A tribute to Groovy

NOTE: This is a restored version from this archive.

My life as a developer :

Update : it’s my life as a professional developer, since my life as a programmer began in 1983 on a Sinclair ZX81…

1995 : Java 1.0 beta is released. I begin playing with it. Hotjava browser, applets are all the rage. Soon after, the infamous « Loading Java » status bar message in Netscape is the signal that you’ll loose control of your browser for at least 15 seconds while the JVM loads an applet.

1996 : Academic and toy projects in Java. Since JDBC is not out yet, I decide to write my own DBMS in Java. It works but of course it’s crappy. Cloudspace, Hypersonic and over 100% pure Java DBMS are safe.

1997 : Wrote [an HTTP 1.0 server in Java](/download/Rapport AXONE.pdf), with pluggable controller modules named « lumps » (Java <-> coffee <-> sugar lumps, nudge nudge wink wink). Damn, I should have thought about « Servlets ». Wrote a lump which interprets a server page language not unlike ColdFusion (that is, as crappy, but at least at that time it already ran on the JVM). Wrote my first server pages which could access an Access database through the freshly released JDBC-ODBC bridge and display data on my browser. As a trainee, I have to work on a project built with Borland Intrabuilder. That was both interesting and very scary, since the thing was drowning in bugs.

1998-1999 : Had to work, first part time, then full time. Of course, it’s all about EJB 1.0 beta and my lead developer Laurent Quérel and I try to build something around EJBs and Persistence Powertier which would not look totally unlike Hibernate today. I begin to get the abstraction addiction. It’ll take me a few years to get rid of this addiction.

2000-2001 : the future is on the mobile phone, and WAP is going to be the next web. In full abstraction addiction mode, my team and I develop our own specialized application server, so that you can write a web application once and browse it from any web-enabled device, the presentation being abstracted and adapted to the zillion different devices that would soon access our apps. We develop half a dozen application with this application server before the net bubble explodes and we realise that it would need a few more years before the Internet on a mobile phone would become a Big Thing. One good thing, though : when we began this application server business, we drop all the EJB nonsense. We built our own IoC container, much like Spring. And we didn’t need an ORM, because all we needed to map to was XML, dude. This was the time when I read & wrote a lot on the xml-dev mailing list.

2002-2003 : I’m done with the abstraction addiction. I’ve got a challenging job, lots of work to do, and no much time to think and ponder about abstracting anything. The code I write must be straightforward and must get things done. I’m feeling more and more irritated by the verbosity of Java and the zillion XML configuration files I’m forced to write. An IoC container is a nice thing, but honestly, I sometimes feel that a simple scripting language would be much more suited to configure my apps. I begin experimenting with Jython. I also try for the first time Groovy, which is under development, but the language seems a bit goofy at the time, a patchwork of good ideas but nothing really as coherent as Python.

2004 : OK, I finally get it. I need a dynamic language. I hesitate between Python and Ruby ; Ruby is more interesting but less polished, and at the time, a lot of documentation is badly translated from Japanese. I choose to invest in Python. I fall in love with Python. I use it first for any kind of data massaging tasks, then progressively for web development. I begin tinkering with mod_python, which will eventually lead to my active participation in the project. In the same time, I experiment with Zope, find it fascinating and decide to use it for a classic web application project. Big mistake, that I’m still paying for four years after.

2005 : Ruby on Rails appears. People marvel at the thing. I don’t get that the scaffolding demos that begin to invade the blogosphere have nothing to do with the real power of RoR. When watching those demos, I told myself « OK, that’s really cool, but real apps are much more complicated than just CRUD screens ». Of course, Sherlock, but do you really expect that things will be brighter in any other framework you can choose if even the basic stuff like CRUD is complicated ? Oh, and on August, the 23rd, my daughter Violette was born.

2006 : it’s time for a comeback to Java (nothing to add to what I’ve wrote at this time). I also work 50% on my time for Yoono, once again with Laurent Quérel. One day, walking back from lunch in a Parisian street, I recognize Guillaume Laforge, which I knew took over the leadership of the Groovy project. I tell him « Excuse me, but aren’t you Guillaume Laforge » ? Yes indeed – I think he found it a little creepy to have reached celebrity to the point of being recognized in the street by total strangers :) . Anyway, at the time, in the street in front of our offices, I naively propose him to work for Yoono, as we were looking for top notch Java developers. Of course he declined politely, but now that I know what Guillaume was working on, I’m glad he did !

2007 : for a new big project, I hesitate quite a long time between Java + Spring + Hibernate + Struts, Python + Django and Ruby on Rails. I finally decide to give RoR a go. It’s awesome. Nothing to regret as of today, except maybe my choice of MySQL + InnoDB tables which gives strange problems with table locks. Apart from that, I get the same rush than anyone else trying RoR : freedom and power ! However, the deployment model sucks. What, a single-threaded application server ? You have to launch multiple servers and load-balance between them using Apache 2.2 mod_proxy_balancer, lighttpd or Pound ? OK, I’ve done it with mod_proxy_balancer and it was no rocket science, but seriously, It’s a bit of an hassle to manage. And the performance is not so great, I squeeze 60 reqs/sec per instance, with is totally sufficient for the app we built, but come on ? I get easily 4 or 5 times more reqs/sec with any badly configured Python or Java stack (please don’t flame me for this obviously inane benchmark).

2008 : Grails 1.0 is out. I have a new look at Groovy. It has been totally morphed into one of the coolest dynamic language out there under the lead of Guillaume Laforge. Groovy is now a true dynamic language, with a seriously good feature set. All my favorites from Python and Ruby are there. And it runs, fast, on the JVM. What can I say ? It looks almost perfect. Of course, writing such a language is a difficult task, and things could get ruined by weird lexical scoping interaction with closures or things like that (no, I don’t think about any particular language, Ruby). But at first sight, it looks very, very good. Could I ask more ? A nice web framework running on top of the JVM ? Well, Grails sure looks promising, I can’t wait to try it on a real application ! Performance-wise, my first benchmark tell me we’re far above Ruby on Rails. Oh, and IntelliJ supports Groovy and Grails with a pretty cool plugin, too. So I guess life as a web developer is now perfect, end of story :) .

And now for the punch line : I have now reached a position at work where I’m supposed not to code any more, at all.

WHAT ? All those years of sweating, fighting and yearning, and now that a good web development stack is out in the wild, I’m supposed to retire as a developer and become a friggin’ MANAGER ? I tell ya, there’s no justice anymore in this world.

Oh, and 13 years after, my browser still hangs for more than 15 seconds as soon as I try to load a page with an applet. Meanwhile, Flash objects load almost instantly, without any problem…