[6] Groovy has since changed its governance structure to a Project Management Committee in the Apache Software Foundation.

[10] In 2008, Grails, a Groovy web framework, won the second prize at JAX 2008 innovation award.

[6] That same month, Groovy changed its governance structure from a Codehaus repository to a Project Management Committee (PMC) in the Apache Software Foundation via its incubator.

[19] Groovy features not available in Java include both static and dynamic typing (with the keyword def), operator overloading, native syntax for lists and associative arrays (maps), native support for regular expressions, polymorphic iteration, string interpolation, added helper methods, and the safe navigation operator ?.

[20] Since version 2, Groovy also supports modularity (shipping only the jars that the project uses, thus reducing the size of Groovy's library), type checking, static compilation, Project Coin syntax enhancements, multicatch blocks and ongoing performance enhancements using the invokedynamic instruction introduced in Java 7.

[21] Groovy natively supports markup languages such as XML and HTML by using an inline Document Object Model (DOM) syntax.

This feature enables the definition and manipulation of many types of heterogeneous data assets with a uniform and concise syntax and programming methodology.

A Groovy script is fully parsed, compiled, and generated before executing (similar to Python and Ruby).

[25] ExpandoMetaClass offers a domain-specific language (DSL) to express the changes in the class easily, similar to Ruby's open class concept: Groovy's changes in code through prototyping are not visible in Java, since each attribute/method invocation in Groovy goes through the metaclass registry.

Groovy also allows overriding methods as getProperty(), propertyMissing() among others, enabling the developer to intercept calls to an object and specify an action for them, in a simplified aspect-oriented way.

The following groovy code can be written as enabling the development of domain-specific languages (DSLs) that look like plain English.

[33] On JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and XML processing, Groovy employs the Builder pattern, making the production of the data structure less verbose.

This prevents parts of it from being interpreted as belonging to the surrounding string instead of to the expression: Expression evaluation can be deferred by employing arrow syntax: According to Groovy's own documentation, "When the Groovy compiler compiles Groovy scripts and classes, at some point in the process, the source code will end up being represented in memory in the form of a Concrete Syntax Tree, then transformed into an Abstract Syntax Tree.

AST Transformations provides Groovy with improved compile-time metaprogramming capabilities allowing powerful flexibility at the language level, without a runtime performance penalty.