puts Blog.new(”nonsense”)

InfoQ recently posted the video of my presentation on Grails from QCon San Francisco. If 50 slides in 50 minutes sounds a tad formulaic and tired to you, then you’re in luck. Instead, you’ll see 50 slides in about 5 minutes, followed immediately by 50 minutes of no-nonsense live coding goodness.

In what could perhaps be described as a series of 12 back-to-back lightning talks, you can see what it takes to go from a blank slate to a deployable Grails app including…

• defining domain classes,
• setting up relationships,
• hooking up a database,
• establishing constraints and validation error messages,
• enjoying sexy dynamic finders,
• applying custom URL mappings,
• working with tag libraries,
• encapsulating business logic in services,
• integrating with existing Java code,
• sending e-mail,
• finding and installing plugins, and
• locking down the app with secure authentication and authorization

There’s some good Q & A in there as well. Unfortunately not all of the questions came through on the audio, but in most cases you can pick up the context from the reply.

You’ll also hear me reference Charles Nutter’s JRuby talk a few times over the course of the presentation, and I recommend checking out that video as well.

• Geertjan Wielenga suggests the first (and only) Java closure solution that makes any sense.

• Wait for it. Wait for it. Are you serious?! Damn, that’s cool!

• As always, Alan Hoffler offers some welcome advice “and stuff like that” on using words that add nothing to your message.

• Rails goes Git. Sweet! Who’s next?

• Multi-touch is so 1984.

• “Working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live.” Well said. And if you disagree with Paul Graham, watch out; you’re being graded.

Andres Almiray interviewed me this week for the Groovy Zone. We cover a breadth of topics, including:

• Just how far Grails has come in the past two years
• Why the GORM DSL likely obviates previous mapping techniques
• Groovy as a gateway drug to more and better developer testing
• Why Grails testing infrastructure improvements deserve top billing in Grails 1.1
• Something called Rails
• New testing-related developments in the Groovy ecosystem

For all that and more, check out the interview at Groovy Zone, a new(ish) and hoppin’ community for Groovy and Grails news.

(Did I mention that we discuss testing?)

Many thanks to Andres and DZone for the interview.

The first print copies of Scott Davis’s new book, Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java, debuted last week at 2GX.

I had the pleasure of reviewing the book prior to its release, and I’m happy to say that Scott has clearly assembled the go-to guide for turning Groovy into every Java developer’s perfect utility knife. Whether you need to quickly parse an Atom feed, serve up an Excel spreadsheet from your Grails app, or create a tarball on the fly, this book will show you how. In true Groovy style, Scott does away with all unnecessary ceremony and gets right down to business. In almost every section, the very first thing you see is code - the recipe for solving to the problem at hand - and if you want to stick around for the clear and informative explanation, well, that’s strictly optional.

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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Download the MP3 directly

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I recently finished a tech review of Venkat Subramaniam’s upcoming book from the Pragmatic Programmers, Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer, and I was pleased to find that Venkat included a healthy dose of “the red pill.”

Scott Davis’s red pill/blue pill metaphor is spot on …

You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe.

Many developers (and almost all Groovy tutorials and books to date) are still focused on the more conservative features of the Groovy language. Admittedly, the conveniences offered by that slice of Groovy are nothing to scoff at, but it’s frankly short-sighted to stop there. After all, it’s metaprogramming (i.e., the red pill) that gets the credit for much of the coolness that one experiences in a Grails app. And without metaprogramming, Groovy wouldn’t have a chance in the DSL world.

Venkat clearly wasn’t content to let Groovy metaprogramming continue to take a back seat. Instead, he’s dedicated four whole chapters to this important topic. By page count, that’s more than 20% of the book! And that’s not even counting the numerous cameos that metaprogramming makes in other chapters, especially in the discussions on testing and DSLs. Want to know when to use #invokeMethod versus #methodMissing? Venkat’s got you covered. Need to get your head around categories, expandos, and the ExpandoMetaClass? You’re all set. Not sure how to differentiate between method injection and method synthesis? Not for long.

The beta book is available now. Of course, it’s beta, so you’ll have to be forgiving of the areas that still need some polish. But whether you check out the book now, or you wait for it to graduate from beta status, the red pill awaits. Bottom line: You simply won’t find a more comprehensive resource for getting up to speed on Groovy metaprogramming.

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.