Perl automatically converts numbers to strings, and strings to numbers, whenever required. The concatenation with the empty string is superfluous, it only indicates programmer intent.
While any of the Java examples works in Groovy, too, you can also use string interpolation like shown here.
String interpolation ("$i") gives you a GString, which in many places can be used as a string because it is a CharSequence. Here, for clarity, the GString is converted to a String using the toString() method.