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.

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.

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.

I started out the day on Thursday with a helping of Groovy. Andrew Glover, one of the co-authors of Groovy in Action talked about Groovy and reignited my passion for this wonderful scripting language. For those of you who haven’t looked at Groovy yet, you owe it to yourself to take a look at it. Groovy is a “Java”-like scripting language that has some similarities with other dynamic languages like Python and Ruby. Groovy is a dynamically typed language, unlike its Java counterpart, has no checked exceptions, and also has support for things such as closures. The really powerful thing about Groovy is its ability to run in the same JVM as your current Java applications, have access to all of the classes available to Java, and all of your Java applications can also access any libraries you have written in Groovy. This makes for a very easy adoption and integration into existing Java applications, or even quick prototyping that could eventually (if necessary) be replaced by Java code. Don’t be surprised if you see more and more Groovy seeping into Java applications with its low cost of adoption.

The other real exciting session that I attended on Thursday was the Grails presentation given by Chris Judd, who is co-authoring a book called Practical Grails Applications. I was excited to see this framework actually approaching its 1.0 version in the very near future. I had looked at it earlier last year, but it was undergoing such rapid changes to its API that the book I purchased was rendered obsolete by the time I read it. Hopefully Chris and company have a very successful title and I’ll be able to actually build a working application. Grails is rather interesting in that it is similar to Rails in the fact that it follows the “Convention over configuration” theme, but after that most similarities stop. Grails leverages the Groovy language as its main development language, and leverages popular Java frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate to much of the heavy lifting. Even though the main contributor to Grails is a staunch anti-Maven guy (http://graemerocher.blogspot.com/2006/09/vote-to-stop-maven-infesting-spring.html), I’m still pretty excited about this framework and can’t wait to see it grow and prosper in the next year.

Friday I got to hear James Ward, a Flex evangelist from Adobe, give a presentation on migrating Web 1.0 applications to RIAs. As some of you may know BJ Allmon and I are writing a book on Flex and how to do Agile programming using Flex. This presentation was especially helpful in the fact that James pretty much validated the whole book for us in this one presentation. His set of steps for refactoring Web 1.0 applications to Flex practically mirrored our table of contents that I had written just a couple of weeks before attending this conference.

I had a wonderful time at this conference. I finally got to meet Bruce, who was the one who recruited me to Pillar, and BJ who will be helping me write possibly the best Flex book ever. I also got to meet some other very bright people out there in the technology world and pick their brains about some of the bleeding edge topics that interest me. I really hope that Pillar keeps sponsoring this conference and sends more and more of us each year to experience this.