Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 3More Advanced Groovy

Chapters 1 and 2 offered a glimpse into the power and capabilities of Groovy by providing a basic understanding of its language features and tools. But there is far more to know about Groovy. For example, Groovy provides an ideal framework for creating unit tests. It makes working with XML simple and straightforward, and it includes a great framework for templating text. Finally, Groovy has a meta programming model that you can use to do amazing things, such as enabling the creation of domain-specific languages and adding methods and functionality to the Java API classes, including classes that are marked as final, which prevents them from being extended in Java.

This chapter covers a variety of unrelated or loosely ...