Installing Groovy - which version to go for?

Since we released the Groovy course, there have been some changes to the hosting of the Groovy distribution files. The newer versions of Groovy are completely compatible with the course, so you're fine to use any, but you'll need to download them from:

http://groovy-lang.org/download.html

Please note that for Windows users, the latest version may not have a windows installer available. To get started quickly you may wish to check a prior version with a Windows installer. At the time of creating this blog post, 2.4.11 is the latest stable version of Groovy, but if you want the Windows installer you'll need to get 2.4.10.

We also mention in this course that at the time of recording we were planning a course on Grails. We held off for the release of Grails 3, we knew that each version of Grails tends to break something in earlier versions / is not always backwards compatible. Unfortunately the Grails project has lost popularity in recent years (mainly due to political reasons I believe) and so a course on Grails has not been a viable option.

However for fans of the Groovy language, it's perfectly possible to create Spring Boot applications in Groovy - and indeed this is effectively where Grails was heading anyway. So Combining Groovy and our Spring MVC / Spring Boot courses will allow you to build production quality web applications in Groovy... and that's our recommended way forward!