Day 2 @GR8Conf EU 2015

Day 2 at GR8Conf EU June 2015 Copenhagen, Denmark continued to beintriguing and fun filled. The Day started with the keynote from Jeff Scott Brown on Grails and its future plan. He shed light on Grails 3.0 features and its releases plans. He also asked for contribution to migrating plugins from Grails 2.x to Grails 3.0.  In his note, He mentioned “Grails is here to stay” and Community is above all. 🙂 🙂

Here are some of the highlights:

• #The Great Migration By: Noam Tenne

Noam talked about shifting a monolithic application to multiple micro-services. He talked about the advantages and discussed migration of bintray[dot]com from one single big application to building the same using many micro-services. He also gave light on some of the dis-advantages/pains having a system around micro-services like maintenance, version and duplication etc.

• #Spring Boot and Groovy. What more do you need? By: Iván López Martín

We again witnessed the gr8ness of Spring Boot with this presentation from Iván. He started off with a simple example of Spring Boot, one that can fit inside a tweet. And then he demoed more complex cases and how we can implement them with Spring Boot using Groovy. Groovy is a first class citizen in Boot and that makes development that much more fun! To end the session, Iván added a candy in the form of the “boot shell” that gives you a command line access to your application and a dashboard which shows what is going on within your app. Boot, we are sold already!!

• #Event-driven plugins with Grails 3 By: Göran Ehrsson

Event handling in Grails never had better support than what Grails 3 provides. A very simple model of emitting events and the consumers catching them. Göran showcased the power of events and how easy it makes the communication between 2 separate parts of code. Göran proceeded by showing a plugin which helps in migrating the existing Grails plugin from 2.x to 3.x. That was really the bang that Grails 3 needs!!

• #RESTful Web Services in Grails 3 By: Jennifer Strater

Grails 3 is great. What makes it even better is it’s REST support. Jenn talked about why we use REST and then why we use it with Grails. She also covered a lot of the best practices to be used while creating REST API’s like versioning, status codes, naming styles, etc. She also talked about the various annotations that Grails 3 provides out of the box and the various ways to implement REST API’s

• #Hacking the Grails Spring Security 2.0 Plugin By: Burt Beckwith

He talked about how far, we can go in configuring Spring Security 2.0 Plugin. Although it’s very configurable. And how the plugins are implemented, and some specific examples and demos of customization’s that will shed some light on the process for determining where to look when you want to override default or add new functionality.

• #Gradle Glam: Plugins Galore By: Andres Almiray

Andres Almiray, the GR8 community’s very own Luchador was here to show some Gradle magic. Gradle has a very strong community and a very rich plugin repository. Andres took us through some of the most useful plugins like watch, coverall, license, grade-version, etc. Special mention for both version plugin which tells us which dependencies can be upgraded. It was a really cool plugin which can help us staying on the latest versions of our dependencies.

• #Simplify Android Development using Groovy By: Alexander (Sascha) Klein

Interesting session, away from Grails ;). In this session, Sascha showed how easy it is to make an Android application using Groovyand how one can move Android Java code to Groovy code, how easy it is to start Android development with Groovy and how one can use Lazybones to get a heads up with Android development. He also showed the advantage of having @LazyLoading with images in Android which is available with Groovy. While developing an Android app using Groovy, one needs to be aware of using @CompileStatic. He also discussed about roadmap for Groovy on Android.

• #Rest Groovy By: Guillaume Laforge

Another awesome session by Guillaume on REST Groovy. This session had talks around the beauty of REST and how one can make API URL’s self descriptive with right use of HTTP methods types (PUT,GET..etc) and HTTP status codes like “code 429 – too many requests”. He also showed the Groovy way of making HTTP calls and frameworks available for REST calls based on Groovy. One of the cool tips  was to make use of mockbin[dot]com for mocking API endpoints till API development finishes. This would help us to develop an API in parallel while testing.

• #Testing with Spock. The logical choice By: Iván López Martín

ván started his session by shedding light on “Why Spock? “.  He showed some pretty cool stuff available with Spock and how simple it is test code irrespective of whether its written in Java or Groovy. The session was demo driven and he ran lots of test cases. He also pointed out use of STUB and MOCK for mocking classes. It was a really nice session with a lot of insights.

• #All Your Lego Are Belong to Us By: Ryan Vanderwerf

Groovy with Lego. Some what a bit different session, around LEGO Ev3 and robotics stuff. It was very cool to see the power of Groovy. He also demoed how he configured to make LEGO Ev3 run on Groovy and in the end, he showed “How one can make a Grails application to control the Lego Ev3 “.

It was a day full of knowledge flowing in from all directions and we could clearly see the bright future of GR8 technologies.

After all the sessions, we had a nice puzzler session, The Epic Groovy Puzzlers II By: (Noam Tenne, Andres Almiray) at the end where everybody had great Groovy fun.

It was a great end to a wonderful day. Check out a sneak peek of the second day below! 😉