Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Groovy and Grails in The Gateway City

On January 5th, the Gateway Groovy Users had their 2010 kick-off meeting. The turn-out was amazing. When we were discussing the plans to get the group going again (after a 6 month hiatus), we thought we might be able to get our attendance numbers up to 10 or 12 (from the previous record of 7). We ended up with over 50 people! We even had such St. Louis Groovy icons as Jeff Brown and Ken Sipe.

We're hoping to keep that momentum going with our next meeting, on February 2nd. Seth Havermann will be giving a presentation on and demonstration of Groovy's SwingBuilder.

Then we'll turn it up a notch in March, with Alex Miller presenting on GPars (officially pronounced like “Jeepers”), the Groovy concurrency library. Perhaps we can get our sponsor to bring nachos.

As excited as I am about the response to the Gateway Groovy Users meetings, I am even more thrilled to see that this is not an isolated phenomenon. Groovy and Grails groups continue to pop up around the globe, and those that have been going for a while are reporting continued success.

One of the first Groovy user groups in the US, the Groovy Users of Minnesota (GUM – you gotta love that name!), provided the inspiration for the first US-based, community-driven Groovy conference: GR8 in the US, to be held April 16th, 2010 in Bloomington, Minnesota.

To find out about other Groovy, Grails, and Griffon user groups, or to help get one started, check out http://g2groups.net. The Groovy community continues to grow, to thrive, to amaze, and to inspire.