Programming Groovy 2

2.9 Support of Java 5 Language Features

Java 5 language features like enums and annotations work in Groovy also. This means we can mix Java and Groovy quite fluently. To refresh, the Java 5 language features are as follows:

• Autoboxing

• for-each

• ​enum​

• Varargs

• Annotation

• Static import

• Generics

Let’s discuss the extent of the Groovy support for these features.

Autoboxing

Groovy, because of its dynamic typing, supports autoboxing from the get-go. In fact, Groovy automatically treats primitives as objects where necessary. For instance, execute the following code:

int val = 5

println val.getClass().name

The type is reported as follows:

java.lang.Integer

In this code, we created an instance of ​java.lang.Integer ...