Part 2. Groovy tools

Welcome to part 2: “Groovy tools.” In these two chapters, I address two of the major ways Groovy is often introduced into an organization: namely, build processes and testing.

Chapter 5 on build processes reviews the dominant build tools in the Java world, Ant and Maven, and shows how to add Groovy dependencies to each. It also covers the Ant tasks that work with Groovy and the major Groovy plugins for Maven. Finally, it provides an introduction to Gradle, one of the most important projects in the Groovy world, and includes examples covering several interesting build tasks.

Chapter 6 on testing starts with JUnit tests in both Java and Groovy and then looks at the JUnit subclass GroovyTestCase and its descendants and what additional capabilities they bring. Then it covers the MockFor and StubFor classes in the Groovy library, which are great ways to build mock objects and also provide some insight into Groovy metaprogramming. Finally, the chapter ends with a good overview of the Spock testing framework, which includes mocking capabilities of its own.