A previous post promised a head-to-head no-mercy Neo4j vs. relational showdown. It also provided Groovy programs to store and retrieve file system data in a Neo4j graph database. Neo4j was recently released in a 1.0 version (see the Neo4j site).

Now it’s time for the relational combatant to enter the scene: Apache Derby.
We will write another Groovy program to store file system data, this time using a Derby relational database. To make the task more interesting we will try to earn a “nosql” medal by not using SQL.
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Neo4j is a graph database, recently released in a 1.0 version (see the Neo4j site). A previous post showed a trivial example of using Neo4j from Groovy.

This post contains an example somewhat closer to real life. It is also the first entry in a Neo vs. relational head-to-head no-mercy showdown.
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Neo4j is a graph database, recently released in a 1.0 version (see the Neo4j site). The main programming interface is Java. A lot of Java stuff looks much groovier when run from Groovy. Why not give Neo4j a try?

This post takes the little “Hello world” program from the Neo4j Getting Started Guide and makes it somewhat groovier. A later post will demonstrate a more complete program.
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What is the value of exceptions in programming languages? Great in many ways. Does anybody remember the clunky longjmp? Or the terrible programming style where a return code must be examined after every function call? Exceptions are invaluable to keep error handling from messing up the logic of your code.

So exceptions are good. If something is good, isn’t more of the same better?
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After a previous post, covering the basics, we’ll go on with another geek-level look at regular expressions in Groovy. This time we will examine groups. Groups is about parsing, how to pick up parts of what a regular expression matches. We will also uncover a few more gotchas. Continue »

The Groovy programming language simplifies many common tasks, including regular expressions. This post shows common uses made easy by Groovy. However, regular expressions in Groovy are not free from irregularities. This geek level post will explain one of them. Continue »

If you create software for a living, chances are the only important question in your workplace is, “How quick can you get it out the door?” Unlike figure skating or diving, no points are awarded for good style. But once in a while it’s refreshing to think about how we work and the tools we use, like programming languages. I enjoyed reading In Praise of Scripting: Real Programming Pragmatism by Ronald P. Loui (complete reference below). It’s a high quality text with a lot of perspective.
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Is there anything groovy about office documents? How about getting document properties out of all kinds of MS Office documents without running an Office application? Add platform independence as a bonus. Did you say impossible?
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Because of the strong ties between Java and Groovy, Groovy benefits from an enormous amount of Java utilities. This time we will take a brief look at what you can do with PDF documents. Continue »

The Groovy lessons reflect my first steps into Groovy territory. Groovy is a programming language that builds on Java and is quite seamlessly integrated with Java.

After learning to run simple stuff in the GroovyShell you naturally want to proceed to something resembling an application. Run it conveniently using the GroovyScriptEngine. Enter the following lines in a GroovyShell:
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