Hi all, just to give you an impression on how easy it is to handle XML/MRML in Groovy I attach you a little script.
It should work out of the box with a recent Groovy. No additional libraries required.
On the side, it answers questions regarding choosing features, simply set features '...-blocked='yes' where needed.
As Groovy classes can implement JAVA interfaces, there should be no problem in restructuring/re-using code in a JAVA/Spring context. A Grails client should be trivial.