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Sun Support for Groovy

 
Greenhorn
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Groovy was initially supported by a JSR correct? Why has it moved away from being part of the Java Community Process? And what position does Sun take on Groovy?
 
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I believe it was a JSR at one time, yes. I for one am glad it is not. Sun has, in my opinion, done a poor job in the past forcing so called "standards" on the community (EJB, JSF, etc). Groovy is too good to be endorsed by Sun.
 
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If NetBeans is any indication, I'd say Sun isn't investing very heavily in Groovy. The Groovy plugin for NetBeans is nowhere near as good as the Groovy plugin for Eclipse. To me, this would indicate that Sun isn't pushing Groovy very hard, as IDE support is a huge contributor to a language's success these days.
[ April 09, 2008: Message edited by: Josh Brown ]
 
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Originally posted by Josh Brown:
If NetBeans is any indication, I'd say Sun isn't investing very heavily in Groovy. The Groovy plugin for NetBeans is nowhere near as good as the Groovy plugin for Eclipse. To me, this would indicate that Sun isn't pushing Groovy very hard, as IDE support is a huge contributor to a language's success these days.

[ April 09, 2008: Message edited by: Josh Brown ]



In a relatively recent episode of the Java Posse podcast, Tor Norby, one of the Netbeans team's heavy hitters, mentioned that Sun had not been focusing resources on Groovy support because other IDEs have already 'cornered that market' (I'm paraphrasing, perhaps even poorly, but that's the idea).

To be fair though, I don't think this means that Sun doesn't support Groovy. Rather, IMO it means that Sun simply doesn't feel it's profitable or smart to devote developer resources to enhancing Netbeans groovy support when IntelliJ and others are already doing a lot in that area elsewhere.
 
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The way one Sun employee put it to me (very rough paraphrase) was that Groovy developers are Java developers. The same is not necessarily true of Ruby or Python developers. Hence greater emphasis on bringing them into the fold. Sun has been supportive of the Groovy project and has, from what I heard, donated hardware and other support.
[ April 09, 2008: Message edited by: Dave Klein ]
 
Josh Brown
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Originally posted by Chris Patti:


In a relatively recent episode of the Java Posse podcast, Tor Norby, one of the Netbeans team's heavy hitters, mentioned that Sun had not been focusing resources on Groovy support because other IDEs have already 'cornered that market' (I'm paraphrasing, perhaps even poorly, but that's the idea).

To be fair though, I don't think this means that Sun doesn't support Groovy. Rather, IMO it means that Sun simply doesn't feel it's profitable or smart to devote developer resources to enhancing Netbeans groovy support when IntelliJ and others are already doing a lot in that area elsewhere.



I'm not going to debate whether Tor Norby said that, but I don't think he's right. I don't think other IDEs have cornered the market, because IntelliJ has the only good Groovy plugin that I've seen. But you have to pay for IntelliJ, and I think there are still a lot of developers out there who want a free IDE. I've worked with the Eclipse plugin, and it's not good. The plugin for NetBeans isn't good either, but they're not that far behind. It's not too late for them to catch up by improving on their plugin.
 
Gregg Bolinger
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It does seem odd that Sun would just back away from something as relevant and surely desired as a good groovy plugin for Netbeans because other's have "cornered the market". That doesn't sound at all like Sun to me.
 
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Well, Dave's comment does seem a plausible explanation for the behavior we see. If they have limited resources, they may be choosing to spend them countering what they see as the bigger threat to Sun - namely Ruby run without Java. By putting resources into Netbeans integration with Ruby/Rails, they will have more ability to guide those developers towards JRuby and encourage the use of other Java libraries. Meanwhile the Groovy developers may go and use Eclipse or IntelliJ, but they'll still be using Java as their underlying technology. That's unfortunate, from Sun's perspective, but not as bad as the prospect of developers abandoning Java entirely. So they're putting their efforts where they'll be the most valuable, as Sun sees things.
 
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