Effective Unit Testing

8.2. Writing unit tests with Groovy

Groovy’s premise for writing unit tests is a significantly lighter syntax for expressing your intent. Though Groovy still resembles Java, its lightness comes from making a lot of Java’s syntax optional.

For instance, in Groovy semicolons, parentheses, and the return keyword are optional and can be left out, as illustrated by the following listing.

Listing 8.2. Groovy’s syntax is like stripped down Java

void logAndReturn(String message) {
   def logMessage = "${new Date()} - ${message}"
   println logMessage
   logMessage
}

The listing also illustrates a number of other ways in which Groovy reduces the amount of boilerplate programmers have to write. Because Groovy’s default visibility modifier is public, you can omit ...