What are the benefits of writing a Maven plugin in Groovy over Java?

Question

I'm going to write some Maven plugins to make life easier for R&D people. I'm thinking of writing a plugin in Groovy or Java.

The plugin will most likely be needed:

• Use Git commands like checkout, clone, etc.
• Download pom.xml files of specific artifacts from a remote repository (our internal Nexus)
• Parse the pom.xml file to extract a few XML elements (e.g. SCM tags and specific elements that I need for my plugin).
• Work with the file system (there is a directory, a directory is deleted, etc.).
• Get metdata information from a pom file, such as a dependency.

Any advice that may come from your extensive experience writing plugins in both languages ​​will help me a lot!

Answer 1

I have a lot of experience with both languages, and have also written several Maven plugins. I wrote them in Java because I had no choice, but if I had a choice, I would choose Groovy.

In my opinion, if performance is not absolutely critical, Groovy is usually a better choice than Java, no matter what you do. I say this because there is usually 30% -50% less code to write something in Groovy than in Java. Most of the code that you omit when using Groovy is what will be considered a Java code template.

Groovy compactness due to two factors

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• JDK. GDK Java. , Java 10-20 ( ). Groovy, :

  String fileContent = new File('/foo/bar/baz.txt').text
  

, GMaven Maven Groovy, , AbstractMojo, Java

, pom.xml. pom.xml , , , MavenProject.