The Biggest Grails Conference in India – GrailsConf 2015!!!

We’ve been talking about it for a while and finally GrailsConf 2015 went fabulously well. It was an amazing conference, packed with sessions from an eminent lineup of speakers and over 160 participants who gathered at The Indian Habitat Centre, New Delhi.

The gathering was of mostly Java and Groovy developers. I noticed many Java developers who were amazed to see the power and brevity of the Groovy language.

Well we’ll be posting recordings of the sessions next week, however in the meantime here’s the rundown on all our sessions and speakers from the GrailsConf 2015.

Highlights of the sessions

The day started with a keynote by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc. on pleasure and perils of a dynamic ecosystem if this could be a Heaven or It could be Hell to motivate developers towards how to be productive with sustainable practices. Few key thoughts that I really liked are :

1. Language mould our thoughts, that way we design the software is greatly influenced by the languages we know. So learn more languages, don’t stick to one or two.
2. How fast we can learn depends how frequently we are exercising our mental muscles i.e invest on learning new things on regular basis.
3. Unit testing is to software like exercise is to the body. i.e Write more & more unit test cases preferably following TDD.

One could clearly sense the excitement in audience and I was one of them.

The next session was on Grails Goodness – The search is over, taken by Roni C Thomas & Manoj Mohan from IntelliGrape.
This session demonstrated how easy and faster it is do development with Grails, focussed mainly for the audience fairly new to Groovy ecosystem. Topics that were discussed includes GVM, Multiple datasources, scaffolding, RestfulAPI, plugins usage etc.

After a small break in between, Kunal Dabir, Senior Consultant with ThoughtWorks, talked about Demystifying Gradle Build Scripts focusing on:

1. Defining custom tasks
2. DSL
3. How internally script works, covered operations performed on Project object here.
4. How hidden handlers can be used to find what methods are available.
5. Task API and its internals.

Rolling into the next session by Shrikant Vashistha, Director Engineering – GlobalLogic, who took the session on Specification by Example in Grails with Geb & Spock shared the following items :

1. How the specification should be written.
2. Introduced concept of Definition of Ready.
3. Discussed benefits of Geb and took us through few examples.

After an hour of networking lunch, Dr Venkat Subramaniam, took the session on Applying Groovy Closures for Fun and Productivity. His talk was around concept of Closures, Curry, Trampoline & Memoize. I could have never understood those concepts better by the examples and use cases he shared. It was actually real fun learning them.

Manoj Thakur, Director Engineering – Flipkart did a presentation on Elasticsearch – in general, usages and key concepts allowing the participants to get meaningful analytics from the machine generated data which grows rapidly and in real time. Then many from audience shared their experience of working with ElasticSearch.

Naresha K, a technologist with Channel Bridge Software Labs, took the session on Effective Java with Groovy, where he recommended better practices and once followed that would make life much simpler and those practices includes using more annotations and better handling of null objects, closures and delegate concept etc.

Finally the conference had a panel discussion specifically on Upcoming Trends in JVM Landscape where many interesting questions were discussed which gave lot of clarity:

1. What are the new languages to learn first?
2. Things to look forward in Java 8.
3. How to decide which tool/technology is right?
4. A good practice after TDD?
5. And few more.

A BIG Thanks to the fantastic speakers for taking out time and sharing your knowledge and experience with all of us. Many thanks to all participants for coming over in this chilly weather.

I feel really excited now when I think about how the next GrailsConf 2016 would be. 🙂

Click to view the pics or Visit our YouTube Channel to watch the videos from the conference.

Cheers!!