Part 1 has lifted you to the level where you can confidently work with the Groovy language. You have also seen a glimpse of some of the fundamental parts of Groovy library. Part 2 builds upon this knowledge, diving into other parts of the Groovy library and exploring how Groovy extends the Java Runtime Environment. You have already seen how Groovy tries to make commonly performed tasks as easy as possible in the language—this part of the book shows how the same principle is applied in Groovy’s libraries, using many of the advanced language features available to let you do more work with less code.

Chapter 8 introduces the builder concept, which is one of Groovy’s distinctive capabilities, because it can only be implemented in a general library class with a truly dynamic language. We will examine the builders that come as part of the Groovy distribution and show you how to implement your own builders.

Chapter 9 covers at the object/method level pure GDK library capabilities that were not presented in part 1, because they are not directly related to language features.

Chapter 10 goes through Groovy’s library support for dealing with relational database systems, providing total flexibility where necessary and significant shortcuts where simple solutions suffice.

Chapter 11 presents various ways of making Java applications more dynamic by integrating them with Groovy, allowing for rich runtime customization and interaction.

Chapter 12 dives into the special topic of XML support in Groovy: reading and writing XML documents, transforming them into other representations, and using XML for interoperation of heterogeneous systems.

Part 3 will finally show how to put all the Groovy language and library capabilities into action for your everyday tasks.