:jasonrudolph => :blog

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!

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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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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The No Fluff Just Stuff G2One event officially kicked off my JavaOne festivities last night, and it turned out to be the veritable who’s who of Java geekery. I say that affectionately, of course, and I was quite impressed. It’s a clear testament to the sincere interest the Java community has in the Groovy story. Faces I saw in the crowd (some of which I had the distinct pleasure to meet) included none other than: Dick Wall and Carl Quinn (of Java Posse fame), Emmanuel Bernard (of Hibernate and JBoss fame), Romain Guy (of Filthy Rich Client fame and owner of the French accent making occasional, and always hilarious, guest appearances on the afore-mentioned Java Posse), Stu Halloway (most-recently of Ruby and Rails fame), David Geary (of Swing and JSF fame), and Chris Richardson (of POJOs in Action fame). And when we capped off the event with the panel discussion, we were presented with a surprise guest host, Ted Neward (of interoperability/controversy fame (wink)), to preside over the session. Very cool! It was a blast!

For those that weren’t able to attend the event (or are perhaps still wanting more Groovy/Grails goodness), Jay Zimmerman announced plans for a dedicated Groovy and Grails training program that’s set to debut in September and then the first Groovy Experience conference scheduled for February of next year. Stay tuned. The momentum continues to build.

As a final note, it was great to finally meet so many of the Groovy and Grails pioneers and evangalists in person: Graeme Rocher (who has a good write-up on Day 0 as well), Dierk Koenig, Guillaume LaForge, Andrew Glover, and Neal Ford. Keep groovin’, Guys!

Grails 0.5 is out, and it’s busting at the seams with improvements! This release marks a huge milestone in the march towards Grails 1.0, as it brings with it a whole host of features that truly take Grails to the next level. The real heavy hitters include a DSL for custom URL mappings, command objects, and GORM’s continued quest to free the world from the evils of painful Object Relational Mapping. You’ll also find this release sporting the new Groovy 1.1 beta distro, an improved developer experience (thanks to major improvements in hot reloading of key artifacts), an almost 50% increase in performance, and resolutions for over 200 JIRA issues. Be sure to check out the release notes for details on (and examples of) these and many other features of this slam-packed release.

If you’re heading to JavaOne next week, what better way to get the festivities started than to spend an evening checking out the one-two punch that is Groovy and Grails?! The No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposium Series is hosting the Groovy/Grails One Meet-up from 6:30 - 10:30 on Monday night at the W Hotel, just across the street from the Moscone Center.

Come on out and hear the latest news on the just-released Groovy 1.1 beta. Groovy Project Lead, Guillaume LaForge, will be on hand with all the details. And, you won’t want to miss Graeme Rocher, Grails Project Lead, as he brings you up to speed on the slam-packed Grails 0.5 release due out any moment. We’ll follow up those presentations with giveaways, demos, and a panel discussion including Dierk Koenig, lead author of Groovy in Action; Andrew Glover, co-author of Groovy in Action; Neal Ford, DSL Guru; and yours truly.

And in a genuine show of class, the NFJS folks have added a charitable angle to the event. Registration is free, but they’ve asked that attendees make a small donation to the charity of their choice. In exchange, you get to check out two of the most promising technologies in the Java world today, meet some of the people behind the scenes, and you even stand a chance to win some cool gear. Well done!

Attendance is limited, so register early!

The Groovy team has clearly been hard at work since the 1.0 release at the start of the year, and now, just in time for JavaOne, the first beta release of Groovy 1.1 is here to show off the fruits of that labor.

Checking off one item at the top of many a wish list, Groovy now plays nicely with Java 5 annotations. In case you weren’t impressed enough already with Groovy’s rockin’ Java integration abilities, Groovy has now stepped up as the lone alternative JVM language to support Java 5 annotations.

The next question, of course, is, “How’s the tool support coming along?” That story seems to be getting better all the time. What’s your editor of choice? NetBeans? Check out the stuff that Geertjan’s been up to. IntelliJ IDEA? Jetbrains says solid Groovy and Grails support is on the way. Eclipse? Yes! We’re well on the way to some much-requested code-completion. TextMate? Good for you! Groove on.

This new release also sports that black magic code wizard affectionately known as the ExpandoMetaClass. (’Tis quite cool to see innovations that started out in Grails make their way into Groovy proper.)

Be sure to check out the release notes to see everything this release has to offer. And while you’re at it, take it for a spin!

Grails is on the move, folks! The past month has seen an enormous increase in the momentum of Grails, and by the looks of it, that trend will only grow stronger as we move through 2007.

As Graeme recently pointed out, if mailing list traffic is any indication of uptake, then the Grails community is rapidly gaining in size. The Grails mailing list now tops all projects at Codehaus. Is that significant? Take a look at the list of Codehaus projects, and judge for yourself.

Of course, buzz will only get you so far for so long. However, thanks to some enterprising developers, the proof is right there for the world to see, touch, feel, and use.

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What would it take to assemble a group of speakers like Spring creator Rod Johnson, Grails project lead Graeme Rocher, Groovy in Action author Dierk König, renowned agility expert Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, real-world Grails users from as far as away as Japan, Australia, and the UK, thought leaders from Hibernate, JBoss, Dojo, Google, Oracle, and Sun, and a whole host of others that each deserve individual mentions as well?

It’s the First International Grails eXchange 2007, of course! Mark your calendars for May 30th to June 1st, and head on over to grails-exchange.com to register for what’s sure to be a rock-solid event. From the official site…

Packed with presentations on Grails, Groovy, Ajax & Web 2.0 and JEE and the core technologies that support the Grails technology stack such as JEE, Spring, Hibernate, SiteMesh, Dojo and Quartz. … The Grails eXchange features the following tracks:

• The Groovy Language
• The Grails Framework
• Ajax and Web 2.0
• Java Enterprise Edition - JEE

I hope to see you there!

I recently had the chance to sit down with Scott Davis, Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com, for an interview about Grails, how I got involved with it, and what lies ahead.  It runs about 23 minutes in length, but we manage to cover quite a bit in that time frame.  We agree that we don't need one programming language/technology "to rule them all."  We discuss the origin of (and the potential future for) Getting Started with Grails, and we set the record straight on whether EJB3 is a legacy technology.  (Spoiler alert: It's not.)

Proper RSS support is coming soon for aboutGroovy.com podcasts.  In the meantime, feel free to download the MP3 directly.  

Many thanks to Scott and aboutGroovy.com for the interview.