Is is possible to use Spring MVC with Groovy or Scala?

Question

I wanted to know if it was possible to use Spring MVC with a different JVM language than Java, e.g. Groovy or Scala. Or can Groovy only be run on Grails?

Also if it is possible, is this something which people try often, or do they just stick to the framework traditionally used?

Answer 1

Spring works perfectly well with scala because scala compiles to normal .class files which are Java-equivalent bytecode. I use Spring and scala all the time. It's even possible to use the Spring XML-extensibility to add support for scala-specific types, for example:

<bean class="my.scala.Class">
    <property name="listProp">
        <scala:list value-type="java.lang.Integer">
            <value>1</value>
        </scala:list>
    </property>
</bean>

Answer 2

Sure, spring has excellent support for dynamic languages like Groovy. There is an entire chapter in the reference manual: http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.6/reference/dynamic-language.html

As for scala; I tried doing this and it is possible. The problem is that JSP (or for that matter most templating languages supported by spring mvc) doesn't 'understand' scala collection types so I found myself converting between scala and java collections quite a lot. This should be better in Scala 2.8.0 but I haven't tested this myself.

Answer 3

Grails is implemented with Spring baked in, Grails 3 uses Spring-Boot. So that is definitely possible. You could also use Scala with Spring MVC. I don't know that you'd get the most mileage out of Scala with Spring MVC -- not a lot of opportunities to use Scala's functional programming features -- but there's nothing stopping you from trying it out.