:jasonrudolph => :blog

The inaugural Groovy/Grails Experience (2GX) is in the bag, and as much as I was looking forward to it, it honestly exceeded my expectations rather significantly. The sheer enthusiasm for Groovy (and Grails) in the Java community is almost palpable.

The event capped off with a new installment of Relevance’s Refactotum series. Jay Zimmerman (Director of 2GX and the popular NFJS Symposium Series) was kind enough to dedicate the final afternoon of the conference to this unique session demonstrating the ease of contributing to open source, followed immediately by a workshop for putting those techniques into practice. Coming out of the Refactotum, we had a widely diverse set of contributions, all of which make meaningful improvements to Grails. The resulting set of patches involve increasing test coverage, refactoring for readability, boarding up broken windows, reducing complexity, and a handful of other improvements as well. And perhaps the most rewarding part (for me, at least) of the three-day conference was talking to the several people that stopped by afterward, each to express that while they had never before understood just how easy it is to get involved in open source, now they know, and each seemed downright eager to contribute!

Special thanks to Scott Davis, Jeff Brown, Dierk König, Alex Tkachman, Alexandru Popescu, Ken Kousen, and Daniel Hinojosa for their excellent and insightful contributions to the discussion!

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Resources

Slides

• Refactotum #6 - Grails (2GX)

Helpful Links and Tools Discussed

• Jay Fields - Tests Reflect Code Quality
• Code Coverage (Wikipedia)
• Grails Code Coverage Report
• Cobertura
• easyb
• Testing Private Methods in Ruby^§

Resulting Patches (Keep ‘em Coming!)

• GRAILS-2412
• GRAILS-2469
• GRAILS-2470
• GRAILS-2471
• GRAILS-2521
• GRAILS-2527

^§The controversy of testing private methods isn’t unique to Groovy…but seems common to Refactotums.

Grails 1.0 is in the wild!

Check out the release notes, download the new hotness, and for Pete’s sake (er, Neal’s sake?), take that old web framework out behind the barn already.

It’s been almost a year since I first sat down with Scott Davis for an aboutGroovy.com interview, and the upcoming Groovy/Grails Experience seemed as good a reason as any for us to catch up.

In addition to discussing the various conference sessions in the works, we also spend a few moments exploring some relative merits of Rails and Grails. While we won’t tell you which framework is right for you, I do suggest some key features that each framework could stand to adopt from the other, and we even discuss how some of that cross-pollination is already coming to fruition.

Many thanks to Scott for having me on the podcast.

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The Groovy community’s been busy rolling out a steady stream of holiday goodness for the Java developers of the world: Groovy 1.5 was just released, Grails 1.0 RC3 is out, and now the Prags are prepping two new Groovy books for early next year. And to top things off, the folks behind NFJS are hosting a three-day conference with Groovy and Grails experts from all over the world.

The inaugural 2G Experience will take place February 21-23 in Reston, VA, and the agenda is slam-packed! BDD with Andy Glover. DSLs with Venkat Subramaniam. Google Maps with Scott Davis. Metaprogramming with Jeff Brown. A can’t-miss JRuby/Groovy smackdown with Neal Ford. A Grails keynote with Graeme Rocher. The list goes on…

I’ll be presenting sessions on Going Further with Grails and Bending GORM: 5-minute Techniques for Enterprise Integration. And to close out the conference, Relevance’s Refactotum series will make its Groovy/Grails debut. I’m teaming up with Scott Davis and Venkat Subramaniam (and any stray Groovy/Grails devs that happen to wander nearby) to host this hands-on workshop helping attendees make their mark on the Groovy and Grails revolution.

Refactotum: Groovy/Grails (3-hour workshop)

Contributing to open source is great for your career. In a few short hours, you can learn, teach, promote your skills, and improve the quality of the community. In this unique workshop, we will show you how, by doing it. Using Grails as an example, we’ll show you how to:

• download the source code
• build and run tests
• use Cobertura and code review to find problem areas
• refactor some code
• create and submit a patch

Take this opportunity to begin contributing to Groovy, Grails, or any other open source project that interests you. Experts from the Groovy and Grails community will be on hand to help you get started.

So is Groovy really “the next generation” of the Java language? Come decide for yourself. As for me, I couldn’t agree more.

The Chinese version of Getting Started with Grails made its debut last week.

In fact, InfoQ has been steadily growing their Chinese Grails portal for quite a while now. There you’ll find updates on the recent Groovy and Grails support in IntelliJ IDEA 7, Guillaume Laforge waxing philosophical on Groovy DSLs, a (familiar) article on using Grails+EJB3, and more.

Add these resources to the Japanese and Korean docs on grails.org, Sven’s upcoming German book on Grails, and undoubtedly several other international resources in the works, and we’re rapidly starting to see a whole new meaning to good i18n support.

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!

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Michael Kimsal for a diverse and enjoyable episode of WebDevRadio. Over the course of about 30 minutes, we tackle such topics as Groovy, Grails, Ruby, Streamlined, and the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour.

If you’ve listened to WebDevRadio in the past, you know that Michael comes primarily from a PHP and Perl background. Throw those languages in the mix with Ruby and Groovy, and that’s a whole lot of dynamic language goodness for 30 minutes of podcasting! (We try not to leave any of the low-level languages too battered and bruised, but their extra baggage has simply become too much to bear for day-to-day application development.)

While the podcast itself is obviously intended to focus on web development, in this particular interview, developer productivity may very well outshine web development as the overriding theme. We discuss the profound impact of convention-over-configuration, the future of opinionated software, and whether there’s ever such a thing as too much choice.

Many thanks to Michael for having me on the podcast.

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