Quick Notes: Thanks and the def Keyword

With the Test Automation Noob blog rolling past 17000 page views, I wanted to thank everybody who has asked questions, taken a few moments to send some feedback regarding posts, or recommended the blog to others; hearing from readers has been very gratifying.  I also apologize for the sporadic frequency of postings:  between work, parenthood (is that redundant?), and other pursuits it's sometimes difficult to carve out time to write new posts on a consistent basis.

If you've looked beyond this blog for soapUI scripting samples, you may have noticed some differences between the scripts here and those posted elsewhere.  Some of these are due to differences between Groovy and Java-- frankly, my scripts tend to be "Java-centric" and don't take advantage of many of Groovy's shortcuts; I think some of the Groovy constructs are a little less intuitive and harder to grasp for somebody starting out in scripting, and I came to soapUI with experience in Java, so I never really dove into the nuts and bolts of Groovy.  I hope to write a post in the not-too-distant future to bridge some of those gaps and illustrate some of the different ways of doing things in Groovy that can help make your scripts more compact.  However, there is one Groovy keyword I haven't used thus far, but intend to use in the future: the def keyword, used when declaring a new variable in a script.  If you've already started implementing scripts without def, don't panic!  It's optional; the scripts I've written so far should be working fine without it, and omitting it saves a little bit of typing.  If you only intend to write simple scripts in soapUI for the odd situation where the standard interface isn't quite sufficient, you can probably get away with leaving out the def keyword.  However, moving forward I intend to use the keyword in scripts and you may see some of the past scripts and posts re-worked to include it (look for an update to the first scripting post on variables for more detail on using the def keyword).  I have two primary reasons for doing this: first, as I mentioned before, def is ubiquitous in scripting examples elsewhere, including soapUI's own site, so including it here provides some consistency.  Secondly, after reading over discussions on the topic and weighing different arguments, I think it's just better practice, particularly if you think you may end up working with Groovy outside of soapUI someday-- getting into the habit of using it now when it may not matter could help avoid headaches later on when it does.