Exploring Groovy at GRJUG

16 03 2009

I’m going to be presenting at the GRJUG meeting this week giving a whirlwind tour of Groovy. Not sure how I’m going to fit as much as I’d like to in a one hour bite sized chunk, but it’ll be interesting nonetheless. If you’re in the Grand Rapids, MI area on March 19th around 6:00pm, stop on by. Here’s the announcement…

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years you’ve probably heard of Java’s much hipper cousin Groovy. In this presentation we’re going to begin to explore the Groovy language from the ground up through a series of unit tests. We’ll start with some of the very basic concepts such as Strings, collections, looping, conditionals, exception handling, truth and introduce you to closures. With any luck we’ll cover enough of the basics to prepare you for future presentations where we’ll start to dive into the Grails framework and look at more advanced Groovy features such as meta- programming and building DSLs.

Presenter Bio: Jeremy Anderson is a software craftsman for Pillar Technology Group, an Agile consulting firm in the Great Lakes area. He is a self- proclaimed autodidact, constantly tinkering with cutting edge technologies such as Groovy, Grails and Flex. He’s been developing web-based applications on the JVM in one shape or another for over 5 years. He’s currently co-authoring a book on integrating Flex with Java for Manning Publications due out later this year, and even occasionally finds time to write on his blog. When he’s not sitting behind a keyboard hacking away at code you can usually find him out on the single-track on his mountain bike or sometimes even on foot.





GroovyMag article finished

13 03 2009

Earlier this year at CodeMash, my co-author BJ had lunch with the editor of GroovyMag, Michael Kimsal, and discussed writing an article for his magazine, unbeknownst to me.  Ironically at the same time I had been scheming and sending emails to Michael as well pitching the idea for an article on integrating Flex with Grails.  Long story short we landed a 2 part article for the upcoming April and May issues of GroovyMag.

If you’ve never heard of GroovyMag, I strongly encourage you to check it out.  It’s a very reasonably priced magazine for Groovy and Grails developers available as a PDF for the low price of $5 per issue.  Considering there are almost no advertisements and each issue is packed with great content from authors such as Chris Judd, and of course now yours truly.