Groovy & Grails eXchange 2014, London: Day 1
The day finally arrived for which we crossed couple of continents. The onening day of the GGX conference went beyond our expectations and had just the right blend of enthusiasm from the presenters and the audience alike. All the while we were travelling to the venue, we had an inkling that something new was about to be experienced.. and we were not dissapointed.
Gods of Grails
The opening key note talk was delivered by Guillaume Laforge, who talked about the latest happenings in the world of Groovy. Starting with the similarity between lambda expressions and closures, he moved on to Groovy Traits. While discussing, Laforge also explained how you could easily achieve multiple inheritance using Groovy Traits and how the well known Diamond problem of multiple inheritance has been negated. Many other powerful annotations were also talked about like @Builder, @Sortable and @BaseScript.
All in all, a perfect start to the day.
In the second session of the day, Schalk Cronje convinced on how easily one could manage I/O operations on a remote server using Groovy VFS. Removing all the boiler plate code and replacing it with an easily useable and readable DSL, performing a long listing(ls) on a remote server seemed absolutely easy
[groovy]
vfs{
ls "SOME_REMOTE_SERVER_URL" {
println it
}
[/groovy]
A similar easy syntax can be found for copy, move and mkdir commands among others. Not being limited to just the base language, a Gradle extension is in the beta stage along with a command line utility for the same.
Another eye opener of a session was presented by Lari Hotari who discussed how dividing your application in “Vertical Slices” would be more beneficial in the long run as opposed to the traditional horizontal division of Presentation, Services & Persistence. Ranging from the basic concepts of Coupling and Cohesion to the cost ratio of a monolithic architecture against a microservice driven back-end, Hotari also gave an insight on how to effectively transition from a monolithic to a microservice driven architecture.
Among the other sessions presented were
- Groovy AST Transformation by Jeff Brown
- Feed your Grails Karma by Vladimir Orany
- Stateless Authentication for MicroServices by Alvaro Sanchez
- Spoctacular Testing by Russel Winder
- Groovy for Java developers by Peter Ledbrook
- Gpars 2014 by Russel Winder
As the day came to an end, it was finally wrapped up with a panel discussion consisting of Graeme Rocher, Jeff Brown, Guillame LaForge and Russel Winder in which they took on questions from the audience and a really energetic Peter Ledbrook on the future of Grails, how Groovy stacks up against the latest developments in Java 8 and much more.
You had to be here to experience it all. If not, Day 2 is still an upcoming opportunity to be utilized !!!
Chandan Luthra
