It’s been a long time since I last talked about, let alone worked on ADAM script, or Advanced Data Acquisition and Manipulation script. But last night I finally revived this project that I haven’t worked on since 2006. Yes, nearly 4 years have passed since I last even considered my little data manipulation language.

And now with Groovy being more powerful than ever, and me loving it more than ever, I decided once again to revisit and rework this idea. Groovy is a very powerful and versatile language on top of Java and the JVM, and has language elements to actually support writing DSL’s, or Domain Specific Languages, which is what ADAM is. Consider the following script.

::groovy
datasource ds1, {
	type "mysql"
	host "localhost"
	userName "user"
	password "password"
	catalog "test"
}

This script demonstrates a sample of the language, and as you can see it flows fairly easily. With a brief glance it should be apparent you are setting up a data source. The neat thing about this script sample is that it is technically Groovy code. Here’s what it actually is.

::groovy
datasource("ds1", {
	type("mysql")
	host("localhost")
	userName("user")
	password("password")
	catalog("test")
})

Since Groovy doesn’t require parenthesis or semicolons we can build a syntax that feels simpler and more natural. So the first argument is a string. I’m able to lose the quotes due to the nifty missingProperty method available, so when Groovy sees the word “ds1” without quotes, it assumes it is a property. And when Groovy doesn’t find the property in the class it asks for missingProperty.

The second argument is a closure. Each line after that is technically a method. The closure is executed in the context of the Datasource class using the with(closure) syntax, which is uber-cool by the way. This means that each method executed inside the closure will execute within the context of the Datasource class.

So far Groovy DSLs are super cool and I think I may finally be on my way to getting a working first-draft of my ADAM script language! Happy coding!