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Poll: Do You Consider Groovy "Production Ready"?

06.08.2012
| 11136 views |
We recently got a post on Javalobby from a new contributor, Pavel Bernshtam.  He wrote an explanation of why he thinks Groovy is a "Better Java".  I was initially going to see how everyone on JL felt about that statement (maybe a poll to see who thinks Groovy is preferable in a situation where speed of development and not performance is the main goal.), but then I read the comments:

Murali Mohan Rath:

Groovy for production.. not yet. Some of my colleagues use Groovy for few scripts and their opinion is Groovy not for production use. The implementation is not yet stable for serious applications. I have tried Groovy as well, I liked the syntax. I appreciate the work done for static compilation. But few things I wanted didn't work out of box, e.g. generating JPA meta model classes from groovy models.. Once you hit a bug, it gets difficult to progress. There might be work arounds etc but I want it to work out of box when I use it for production apps.

My opinion groovy is a great language with nice and clean syntax but the implementation is not good enough for production use.


Response...

Thomas Eichberger:

I don't know why people say that Groovy is not production ready - it is - and it has been for some years now.

For me personally it is definitely the better Java :-)



So I ask you...

Do You Consider Groovy "Production Ready"?

Yes, Groovy is Production Ready
81% (693 votes)
No, Groovy is NOT Production Ready
19% (159 votes)
Total votes: 852

Comments

darryl west replied on Fri, 2012/06/08 - 9:30am

in 2000 and 2001 some large IT departments would dismiss Java as not being production ready.  Fortunatly most of those opinions lost influence when the dot-bomb collapse sent them packing.  What it clear is that large IT departments are rarely production ready.

Guillaume Laforge replied on Fri, 2012/06/08 - 9:44am

Groovy is used in financial institutions (insurance companies, banks, hedge funds, literally manipulating millions of dollars/euros every day), for scientific simulations (nuclear, bio-medical), high-traffic and highly dynamic websites (thanks to Grails), in the travel business, in patent offices, and many more use cases.

These are just some I know about personally, although they're not necessarily publicized, but Groovy's really been used successfully for very serious use cases, for a fair number of years already.

Philippe Delebarre replied on Fri, 2012/06/08 - 9:48am

Groovy is used daily in my organization (European Patent Office) and successfully powers critical applications for more than 3 years.

olivier fresse replied on Fri, 2012/06/08 - 9:58am

Production ready, and in fact, in production on various customer sites... 

Erik Post replied on Fri, 2012/06/08 - 10:24am

I don't know much about Groovy, but whatever is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. The comment by Mr. Rath ("I tried something but I couldn't get it to work out of the box") falls into this category. That's not to say I'm unsympathetic to his blight of having encountered something in his programming career that wouldn't work the first time around -- presumably only after years and years of RTFM-less, bug-free Java development. Nonetheless, I think this poll is a bit silly and does not belong on a site that takes progamming matters seriously.

James Ervin replied on Fri, 2012/06/08 - 10:26am

I would have agreed with the notion that Groovy is not production ready, oh about 6 years ago.  Today?  No way, it has long ago passed that threshold.

Brian Schlining replied on Fri, 2012/06/08 - 10:38am

Well, I've been using it in production for almost 4 years. So I'd say: yeah, it's ready for production.

David Vree replied on Fri, 2012/06/08 - 11:03am in response to: Erik Post

I'm glad they did the poll and am interested in the comments.

Mitch Pronschinske replied on Fri, 2012/06/08 - 11:22am in response to: Guillaume Laforge

@ Guillaume

That's what my observations of the space have shown me as well.  I felt kinda silly putting this poll up to be honest.  I think it's obvious that Groovy is "Production-Ready".

Erik Post replied on Fri, 2012/06/08 - 11:59am in response to: David Vree

I'm glad you're glad. ;) Allow me to summarise them for you: Groovy has been production ready for several years now, and nobody sees any sense in what the gentleman who couldn't get something or other to work once was saying.

David Vree replied on Fri, 2012/06/08 - 1:12pm in response to: Erik Post

<deleted>

Fred Janon replied on Fri, 2012/06/08 - 5:38pm

I have been using Groovy & Grails in production for web applications for 4 years without a glitch. They are getter better by the day. I had one issue that was due to a OpenJDK JVM bug, not Groovy.

Nirav Assar replied on Fri, 2012/09/21 - 11:44am

I have worked with financial clients on over 20 applications, and they are all production ready. When encountering a groovy as new language and dismissing as not ready, one should introspect to see if the group is not ready for the languance, rather than the language is not ready for production.  Learning takes time, but it should not dismiss the capabilities when others have demonstrated its usage.

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