really liked was how little typing I needed to get something done in Groovy compared to Java.

Take the following Java code for example:

public class Greetings {

public static void main(String[] args) {

for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {

System.out.println(i + “,”);

}

System.out.println(“Testing Groovy”);

}

If the code above is saved in a file with extension .groovy, you could run it by saying groovy fileName.groovy  (you do have to install groovy first). You could compress the Java code above into:

for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {

System.out.println(i + “,”)

}

System.out.println(“Testing Groovy”);

This code does the exact same thing as the first code, but with a lot less lines. Groovy does not require you to have all logic within a class. And notice, Groovy does not require semicolons after statements. This code can be compressed even further:

for(i in 0..9)  { print(i + “,”) }

println(“Testing Groovy”)

Groovy makes life a lot easier, everything does not need to be enclosed within a class or enclosed within a main method within a class.

From the blog Software Testing – The blog about software by Sudarshan and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.