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News Roundup: Geb, GProf, GR8Conf, And The Grails Podcast

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

Geb 0.9.0 available. Geb, the Groovy browser automation tool, is even now as we speak at version 0.9.0. For the benefit of those of you that for whatever bizarre reason are not on the Grails user mailing list (seriously? Why?!), we give this, from Marcin Erdmann’s announcement posted there:

“Please have a look at new features, fixes and braking changes for this release listed here: http://www.gebish.org/manual/current/project.html#090.

“We would also like to bring to your attention a breaking change that should be keept in mind when migrating: Browser’s to(Class<? extends Page>) method now changes the page on the browser and _verifies the at checker_ of that page in a single method call. You should use via() if you need the old behaviour of to() method (see http://www.gebish.org/manual/current/browser.html#at_checking for details).”

Geb has a very nice manual, by the way. You probably should check this out.

GProf: a new profiler for Groovy. This last Wednesday, Masato Nagai, the creator of GBench, announced the first release of GProf, which he says does for Groovy programs what GNU gprof does for ones in C and C++. There is a nice example in his announcement post (and also on the project’s homepage, which is at Google Code). Do try this out and send him some feedback. For now, you’ll have to download a JAR (or create one from the project source) by hand, but there are plans (we are told) to put this on Maven Central, for those of you that might need that.

GR8Confs approaching. GR8Conf Europe is coming back to Copenhagen on May 22-24, 2013 marking GR8Conf’s fifth anniversary. Registration is still open for that, and of course, being GR8Conf, they have quite the impressive list of Groovy Luminaries coming to address the gathered Groovyists.

Also, GR8Conf US is going to be back in Minneapolis (MN) this July, on the 22nd and 23rd (also with the usual pre-conference workshop day, which is July 21). If you can’t be persuaded to make it out to Denmark this spring, you might be interested in Minneapolis in the summer instead. Early Bird prices are still available now. There is even a hackathon being put on by Target on Sunday night (the 21st) after the workshops, with real actual prizes involved. Unless you have something against Minnesota (?!) or Target gift cards I say that you definitely should consider going to this. (First, though, go and subscribe to the Grails mailing list.)

CodeNarc’s Eclipse plugin has been updated. Eclipse-type users of CodeNarc now get to make use of version 0.18.2.

Grails Podcast Episode 138 (!). I have neglected to keep up with the workings of the Grails Podcast crew, but they are very much still in action and have just yesterday released their Episode 138. This is the astoundingly-groovy Glen Smith of groovyblogs.org fame interviewing GR8Conf Europe speaker Jan Reher, whose session there will be “We chose Grails and Groovy for a real-world project. Was it wise?”

“Grails Best Practices”. DZone’s Groovy Zone has published an article by Nitin Kumar on “the usage and best practices around the Grails.” This is lengthy and contains some good stuff.

Posted in conference, geb, grails, groovy, news | No Comments »

News Roundup: Groovy 2.1, Interview on Grails 2, Gradle In Action, and the road to Grails 3.0

Tuesday, February 12th, 2013

Interviews for all my Groovy friends!

For Groovy and Grails project committers, February (and the whole of 2013 in general) seems to be a bit of what they might perhaps call “busy,” as months (and years) go. In the past couple of weeks, interviewers and conference organizers have been publishing most fascinating reports on the progress of Groovy the language and Grails the framework, with important recent releases just behind us and exciting new ones coming up. From our friends at InfoQ, we have:

Guillaume Laforge on Groovy 2.1

We officially noted the first beta of Groovy 2.1 earlier this month — it was released in the dark ages of December last year, and we had been told to expect the final 2.1 by perhaps as soon as the end of January. Lo and behold, it is now here, and this last week Victor Grazi for InfoQ spoke with Guillaume Laforge on some of the newly-available features we’ve been eagerly awaiting from this release, such as GPars and support for invokedynamic from Java 7. There’s some good stuff on the mindset that the Groovy committers employ in deciding what will be included and in what fashion in newer releases of Groovy, and even some bonus sneak peeking into the direction in which the Groovy of the future will be heading in the months and years, yea, the decades to come.

Jeff Brown on Grails 2

Dio Synodinos interviewed Grails committer and generally legendary Groovyist Jeff Brown at QCon last year, mostly on Grails 2 but also some on the current state and popular applications of Groovy. They’ve just put up the video of this interview, and there’s even a transcript (which if somewhat hard to get to is at least nice for those who for whatever reason prefer to read rather than watch). I would recommend this very much even if only for the discussion on Groovy itself, but obviously as Mr. Brown is an exceedingly smart fellow and just recently co-authored The Definitive Guide To Grails 2 with Grails creator Graeme Rocher, the entire thing is worth watching (or perchance reading).

And from other Groovy sectors of the universe, we have the following:

Graeme Rocher on “The Road To Grails 3.0”

Greach, “the Groovy Spanish conf,” just happened last month in Madrid, and its wise organizers have put up video of some of the sessions there. This includes Graeme Rocher’s on the upcoming features of Grails 2.3, which we should be seeing in the near future — the official roadmap suggests  a release in Q2 this year — and on 3.0, which we should also be seeing sometime in this very to-be-groovy year of 2013. This is of course nicely recent, and who better to expound upon the future of Grails than the project lead? Have see.

Manning’s Gradle In Action now in Early Access edition

Any of our reading audience that are familiar with the popular Groovy build tool Gradle are no doubt also familiar with Benjamin Muschko, one of the Gradle community’s more actively active members. He is now in the midst of writing a book on Gradle for Manning’s In Action series; it is scheduled to come out in paperback form this fall, and this paperback can be preordered, but in the meantime, those of our readers that favor electronic devices for the use of reading can get Gradle In Action in ebook form now through Manning’s Early Access Program. If you do so, you get to not only make use of the book in its early pre-release form but also to provide Mr. Muschko with helpful feedback as he is writing the book — he of course gets to incorporate this feedback into what will be the final version of the book.

A groovy effort to update documentation — and a site redesign

“Groovy is a very mature and widely used language on the Java platform, with hundred thousands of developers worldwide. However, one area where the Groovy project can do better is with its documentation.… We’re launching an effort towards overhauling our documentation and web presence.” Thus begins Guillaume Laforge’s February 8 message to the Groovy user list, announcing a community-wide effort to improve and better present Groovy’s documentation and website. The official Groovy team members are going to be the ones moving this forward for the most part, of course, but they are looking for feedback (this is where the “community” part comes in) and suggestions on how and where to work at Groovy’s online presentation. Those of you with ideas here should not fail to get involved.

“The Groovy Conundrum”

The editorial opinion recently published at DrDobbs.com on the curious current position of Groovy in the larger JVM language space seems to have been a motivating consideration for the Groovy team in this aforementioned plan of revamping. In summary, Andrew Binstock says: “Groovy is one of the most interesting JVM languages, but its longtime performance issues kept it confined to narrow niches. However, a series of important upgrades look like they might push the language into the mainstream. There’s the conundrum.” You may wish to read the full article.

Wanted: a Massachusetts Groovy developer to help change the world

Vsnap, the Boston-based startup which we have mentioned in the past as building its video messaging service on the Grails framework, is looking for a Java or Groovy developer in Massachusetts (Grails experience is a plus for the position). If you yourself are currently looking for Grails work in Massachusetts or know of somebody else who is, do be sure to check this out — see their blog post for full details.

Posted in announcement, conference, gradle, grails, groovy, news | No Comments »

News Roundup: GroovyMag News Roundup back (!), January News

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

[Well hello there! Long see, no time!

I have not posted anything here since March of 2012. You see, there has been in the past here a bit of an administrative mixup, system-wise, regarding the machinery behind this blog. As a result of this I, your humble News Editor (I,YHNE,), have been for some time unable to bring you anything significant in the way of news, except in the form of the columns that you have of course been faithfully reading each month as part of your solemn duty, as a devoted reader, to GroovyMag the magazine. To add injurious insult to cliché, the column I,YHNE, had written for the month we are currently enjoying was, because of an unfortunate further mixup on the part of whoever it is whose role it has proven to have mixed up that which was mixed up a result of this particular mixup, left out of the magazine issue for the current month.

So basically, now that we have the blog once again up for your enjoyment and seeing that you, our faithful reader, have missed the news for this month, we are running it here. Please note that as this was formatted to fit the PDF edition of the GroovyMag magazine itself, links are fewer and are (as it were) spelled out rather than inline, and are in some cases shortened; also, everything in here was written late on the evening of the night before the dawning of the morning of the first day beginning what many are now referring to as a “new year,” namely, the year of our Lord 2013. Most of the references time-wise are therefore likely to be roughly a month out of date. —Ed.]


January Groovy News

 

After Groovy & Grails eXchange 2012

The 2012 edition of Skills Matter’s GGX is over, and if you were not there, you get to have a peek at some of the overwhelming Groovyness that appears to have happened by following the following link to some photos of the event by Yu Sodo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/y___u/. In addition there is an “aftermath” post (the only one I’m aware of that was written in English) by Grailsrocks legend Marc Palmer (with links to both video and slides of some of the talks he attended, in addition to his own). See http://is.gd/ggx2012 for that.

The Grails Platform UI Theme Challenge

Speaking of Grailsrocks’s Marc Palmer, we must note that this last month, he released an RC of his Platform UI plugin for Grails. The plugin, he says, “holds massive potential to take the Grails plugin ecosystem to an entirely new level.” Now that we have a UI and theming platform available for Grails, the way is cleared for aesthetically-minded (and UX-minded) developers to introduce high-quality themes (think of these as similar to WordPress themes) that allow developers quick, easy and standardized website construction out of the proverbial box. To encourage theme development, Grailsrocks has announced the Platform UI Theme Challenge: theme developers acting quickly can enter their productions for a chance to win some astoundingly-cool prizes (and potential fame and fortune at next year’s GGX). See http://is.gd/uichallenge — an update to the original announcement — as well as the original announcement (linked to in the update) for complete details. Mr. Palmer has officially extended the challenge and it will remain open now until at least the first five entries are submitted. If you do Grails and know design, be certain to check this out.

Grails 2.2 released

The ever-at-work Grails development team has now released to the eagerly-waiting masses the final release of Grails 2.2, which is the first Grails release to ship with Groovy 2.0. Besides this, 2.2 is said to include over 100 bug fixes, forked JVM execution for the embedded Tomcat, new functionality for criteria queries, and more besides. See the “What’s New” section of the documentation at http://is.gd/grails22new2; as usual, this release is freely available at http://grails.org/download.

GPars 1.0: “arrived”

This month, Václav Pech announced that “after four years of development GPars, the Groovy concurrency library, has just reached its 1.0 mark.” This release of course certainly marks a major milestone for the library, which for the past couple of years has been varyingly committed to by (beside Václav) Paul King, Dierk Koenig, and Russel Winder, among other respected Groovyists. Links to the downloads and other GPars-related pages are in the announcement post at http://is.gd/gpars1.

Also released: Groovy 2.0.6 and 2.1b1

The Groovy development team has been faithfully continuing their own repeated committings to both the 2.0 and 2.1 branches of the Groovy project, and for the last releases of 2012 they bring us 2.0.6, a bug-fixing release for the 2.0 branch, and the first beta of 2.1. Work appears to be moving quickly on this next new breed of groovy Groovyness, and according to Guillaume Laforge’s estimate of a week ago, we could be seeing a final release of 2.1 by the end of January (next month, my sources tell me). For especially-detailed notes on some of what you can expect with that new breed, see his official announcement at http://is.gd/groovy21b1.

A new “Groovy developers” Google+ Community

Also from Mr. Laforge come the glad tidings of this new Google+ Community for Groovy developers: http://is.gd/gpluscommunity. To quote from a post of his on the mailing list about this, in response to questions on whether that list would be the quieter for this new additional page: “The Groovy community on Google+ is just an additional communication, where people can discuss, exchange ideas, talk about what they’ve done with Groovy, tell the world about their upcoming Groovy-related events, etc. It’s not replacing the mailing-lists for user support, or developer discussions. It’s a complement, an additional communication medium.” If you use Groovy (and of course you do) and are on Google+, be sure to get involved at http://is.gd/groovyplus.

GVM: the Groovy enVironment Manager

Any among our reading audience that recall your humble News Editor’s column from September of this year may recall that in that edition, I mentioned Marco Vermeulen’s “proposal for [a] convenient install tool for Grails, Griffon and Groovy.” That RVM-inspired proposed tool has since been developed and is now available to the Groovy public as GVM: the Groovy enVironment Manager. It is currently at version 0.9.3 and is already in use by countless millions of Groovy developers around the globe. (OK, so perhaps that is a little bit of an overstatement there. Nevertheless the possibilities, as the proverbial saying goes, are truly endless.) It runs on Mac OS X, Linux, Cygwin, Solaris, and bash-equipped BSD, and its Candidates for installation include Groovy, Grails, Griffon, and vert.x (among others now and still others in the future). Get it at http://gvmtool.net and read detailed tutorial information in Andre Steingress’s fine post at http://is.gd/gvmdesc.

An update to the Grails plugin development process

A while back the team behind grails.org reworked the plugin system, creating a new process for plugin developers to submit their plugins for inclusion in the main repository. There is now a special section of the Grails plugin site to handle this process — you get to either submit your own plugin or see the list of currently-pending plugins by others, with Disqus comments below each one. This latest addition to the site represents further progress in the ongoing effort by the Grails developer team to get the community more involved in the generally community-powered process of plugin development, and with the new page for pending plugins, as I understand it, you do not even have to have written your own to be able to help. See http://grails.org/plugins/pending to begin to get involved here.

Posted in conference, grails, groovy, groovymag, news | 1 Comment »

News Roundup: Links for January 17

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Continuing goodness (by Mr. Haki)

Mr. Haki (of Groovy Goodness fame) has some new tidbits up on goodness in Grails:

Continuing Grails screencastery (by Mr. Warner)

Bobby Warner has released another “Grails plus CoffeeScript” screencast (“Another Adventure With Grails And CoffeeScript”).

Upcoming Groovificating conferences

GR8Conf Europe’s Call For Paper[s] is now open! This year, the conference is scheduled for June 6 through 8 (again in Copenhagen).

Tutorials or presentations of potential helpfulness or interestingosity

Generating Excel From Grails, by Shaun Jurgemeyer at Object Partners

Groovy DSL — A Simple Example, by Nirav Assar of Assar Java Consulting

Grails 2.0 — What To Be Excited About (a presentation by Zan Thrash)

Alarming news reports

Elvis carried away by spaceships (Ken Kousen, reporting for Kousen IT)

Posted in announcement, conference, grails, groovy, news, screencasts | No Comments »

News Roundup: Groovy++ Release, SpringOne/2GX, Ratpack

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011
Deeper Into Grails And Cloud Foundry
Peter Ledbrook has posted a follow-up of his last Cloud Foundry post on the SpringSource blog. In this post, he shows us the magic behind GrailsTwitter (an example Grails-on-Cloud-Foundry application, the code for which is available on GitHub).
http://blog.springsource.com/2011/04/21/deeper-into-grails-&-cloud-foundry/
https://github.com/SpringSource/cloudfoundry-samples/tree/master/grailstwitter/
http://grailstwitter.cloudfoundry.com/
Griffon Plugin for NetBeans IDE 7.0
http://netbeans.dzone.com/news/griffon-plugin-netbeans-ide-70
Griffon podcast (Spanish)
http://www.jroller.com/aalmiray/entry/griffon_podcast_spanish
Another Year With Grails
Kim Betti
http://www.developer-b.com/blog/entry/2028/2011/apr/20/another-year-with-grails
SpringOne/2GX
http://springone2gx.com/conference/chicago/2011/10/home
Groovy++ 0.4.225 released
The main and long waiting feature of this version is compatibility
with both 1.7.x and 1.8.x brunches of Groovy core.
http://code.google.com/p/groovypptest/wiki/Welcome
Create Lightweight Groovy Web Apps with Ratpack
http://jameswilliams.be/blog/entry/207
Load testing GWT applications with Selenium 2 and Gradle
http://blog.oio.de/2011/04/19/load-testing-gwt-applications-with-selenium-2-and-gradle/
GR8Conf Speaker Interviews
Three more interviews were published in the GR8Conf speaker interview series this week:
Evgeny Goldin
http://www.gr8conf.org/blog/2011/04/26/100
Peter Niederwieser
http://www.gr8conf.org/blog/2011/04/26/101
Jochen Theodorou
http://www.gr8conf.org/blog/2011/04/26/102
GR8Conf Europe 2011 is just three weeks away. You can register at http://www.eu2011.gr8conf.org/.
Plugin releases
Grails Scala Plugin 0.6 – compile Scala source code in /src/java and /src/scala directories of Grails application
http://www.grails.org/plugin/scala
Grails Git Plugin 1.0-SNAPSHOT – integrate Git distributed version control system into Grails project
Grails Serializable Session Plugin 0.1 – enforce session’s acceptance of serializable objects only
http://grails.org/plugin/serializable-session
Grails 960 Grid System 1.0 – provide 960 Grid System resource files (from 960.gs)
http://grails.org/plugin/nine-sixty-grid-system

Deeper Into Grails And Cloud Foundry

Peter Ledbrook has posted a follow-up of his last Cloud Foundry post on the SpringSource blog. In this post, he discusses details of the magic behind GrailsTwitter (an example Grails-on-Cloud-Foundry application, the code for which is available on GitHub).

Griffon Plugin for NetBeans IDE 7.0

Geertjan Wielenga has updated the Griffon plugin for NetBeans to 7.0. You can download it from the NetBeans Plugins Portal.

Griffon podcast (Spanish)

Speaking of Griffon: Andres Almiray was recently interviewed (in Spanish) on the JavaHispano podcast, on the topic “Introduction To Griffon.” See http://is.gd/jhgriffon.

DZone interviews Tim Berglund on Groovy and Grails

Yesterday, Andres Almiray published his interview of Tim Berglund of the August Technology Group. They discuss polyglot programming on the JVM, Grails, Gaelyk, and NoSQL, among other things.

Another Year With Grails

Kim Betti discusses the changes in Grails and its community since his “A Year With Grails” post.

SpringOne/2GX 2011

SpringOne/2GX 2011 will be held in Chicago on October 25-28. The Groovy speakers so far announced are Graeme Rocher, Guillaume LaForge, Jeff Brown, Peter Ledbrook, and Burt Beckwith; more speakers (along with session information) should be added soon.

Groovy++ 0.4.225 released

This morning, Alex Tkachman announced the 0.4.225 release of Groovy++, the statically typed “extension” of Groovy. With this new release, Groovy++ is now compatible with both the 1.7 and 1.8 branches of the Groovy core. Download Groovy++ from Google Code.

Create Lightweight Groovy Web Apps with Ratpack

James Williams has written a tutorial for Ratpack, the Groovy “micro web framework” which, inspired by Ruby’s Sinatra, “aims to make Groovy web development more classy.”

Load testing GWT applications with Selenium 2 and Gradle

A new post by Sven Lange on the Orientation in Objects blog, demonstrating a choice for load testing GWT applications: “a Gradle build file that executes a single JUnit test case several times in parallel.”

GR8Conf Speaker Interviews

Three more interviews were published in the GR8Conf speaker interview series this week: Evgeny Goldin, Peter Niederwieser, and Jochen Theodorou (technical lead of the Groovy project). GR8Conf Europe 2011 is just three weeks away. You can register at http://www.eu2011.gr8conf.org/.

Plugin releases

Grails Scala Plugin – 0.6: compile Scala source code in /src/java and /src/scala directories of Grails application

Grails Git Plugin – 1.0-SNAPSHOT: integrate Git, the distributed version control system, into Grails project

Grails Serializable Session Plugin – 0.1: enforce session’s acceptance of serializable objects only

Grails Avatar Plugin – 0.4: provides a taglib for displaying avatars (Gravatar support only)

Grails 960 Grid System Plugin – 1.0: provide 960 Grid System resource files from 960.gs

Grails Modernizr Plugin – 1.7.1: provide the Modernizr Javascript library resource files from modernizr.com

Posted in conference, grails, griffon, groovy, news | No Comments »

News Roundup: GR8Conf, Grails PPA, Wiumi, GroovyHelp

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

GR8Conf Europe

Gr8Conf Europe 2011 will have two tracks. Its speakers include Andres Almiray, Burt Beckwith, Dierk König, Guillaume Laforge,Hamlet D’Arcy, Paul King, Peter Ledbrook, Rob Fletcher, and Václav Pech. There are only 9 days left for the early bird discount. Register at http://www.eu2011.gr8conf.org/.

Wiumi.com: a community news aggregator, powered by Grails

Jeremy Ramsey posted today about his first Grails project, Wiumi – “a community driven news aggregator that lets users subscribe to their favorite news feeds, vote on articles, discuss them and share them with friends.”

PPA update for Grails on Ubuntu

Marco Vermeulen has updated the Grails PPA; it’s currently at Grails 1.3.7, and multiple-version support is coming next. See the blog post for more details.

A Groovy/Gradle JSLint Plugin

Kelly Robinson shows how to create a plugin for Gradle.

He’ll dry those tears if you’ll just go ahead and cry ‘em
It ain’t no sin to get the blues

GroovyHelp 3.0.0 GA released

Daniel Sun announced the 3.0.0 GA release of GroovyHelp yesterday. This release of GroovyHelp supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, and adds search and performance improvements. Get it at http://code.google.com/p/groovyhelp/.

Plugin releases

Grails Spawn Template Plugin – 0.4: specify templates to use for domain classes

Grails Drools GORM Plugin – 0.5.0: integrate JBoss Drools with Grails app

Grails Artisteer Plugin – 0.4: adds script for unpacking Artisteer templates in Grails

Grails Activiti Plugin – 5.4: integrate Activiti BPM Suite / workflow system with Grails. Release notes: http://limcheekin.blogspot.com/2011/04/grails-activiti-plugin-54-released-with.html

Grails MongoDB  (Morphia) Plugin – 0.7.2: use MongoDB with Grails; uses Morphia library

Grails Weceem CMS Plugin – 1.0 M2: install Weceem, the Grails-based CMS

Grails Flash Helper Plugin – 0.5: simplify adding and reading messages in flash scope

Grails Facebook Graph Plugin – 0.11: access the Facebook Graph API

Posted in conference, grails, groovy, news | No Comments »

1devday conference

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

David McKinnon is organizing what looks to be a good one day Java flavored conference up in Detroit – 1devday.  Several GroovyMag authors will be presenting – Chris Judd, Jeremy Anderson and Matt Stine are confirmed so far.  While the focus won’t specifically be on Groovy and Grails, this still is a great value for developers looking to learn from some of the area’s best development minds.

Conference is on October 23 in Detroit.  Visit 1devday.org to learn more.

And when you’re done with 1devday, be sure to come to indieconf in Raleigh. :)

Posted in announcement, conference | 61 Comments »

GR8 conference wrapup

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

I had (or really, am having) the pleasure of attending the GR8 conference in Copenhagen.  I originally thought I’d “live blog” the whole event, but some travel problems prevented me from getting to the beginning of the conference.  The agenda shows a complete list of all the presentations.  I’m going to post my reactions to each presentation below.  Please feel free to add your own comments!

Day 1
Keynote & Introduction to GR8 Technologies — Søren Berg Glasius & Guillaume Laforge

I missed this one.

Grid Computing for Real-Time Computational Finance: A Case Study with Groovy and Grails — Jonathan Felch (Crédit Suisse)

Missed this one too.  Heard a lot of good feedback on it, and some feedback that it got a bit financially technical for some people.


Groovy usage patterns — Dierk König
I arrived about halfway through this one, so it took a bit of catching up to see where Dierk was going with the theme.  The idea was that there are several patterns of using Groovy in your environments, rather than using it as an all or nothing approach.  The Glue pattern (tying various external pieces together), Smart Config pattern (using Groovy for config files instead of XML), and others were ideas that he touched on.  I only caught the last portion of this, but the portion I saw was both useful and well delivered.  PHP is often referred to as a ‘glue’ language, and it was interesting to hear Groovy referred to as one as well.  :)

Lunch
Lunch was excellent (this was actually Tuesday’s lunch)
 

What’s new in Groovy 1.6? — Guillaume Laforge
For me this set the tone of the conference – an insane amount of good information.  As with most conferences, there’s simply too much to take in.  One of the big takeaways for me was seeing Guillaume demonstrate mixins in Groovy 1.6.  I’d read about them, but seeing them ‘live’ was more ‘real’ for me.  I’m not even sure he ran code – just showed it on the screen and talked about it, but something ‘clicked’ and I get it much better now.  This was primarily information from his infoq and groovymag articles, so if you’ve read either one (you’ve read groovymag, right?) you saw most of this.  If not, you should be able to see the video on parleys.com soon (I’m told).

What’s new in Grails 1.1? — Graeme Rocher

Another session of information overload, but in a good sense.  One of the good takeaways for me was reminding me that we can use grails taglibs in controllers.  For example, you can have def contents = g.include(controller:”person”,action:”show”); println contents; in the controller to include the results of a controller.  Graeme demonstrated a huge number of changes, including standalone GORM.  I’m probably less impressed with this than I thought I would be, only because I realized I don’t do Java outside of Grails anyway. :)

Designing your own Domain-Specific Languages — Guillaume Laforge

This was an interesting presentation.  We were shown some of the basic meta-programming techniques to add things like “43.days” to your application.  Actually, his examples ended up being more complex than that towards the end, but I have to confess, I was started to zone out.  I have to rewatch this one on parleys.com when it’s posted.  My zoning was due to the fact that I hadn’t slept the night before (long story) but then accidentally took sleeping tablets on the morning plane ride over (instead of my cold/flu tablets) so I was slightly spaced out by the afternoon.  :)   Was it this presentation where we learned about @singleton in Groovy?  I need to read up on that some more…

Groovy and Grails in Eclipse – Andrew Eisenberg

Andrew demonstrated the progress he and his colleagues are making on getting good Groovy/Grails support in Eclipse.  Some good basics down so far, but it’s not quite near intellij yet.  :/

Day 2
Breakfast
Good, if brief, as I came in a bit late.

Building a Twitter clone in Grails — Graeme Rocher

I’d missed this when Graeme did it earlier, but was glad I got to see it in person.  Even more glad someone else was taping it.  I was videoing it and my batteries ran out after 23 minutes.  There were a lot of small bits in the presentation which Graeme seemed to make very easy (returning JSON and XML) which I sometimes forget, as I don’t use them much.  Great to see so much power displayed so easily.

The Grails Plug-in System: Plug into productivity — Graeme Rocher
Graeme then showed us a plugin presentation.  It’s inspired me to try to ‘pluginize’ one of my projects which has fallen by the wayside.  His basic thrust was that plugins are just regular grails apps, and he greatly encouraged us to think about pluginizing various sections of our apps to help modularize them.

Groovy and Grails using IntelliJ IDEA — Vaclav Pech

Almost has convinced me to buy IntelliJ.  A different presentation just showing the top 10-20 useful hotkey combinations would probably have been just as well-received (if not moreso) based on some of the feedback I heard at lunch. 

Lunch
Also great (see above pics)
 
Creating a Griffon: rich client frontend to our Twitter clone — Jim Shingler

Had the pleasure of meeting Jim at Codemash earlier this year.  I saw Andres Almiray present on Griffon there, and now Jim here.  The differences between their presentation style and emphasis was interesting – they each seemed to emphasize some aspects of Griffon a bit differently (Andres really built up to @Bindable, Jim introduced it casually early on).  I’m not much of a desktop/client-side guy these days, but the progress on Griffon makes it something to keep my eye on if my desktop needs ever change. 

Industrial Strength Groovy — Paul King

He started off talking about how some of the “gang of four” patterns just disappear when using dynamic languages, then went in to why he’s comfortable recommending Groovy to customers these days (it’s gone past the ‘innovator’ stage and is starting to enter ‘mainstream’ now).  He covered some of the tools he uses for testing, code coverage, documentation and others.  Slides of TestNG, Spock, EasyB, MockFor and other testing tools.  Interesting idea – because of meta programming in Groovy, the need for dependancy injection is lessened.  I hope I understood that correctly.  Lots of good practical tool advice.  Watch it on parleys.com when it’s available.

If you were there (here) what did I miss?  What did I get wrong?  What did I get right?  :)

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