I have spent the last few years working in the .Net ecosystem.

This has generally involved working in C#, PoweShell, Nuget and Chocolatey.

I am now exploring the JVM world.

In order to get the RatPack library installed (which is the Groovy version of Ruby’s Sinatra or the .Net clone Nancy) I have needed to install the JRE, Gradle and Groovy.

Getting Java installed on a corporate dev machine was a little tricky.

The installer was placing files in a folder that I don’t have execute permissions on.

The specific error message that I was getting led to a link that suggested downloading a java based tool to fix. There is a hole in my bucket…

Copying the deployed installer to another location eventually worked.

Several of the Groovy libraries suggest using gvm to install things so I have opted to use posh-gvm:
(new-object Net.WebClient).DownloadString(‘https://raw.githubusercontent.com/flofreud/posh-gvm/master/GetPoshGvm.ps1’) | iex

gvm appears to be the equivalent of chocolatey for the Groovy world.

gradle is the equivalent of msbuild or more specifically Psake.

I now have a list of projects to investigate:

• asciidoctorj – port of the ruby asciidoctor tool to convert structured text to html
• crash – looks like a powershell console equivalent for the jvm
• gaiden – creates html from markdown
• glide – another generation toolkit, could not get demo to work
• gradle – build tool
• grails – web toolkit can’t get to install yet
• griffon – looks like a wpf equivalent for groovy
• groovy – Java based programming language without all the ceremony of java
• groovyserv – speeds up groovy app startup
• jbake – static site generator
• lazybones – a scaffolder for ratpack (t4 scaffolder equivalent)
• springboot – application framework template
• vertx – nonblocking application platform.