University Day @ GR8Conf EU 2016

The day one at GR8Conf EU June 2016 Copenhagen, Denmark which is university day was pretty awesome with lots of hands-on  exercises or labs in each session. Also, we got very cool mugs following are the pics:

The first day of the GR8Conf went beyond our expectations. The atmosphere, the sessions and the speakers really made the day wonderful. We could feel the buzz and energy of the thriving and closely knitted Groovy/Grails community all day long. Following are some of the sessions which I attended today:

Getting Groovy With Lego Windstorms EV3 by Ryan Vanderwerf

This was really an amazing session which started with quick walk through of lejOS and  we saw how Grails application is interacting and controlling the Mindstorms robot. We have installed mobile phone camera on Lego robots which then display live video on laptop screen. And we were able to control the movement(move forward/backward/left/right) of bot from laptop.

REST With Grails 3 by Jeff Scott Brown

In this session, Grails 3 REST API was very nicely explicated by Jef with examples about how the developers can use it, like auto generation of REST verbs using @Resource annotation, or creating a RESTful controller etc. and testing of RESTful API using functional specs. For example one of sample test case is:

void "test retrieving albums by genre"() {
    when:
    def resp = rest.get(path: 'albums',
                        query: [genre: 'PROGRESSIVE_ROCK'])

    then:
    resp.status == HttpStatus.OK.value()
    resp.contentType == MimeType.JSON.name
    resp.data.size() == 2                                   

    when:
    resp = rest.get(path: 'albums',
                    query: [genre: 'HEAVY_METAL'])          

    then:
    resp.status == HttpStatus.OK.value()
    resp.contentType == MimeType.JSON.name
    resp.data.size() == 1                                  

    when:
    resp = rest.get(path: 'albums',
                    query: [genre: 'BLUES'])               

    then:
    resp.status == HttpStatus.OK.value()
    resp.contentType == MimeType.JSON.name
    resp.data.size() == 1                                  
}

In addition, there were few more things like implementing Custom Renderer, json-views to customize view.

Following is the link to lab exercises https://goo.gl/w2VMUq

Creating applications with Grails, Angular JS and Spring Security by Alvaro Sanchez-Mariscal

This session demonstrates the Grails 3.1 improved profile system where the the front-end is an Angular JS application, and the backend is a Grails REST API.  I would really appreciate the verbose documentation for hands-on exercise for this session. We created a back-end using Grails 3 REST API, front-end using Grails AngularJS profile and used spring-security-rest for securing REST API.

One should definitely try http://bit.ly/grails-angular-gr8conf to get thorough understanding of how it works.

Hackergarten on Tour by Andres Almiray

This was the last event of the day and was the most exciting as well where we need to create something that others can use; it could be a plugin, documentation update, bug fix or a patch to open source or public.

A list has been compiled  based on individual preferences on what they want to contribute to open source and later based on preferences separate teams were created. This was very interesting & exciting event of the day where you get chance to work by pairing up with project leaders and members.

Next, there are two more exciting days of conference coming up.