Compile Time and Runtime Metaprogramming With Groovy

The dynamic nature of Groovy makes it a fantastic language for building dynamic applications for the Java Platform. The metaprogramming capabilities offered by the language provide everything that an application development team needs to build systems that are far more capable than their all Java counterparts. Taking advantage of Groovy's metaprogramming capabilities brings great new possibilities that would be very difficult or just plain impossible to write with Java alone. Building Domain Specific Languages in Groovy is easy to do once a team has a good understanding of the Metaobject-Protocol (MOP) and the method dispatch mechanisms used by the Groovy runtime environment.

This session will cover in detail a number of advanced metaprogramming concepts in Groovy. The discussion will cover using dynamic method interception, meta-class manipulation, AST transformations and Groovy's Metaobject-Protocol (MP) to build flexible applications in Groovy including implementing a Domain Specific Language (DSL).

About Jeff Brown

Grails co-founder and OCI Grails Practice Lead, Jeff Scott Brown has been doing JVM application development for as long as the JVM has existed. He has spent most of the last decade focused specifically on work related to the Grails framework. Jeff co-authored The Definitive Guide to Grails Second Edition and The Definitive Guide to Grails 2, in partnership with Grails co-founder and OCI Grails Team Lead, Graeme Rocher. Jeff is also a regular public speaker on Grails, Groovy, and other JVM-related technologies.

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