I'll second that. Groovy is amazing but under appreciated on places like hacker news. Interesting that you bring up python because I find groovy very pythonic in some ways. Even more so with the new type hinting stuff python is introducing.
Although for lighter weight web stuff I've been watching the http://ratpack.io/ project.
Did you know that VMWare pulled its funding for their 6 developers working on Groovy and Grails last March? Two of them got jobs as Grails consultants for Object Computing, two of them (one former Groovy tech and one former Grails) got jobs at Gradleware working on Gradle, one (the former Groovy P.M.) an unrelated job in France, and I don't know about the other one. There might not be much more work or maintenance done on either Groovy or Grails from now on.
>There might not be much more work or maintenance done on either Groovy or Grails from now on.
Yes. I am closely following grails development and you are true in this regards. There was no doubt a disturbance in community and even we were concerned about its future when we were in initial stages of our project. Right now, we are confident that this duo won't die anytime soon.
>Two of them got jobs as Grails consultants for Object Computing,
Good for Grails future as OCI has been providing grails based services in the past and is committed to grails future.
>two of them (one former Groovy tech and one former Grails) got jobs at Gradleware working on Gradle
Gradle being Groovy based is being used in Grails as well. Again it is good for the duo.
>one (the former Groovy P.M.) an unrelated job in France
How is restlet unrelated?
Although VMWare/Pivotal said they were pulling their funding for Groovy and Grails in order to shift their focus to CloudFoundry only, that doesn't explain why they held onto Spring. Groovy/Grails and Spring were managed and promoted together, and the more likely reason is the Spring team didn't want Groovy/Grails attached and petitioned the VMWare managers to dump them. Perhaps the Groovy and/or Grails people were trying to take over in some way. Grails 3.0 released in March now bundles Gradle as well as Groovy and Spring from before, perhaps another predatory move. It could explain why Gradleware recently employed two of the retrenched Groovy/Grails developers from VMWare, to help in protecting their product against takeover by bundling.