a couple of days later, I discovered some serious drawbacks with the oh so great groovy language

1. it's slow as hell, and I mean slow
   
2. no strong typing, i get so many class cast exceptions because I have no idea what kind of object is returned, so if you junit test what you write before you run it you are good, could be a good thing
   
3. the eclipse plugin for groovy plain sucks and is to slow, time to join the project and optimize it
4. hard to get the principle of closures, but can only blame my self for this, give it time

about the junits tests, normally you know you have todo them, but it just takes so much time to write that code. Now if you use groovy to write your tests and your java tests, you are having a lot of fun, since it's a matter of minutes to write a complete test to validate the parsing of an xml file.

and we all want to have well tested software...