Groovy to the rescue

Last week, out of the blue, I was tasked with coming up with an automation of integration of two systems. I was given a week to complete it and bunch of words like "...this is an emergency project", "it needs to be done ASAP", "this is coming from the higher management and this is very important for us", etc., the usual corporate B.S.

I was so tired of "fighting" this corporate politics nonsense, so I just got right to it.

The problem turned out to be quite simple. I needed to automate the daily feed of the photos (jpg files) of the students that our main photo department takes, from their "photo server" (NT, MS SQL Server to keep student's records) to our main class rosters and grading web based system (Spring web app deployed on Solaris).

I didn't think twice and chose Groovy to do the job. The simple script does query the SQL Server, iterates over the result set, renames the jpeg files (according to the naming scheme required by rosters app) and SFTPes them to the Solaris box.

Using GroovySQL and AntBuilder, it turned out to be a very elegant, expressive and tiny solution. It was done in a couple of days and the script is now doing its job in production!

Conclusion: I love Groovy! :-)

Later...