Derek Marley's Tech Blog

Over the past little while I have been writing my test scripts using Groovy and Geb (a web functional test framework). During this process I found myself writing more Groovy style methods, so I wanted to look at what the differences were between Java and Groovy methods.

So now my findings…

For the most part the differences are focused around eliminating as much code from your class definitions as possible (hopefully making your code more readable by eliminating the “noise”).

Essentially there are 4 major differences

1. default visibility is Public
2. return keyword is optional
3. the method return type is optional
4. parameter types are optional

I will now show a quick code snippet with a Java version followed by a Groovy version.  This way you can be the Judge!
Personally I am becoming a fan.

Imagine having 10,15, 20 plus methods – you will start to see the simplicity.

JAVA

    public String sayHello(String firstName, String lastName){
        return “Hello” + firstName + “ “ + lastName
    }

Groovy

    def sayHello(firstName, lastName){
        "Hello ${firstName}  ${lastName}"
    }

Another interesting feature(s)…

Positional Parameters and default parameter values

Groovy has the notion of positional parameters, and the ability to set default values if one of the parameters are not passed to the method.

Example

    def adder(arg1, arg2, arg3 = 5){
        arg1 + arg2 + arg3
    }

    assert adder(1,2,3) == 6
    assert adder(1,2) == 8