SpringSource (creators of the Spring framework) announced yesterday that they have acquired G2One (creators of Groovy and Grails). This is exciting news for all enterprise Java developers. SpringSource obviously views Groovy and Grails as strategic technologies for improving productivity with developing applications using the Spring framework.

Martin Fowler has blogged a lot on his bliki about Dependency Injection, and more recently about Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). With Groovy on Spring you get to have your cake and eat it too. Spring uses Dependency Injection which allows for a more loosely coupled architecture that is more testable and configurable. With Groovy you will be able to use the more expressive nature of the Groovy language to encapsulate your business rules in a DSL, then call them straight from your Java code. Yes that is correct, Groovy and Java play nicely together on the JVM. Groovy can also be used as a power tool for Java development: build scripts and functional tests can easily be written in Groovy, which saves you from writing XML, and tedious amounts of Selenium RC code in Java.

Warning: Gratuitous plug follows.

The next Groovy Sydney meeting will be held on Wednesday, 26 November 2008 at the ThoughtWorks Sydney office on Pitt St. More details of the meeting are located in the forums. Coincidentally it will be the last Groovy meeting in Spring as Summer is just around the corner.