I used Groovy a couple of years back and loved it.  But then did nothing with it.  Then Graeme Rocher, author of The Definitive Guide to Grails, came over to our offices to deliver a course on test-driven development.  After that I got interested in Grails - a web framework that brings the coding by conventions paradigm to Groovy to simplify application development. 

So I refreshed my memory with Groovy by reading the following:

Now, ready to flex my Groovy muscles I downloaded and installed:

Then with that installed I ran through numerous examples.  But before you do anything, I think you simply have to read about Closures.  To my mind, one of the most powerful and well implemented features within Groovy. 

So I’m up and away with Groovy, then next logical step is to see how easy it is to integrate with some legacy Java applications that I have wandering around.  Also, just how easy is it to debug in and is the Eclipse plugin up to it.