So you’re hanging out in New York City tonight, and you’re not sure yet what to do? Umm, does free food and an open bar peak your interest? Yeah? Then come talk tech at the Web 2.0 Meetup tonight at 6:30.

We’ll kick off the evening with a unique look at Grails and how it exemplifies several pivotal trends in web development today.

Abstract

In this unique and interactive session, we’ll explore the guiding principles behind the exciting Grails framework and how those core concepts enable an uncommon level of agility. And while many developers will welcome the productivity gains alone offered by Grails, it’s those underlying ideas that may very well reflect a new era of software development on the horizon. We’ll discuss why those concepts are here to stay and how we can all expect to benefit from them, regardless of our current language or platform of choice.

As mentioned in the abstract above, this will certainly be an interactive session. Come share your thoughts. What trends are you seeing? Are they for the better? What other movements are in the works? - It’s an open bar, so the creativity should be flowing quite freely.

Web 2.0 Meetup
6:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Slate Plus
54 West 21st Street
New York, NY 10010

Hosted by TheLadders.com. (Did I mention free food and an open bar?! These guys now how to put on an event!)

I hope to see you there.

After a HUGE week of Groovy and Grails news, the momentum culminates today at the first International Grails eXchange in London.

In case you missed it, the past week has offered announcements including…

• SAP launches Grails-based solution for developing applications on their SAP NetWeaver platform
• Groovy Project Manager Guillaume Laforge, Grails Project Lead Graeme Rocher, and Former JetBrains COO Alex Tkachman announce the formation of G2One, their new company offering Groovy- and Grails-based services
• Groovy 1.1 RC 1 hits the street
• Grails 1.0 RC 1 makes its debut

Graeme and Guillaume kicked off the conference with a Groovy and Grails “State of the Union” keynote highlighting the remarkable momentum behind these two projects, the significant advancements each project has seen this year, as well as a look at the road ahead. The next three days promise a wealth of information, and not just on Groovy and Grails, but also on Hibernate, Yahoo! UI, Dojo, Spring, Sitemesh, Flex, and other collaborating technologies.

And other technologies (even ones that may not necessarily be commonly thought of as Groovy/Grails collaborators) have a presence here as well. Rock on! I’m consistently impressed by the growing cross-pollination and cooperation between these communities: the leading dynamic languages on the JVM.

So tune your feed readers to Technorati and Google, and keep an eye out for seriously good stuff coming out of the inaugural Grails eXchange.

As an extension to last year’s Grails + EJB3 tutorial on InfoQ.com, I had the pleasure today of presenting an updated demo on this topic, showing just how easy it is to pimp out your EJB3 entity beans to include all the slick dynamic goodness we’ve come to know and love from traditional Grails domain classes.

But as much as I enjoy infusing boring, statically-typed EJB3 POJOs with GORM-powered productivity, I’m recently finding myself more excited about the ability to implement your Grails domain classes with any technology you like, and then simply expecting it all to just work. The result? Implementation-agnostic domain classes and the flexibility to use whichever technology is best suited for the task at hand. We’re free to choose…

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As part of a promo for the upcoming Northern Virginia Software Symposium, I had the privilege last night of introducing Grails to an enthusiastic crowd at the NovaJUG. With the consistent scene of nodding heads and inquiries of, “Can I still use Grails in situation X?”, it’s increasingly clear just how very many pain points Grails addresses for Java web developers.

The slides from my presentation are now available at…

http://jasonrudolph.com/downloads/presentations/Getting_Started_with_Grails.pdf

…but there’s just no substitute for the excellent discourse we enjoyed thanks to the insightful questions of a truly engaged group of developers.

Thanks, NovaJUG!