Been awfully quiet lately as I am concentrating on finishing my book (http://manning.com/allmon), but this was some great news that I had to share.
The makers of the best Java IDE have just announced that they are open-sourcing their IntelliJ IDEA product and offering a community edition for free now. You can read about it here (The Most Intelligent Java IDE — Now Free and Open Source).
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.
I’m a huge fan of Grails, and after hearing a couple of talks on it at CodeMash last week I decided to check in on it’s progress. I had first caught wind of Grails last winter when I purchased the book The Definitive Guide to Grails. I had been attempting to learn Ruby on Rails, and was quite unimpressed. I’m a big fan of the whole “Convention over configuration” way of thinking, but for some reason Rails just never did it for me. Unfortunately the Grails project was undergoing so many API changes as it was working towards the 1.0 release, that it basically rendered the sample application in the book unusable. Through much digging through the documentation and the APIs I was able to struggle through most of the book and knew that this framework had great potential. So now Grails is approaching 1.0 very soon and it’s time to re-familiarize myself with this wonderful platform.
Earlier this week I discovered a new article on IBM’s DeveloperWorks site titled Mastering Grails: Build your first Grails Application by Scott Davis. This article is very much a basic introduction to Grails. It takes the reader through creating the application and generating a simple domain class and controller. I love how in less than 100 lines of code, we’re able to have a complete CRUD application. If you use scaffolding, you can do it in just 15. Just a taste, definitely leaving the reader wanting more. Hopefully the next article will go in depth much more. Thankfully the code actually works as is and I didn’t have to do any digging to find out how to make it work. Until Chris Judd and company finish their Grails book Practical Grails Projects, I guess I’m stuck wading through the tutorials that may or may not work anymore depending on how long ago they were written.
