What is Groovy?

To understand how the gateway works with Groovy, an understanding of Groovy is first required.

Groovy is a scripting language which has been developed with the intent to make it easy for Java developers to write scripts. As a result, the language is very similar to Java but with some simplifications to make it easier, to create and run actions in a manner more like a Linux shell script. Groovy's commonality to Java comes not just from the objective of Groovy but also the fact that Groovy actually uses the Java virtual machine. This means that all the standard Java and Java extension libraries can be used by Groovy.

The Groovy language syntax details can be seen at http://groovy-lang.org/syntax.html.

If Groovy is more like a shell script and purely interpreted then the obvious question is, will it not be affected by performance issues? After all, an interpreted...