Scala is superior to Java in all if not more ways. Scala's static typing system is way more advanced than Java. Taking type safety to the extreme, even with Java's strength in strong typing, Scala beats even Java itself in this department.
To learn more about Scala, get the book Programming Scala: Scalability = Functional Programming + Objects.
Groovy is a very good dynamically typed programming language. Groovy has strengths and weaknesses compared to Scala. I tend to think Scala and Groovy as complementary, not competition. Scala is more suited to replace Java programming language itself (the lower-level stuff) and Groovy is good for higher-level ones or for scripting purposes. Although that's a very rough distribution, the goal is to use the best tool for the job.
I recommend reading Groovy in Action
book for more learning resources on Groovy.The only things blocking mainstream Groovy and Scala usage are: overhead, Java integration, tooling, and integration with libraries.
I'm not worried about overhead since it solved itself as time pass. Nowadays, nobody complains Windows Vista or Windows7's Aero UI is "too slow". Or that there are not enough WAP websites for their iPhone. Or that Eclipse RCP is too bloated and should reduce footprint under 10 MB. So I still think overhead is a problem but can be solved by applying the solution at the right problems.
Java integration is being worked on. Groovy can already create Java stubs so you can develop Java sources (or Scala source) with Groovy sources smoothly, with full code completion, javadocs, etc. even before the Groovy sources are compiled to classes. I don't think Scala has this stub creation functionality yet, but you can use Scala .class files just as you would in Java. So you can compile a mixed project of Java, Scala, and Groovy sources as one.
Tooling is the most important here, and it being the most visible weakness of both Scala and Groovy. However, things are doing very well today compared to a few years ago. Groovy support for Eclipse IDE has official support from SpringSource/VMware. Scala Eclipse IDE Plugin is pretty good too, and development of Scala language itself is rapid (as of this writing Scala is at Scala 2.8 beta version).
Integration with libraries is very important, aka with Spring, OSGi, JPA, Java EE, and the like. Fortunately this is also not something to be worried about, as very few libraries/frameworks explicitly require you to use the Java programming language. All they need are .class-es, and Scala produces them just fine. You can use any and all sorts of Java libraries from Scala, so there's no barrier of entry at all. Aside from JSP, some so-called "Java libraries" are not even Java language at all!
Don't believe me? Take a look at JSF 2.0. It mainly consists of annotations (i.e. @ManagedBean), Unified EL (which is yet another programming language, NOT Java!) and XML (that is, Facelets and namespaced JSF component libraries).
What do you think?
If Scala is better than Java, would you suggest I still invest in java training courses?
ReplyDeletecrystalei... Java training includes Java AND JVM...
ReplyDeleteMost of Java is actually the JVM and APIs, the Java *language* (which I'm talking about in this article) is the smaller part.
The other part is tooling, which varies greatly even if Java language is used (limited choices if we use Scala, but that's because the tooling is still growing). And I believe Java trainings don't really focus much on tooling, since there are too much choice. e.g. Eclipse vs NetBeans vs IntelliJ vs JBoss Dev vs Oracle vs ... and that's just for the IDE. What about build system, CI, etc.