Day Two at Groovy & Grails eXchange 2013

The day two at GGX ’13, London continued to be spell binding and fun filled. The sessions, again, were really nice and proved to be valueable and insightful.

Here are some of the highlights:

Road To Grails 3.0 – By Graeme Rocher
The session started with overview of the new features of Grails 2.3 and then moved to Grails 3.0. The session covered features like dependency resolution with Aether, Forked execution, Default encoding, Async support, the new respond method, Gradle etc.

Metaprograming with Groovy Runtime – By Jeff Brown
The session discussed the basics of metaprograming for the beginners discussing things like methodMissing, invokeMethod, MetaClass. Jeff showed the meta magic by creating an ExpandoLite class, pretending the real Expando class did not exist.

Restfully Async with Grails 2.3 – By Graeme Rocher
The session was an extension (though a bit repetitive) to the Graeme’s first session. Graeme explained the new Grails 2.3 features like Async support, scaffolding, renderers, custom binding, Async Gorm, Gorm Rest Client plugin etc.

Groovy for System Administrators – By Dan Woods
This session was all about using Groovy scripts to manage and automate our servers. The speaker, gave a fair idea about how the programmers can think of Groovy beyond being mere a programming language. Dan, while keeping the mood of the session light, showed how developers can use it as a powerful tool to manage the different server setup tasks.

Application Architecture in Groovy – By Dan Woods

In this session Dan Woods discussed the principles of good Groovy application architecture. The speaker emphasized on things like having less coupling between modules, one function for one task, code readability, passing Clousure as final vararg, maps as first class citizens, methodMissing and propertyMissing and building DSLs.

Build Grails Applications with Gradle – by Luke Daley

In this session, Luke Daley showed how Gradle can be used to create a Grails app from the scratch. Not only can you create all Grails artefacts such as domains, controllers etc. but also run tests, package the app as WAR and even run the Grails app through Gradle. What benefits we get out of using Gradle? Well, the project’s and plugin dependencies can be handled better by Gradle and also we can have more fine-grained control over Grails execution.

Open Source and You – Peter Ledbrook

Peter Ledbrook talked about the intricacies involved in the development of open-source software from the contributor’s as well as community’s point of view. He put forth few of the key points necessary (for the developers as well as the users of these open-source software) to create and maintain a successful/useful open source projects, irrespective of the scale of the project.

Reactor framework – by Stéphane Maldini

In this talk, the speaker showcased the Reactor – a new framework for building asynchronous applications on the JVM (developed by Spring/Pivotal). He also talked about the ease of use and integration of Groovy with Reactor, as the closures and DSLs are already considered as the first-class citizens in Groovy.

Building Lightning Fast Web Services – by Tomas Lin

Tomas demonstrated the use of Dropwizard alongwith Groovy, Gradle, Lazybones etc. to develop the lightning fast web-services. The session delved into the structure and composition of a Dropwizard project and how Dropwizard makes use of Jetty, Jersey, Jackson and Metrics to let you develop fast responsive web-services.

Spring Boot – by David A. Dawson

The session focussed on the importance of few key principles of developing the applications such as ‘Focus on Data Flow’ and the use of HTTP/URLs to transfer data between the components/modules as well as avoiding the creation of monolithic structures when you create your applications. The speaker showed how you can make use of Spring boot to create the application.

Park-bench discussion

The conference ended with the Q&A session where the ‘who’s who’ of Groovy/Grails community took the stage and answered/discussed different questions/issues raised by the audience. The questions ranged from ‘When will the Grails 3.0 be out?’ to the workings of Reactor framework and also the probable migration issues which could be faced when updating the apps to Grails 3.0 etc.

The podcasts of the sessions can be found here.

Imran Mir

imran[at]intelligrape.com