If you’ll be in or around the Princeton, NJ area this coming Tuesday (June 5th), mark your calendars for a special Groovy and Grails double-header at the Princeton Java Users Group.

Andrew Glover (co-author of Groovy in Action and author of IBM’s “Practically Groovy” series) will be presenting his talk on Real World Groovy, which will introduce several of Groovy’s handy roadside assistance offerings (including Groovlets, GroovySQL, Groovy Templates, and Builders). Andy will also shed light on when and how to call in that kind of support while traveling down the sometimes rocky road that is modern Java development. (And oh yeah, watch out for the rulers!)

And of course, web development makes up a big part of that road, but that journey needn’t be rocky any longer either. In my presentation on Getting Started with Grails, we’ll see first hand how Grails spares us from the typical flat tires and oil leaks (most likely caused by those sharp angle brackets scattered everywhere) and instead treats us to a turbo-charged development experience.

The meeting starts at 7 PM. Hope to see you there!

Grails 0.5 was a huge release, and you’re bound to come across some of its many enhancements in any app you build. If you’ve installed 0.5 and you’re using it as you work through Getting Started with Grails (GSwG), there are a few new resources to assist you in that endeavor.

First up, you’ll want to grab the updated sample code for the RaceTrack application. If you’re building the application with Grails 0.5, you can now compare your progress to this sample code at any time to see exactly how the application should look at the end of each chapter.

Next, take a few minutes to have a look at the updated FAQ. The FAQ is your one-stop shop for any and all changes since the book’s original release circa Grails 0.3.1. It’s there that you’ll find answers to these questions and others…

• Using Grails 0.5, I don’t see the index.jsp file that’s supposed to reside in racetrack/web-app/WEB-INF. Did you mean to say index.gsp instead?

• When I run the application using Grails 0.5, I see deprecation warnings related to the optionals attribute defined in Registration.groovy. What gives?

• Using Grails 0.4 (or higher), I can’t seem to find the log4j.production.properties that’s supposed to be in racetrack/web-app/WEB-INF. Where did it go?

• Using Grails 0.5, why does Grails name my WAR racetrack-0.1.war instead of racetrack.war?

I hope you find these resources helpful. And, if you run into gotchas or you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a line.

Enjoy.

Well folks, the tenth and final installment is upon us. Just three more sessions make up our home stretch…

The Scala Experience — Safe Programming Can Be Fun!

Presented by Martin Odersky (Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL)

The Java Posse has been chatting up Scala for some time now, so what better way to see what all the fuss is about than to get the scoop on Scala straight from its designer?

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The fourth and final day of JavaOne: it was a big one. Here we go…

Comparing the Developer Experience of Java EE 5.0, Ruby on Rails, and Grails: Lessons Learned from Developing One Application

Presented by Tom Daly (Senior Performance Engineer at Sun Microsystems) and Damien Cooke (ISV Engineering at Sun Microsystems)

Having spent many years now developing applications in the JEE space, and having had a good look at Rails before spending the past year working with Grails, I was eager to see whether others have drawn the same conclusions as I have. It’s a time-tested technique to loosen up the crowd with a joke, and when I heard Tom’s opening line - “I don’t know much about Ruby and I don’t know much about Groovy” - I was a bit concerned. It wasn’t meant to be a joke. Yet somehow, in just 60 minutes, they actually managed to pull off a pretty darn fair comparison of the three frameworks.

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Groovy’s getting a whole lotta love at the JavaOne bookstore this week, and as of this moment, Groovy in Action is #5 on the JavaOne best seller list. Groovy’s been at least mentioned in almost every session I’ve seen, and as you can tell from the titles of the talks below, these particular sessions gave it much more than just a passing comment.

Advanced Groovy

Presented by Rod Cope (CTO and Founder of OpenLogic)

Two-time JavaOne rockstar Rod Cope pulled out all the stops in this talk, and given the wow-factor of this session, I’ll be quite surprised if he doesn’t three-peat his rockstar status.

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The variety of topics at this year’s JavaOne has been quite impressive, and Day 3 was no exception. Ruby, JavaScript, Groovy, Spring, and JMX all in one day? You bet. Here goes.

JRuby on Rails: Agility for the Enterprise

Presented by Thomas Enebo and Charles Oliver Nutter (JRuby Core Developers)

Charlie and Tom referred to this session as a chance to see “how the other 8% lives,” and not surprisingly, this talk saw a fair amount of traffic. When they polled the audience though, it was quite interesting to see that more folks had heard of Rails than had heard of Ruby. (I imagine the Ruby veterans find that bit of trivia to be a bit annoying.)

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Day 2 wrapped up with talks on ways to stay sane when developing in two particular problem domains: concurrency and web apps. And since those domains certainly aren’t mutually exclusive, this pair of sessions made for a good closing to a solid day of Java geekery.

Effective Concurrency for the Java Platform

Presented by Brian Goetz (Author of Java Concurrency in Practice)

Much like Josh Bloch and Bill Pugh did on Day 1, Brian Goetz demonstrated his uncanny knack for taking a complex problem space and presenting it in a manner that’s both easily digestible and fun to learn.

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For Day 2’s early afternoon sessions, I had the opportunity to see two very different solutions for building rich user interfaces.

Fast, Beautiful, Easy: Pick Three–Building Web User Interfaces in the Java Programming Language with Google Web Toolkit

Presented by Bruce Johnson and Joel Webber (Creators of GWT)

GWT was clearly one of the biggest headline grabbers coming out of JavaOne ‘06, and the Google guys were back and ready to convince any of the wait-and-seers that haven’t yet taken it for a spin.

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Day 2 was a marathon for sure, but it was well worth it. Time for the morning report…

Creating Amazing Web Interfaces with Ajax

Presented by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer (Co-authors of Pragmatic Ajax and Founders of Ajaxian.com)

It’s been two years now since I first saw Ben Galbraith’s and Stu Halloway’s rockstar presentation on Ajax at NFJS, and I was pleased to see another great talk today showing just how very far things have progressed in that time. The plumbing continues to fade into the background, allowing devs to focus more and more on the problem domain and less on the details of HTTP status codes, etc.

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A very full first day is in the books. Here we go…

Sun Keynote

The conference officially kicked off with the 2-hour “Sun General Session.”

• F3 gets rebranded as JavaFX, but will people in the Silverlight and Flex camps even give it a thought?
• JRuby’s getting a whole lotta love from Sun. They specifically called out JRuby in at least two instances (including official support for it in Glassfish V2).

On to the tech sessions…

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