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.

Want to know more about just how easy it is to contribute to the many open source projects that you use day in and day out? The Refactotum series is dedicated to showing you how. Coming up at RailsConf in May, Stu, Justin, Rob, and I will be offering up another round of Refactotum open sorcery.

What are people saying about Refactotum? The 2GX crowd was pretty psyched…

Showed how you can contribute to open source even if you don’t have a lot of time.

Cool. Time? What’s that?

Very helpful. I’ll definitely follow up by contributing to open source projects.

Right on.

Explaining how to contribute to open source is something that is not usually covered and needs to be taught and evangelized.

And even when the network didn’t cooperate…

It turned out to be a giant “pair” programming exercise instead of individual programming and this turned out to be MUCH better. Some of the ideas discussed were really intriguing.

Grab your seat now before they’re all gone. Hope to see you there!

The Triangle’s local Agile group is hosting a round of lightning talks tonight. I’ll be pitching a quick demo showing just how much Mingle rocks, but it’s an open floor, so everything’s fair game.

From the meeting description…

We’ll be doing a lightning talk night with a rejectconf twist. What that means is that there’s no hard time limit, but talks will get sorted by estimated talk time, shortest to longest. The shorter your talk, the more talks we can see and the more likelihood you’ll get to give it. So start thinking about something quick and cool you could share with us - it’ll be a blast!

The meetup gets underway at 6:30 PM. (See the Agile RTP site for full details.) If you’re nearby, come on out. Hope to see you there!

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!

–

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.

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.

–

Download the MP3 directly

or

Subscribe to aboutGroovy.com podcasts via RSS

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.

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…

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

–

Download via iTunes

Download the MP3 directly