An introductory article on the Groovy language has been posted at IBM’s developerWorks website. I have only skimmed it briefly so far, but I definitely need to take a closer look at this article as well as at Groovy in general.
Groovy is a dynamic language that runs on the JVM. It looks similar to Java but without many of its restrictions, and thus closely resembles scripting languages such as Ruby.
While I generally like Java’s strictness and its strong typing, some projects call for a less restrictive approach, and Groovy might be just the right solution. In addition to being able to run standalone, Groovy also offers several simple mechanisms for embedding it into Java applications. That would make it a great embedded scripting language for games, for example.