10 Reasons to attend SpringOne 2GX

I was going to come up with one of those clever top 10 lists but when I went to the SpringOne/2GX home page, I saw 10 great reasons to attend staring me in the face.



The early bird discount ends Friday, September 18th, but even at full price this event is less expensive than JavaOne and will contain way more good technical content. Check out the rest of the speakers and the awesome session list at http://springone2gx.com

If you're interested in Groovy, Grails, Griffon, (or related technologies) or if you use Spring in any of it's myriad forms, or, for that matter, if you use Java, you won't want to miss this conference!

See you there!

New Blog for Grails: A Quick-Start Guide

I'd like to announce a new blog for Grails: A Quick-Start Guide. You can find it at http://gquick.blogspot.com. In this blog, I'll continue to build on the example app in the book, and offer tips and techniques that didn't make it into the book.

The first post covers displaying an image property of a domain class in a GSP. In the GQuick example application, there is a Sponsor class that has a logo property. We never had a chance to show how to properly render that logo image to a page in the book.

If you've read the beta of GQuick and have anything else you would like to see discussed, post a comment here, on gquick.blogspot.com, or at the book forum at pragprog.com.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank the beta ebook readers. Your feedback has been a huge help!

Grails: The Official Web Framework for Java.next

In the August issue of GroovyMag, guest plugin-corner columnist Keith Cochran covers the new Clojure plugin by Jeff Brown. This plugin allows you to include Clojure source code in src/clj and then access that code in your Grails application. More details on the Clojure plugin can be found at http://grails.org/plugin/clojure.

A while back Vaclav Pech came out with a similar Grails plugin for Scala. This one hasn't been covered in GroovyMag... yet. Anyhow, you can find out more about this plugin at http://grails.org/plugin/scala.

So now in a Grails application you can have Groovy code (all over the place), Scala code in src/scala, and Clojure code in src/clj. That's pretty impressive! As I was marveling at these recent developments, I realized that Grails now supports 3 out of the four languages covered in Stu Halloway's paradigm-shifting blog series on Java.next (Groovy, Scala and Clojure - no JRuby... yet).

So unless something else comes along that as easily supports all four, I think we can safely call Grails the "Official Web Framework for Java.next".

P.S. Lest I forget, Griffon (the official Swing MVC framework for Java.next?) has quickly followed suit on supporting these languages. See Andres Almiray's blog for juicy details.

We have a US Groovy/Grails/Griffon Conference!

But let's not blow it!

A while back I wrote about the need for a US conference dedicated to the G3 technologies. Well, now there's one scheduled! You've probably already heard about the SpringOne 2GX (I know it should be 3GX, but names are hard to change sometimes, so we'll cut them some slack :-).

This conference will be a two-for-one deal. You can sign up for either the SpringOne or the 2GX (Groovy / Grails Experience) and you get to go to both. Which means that there will be 8 concurrent sessions to choose from. Ouch! That's going to hurt when I try to split myself into pieces to go to more than one at a time.

The speaker line-up is fantastic. I won't try to list all of them all here, but the three Gs are well represented, with 20 different speakers on the Groovy / Grails / Griffon side and even more on the Spring side. You can see the full list on the website.

But the sessions are only part of the picture. The interaction with speakers and other attendees during breaks and meals is the part that just can't be reproduced or replaced. You may be able to find a book that covers some of the topics, but you won't find a book that contains that great conversation you had with the creator of your favorite tool or framework.

So why did I start this post off with the warning to not blow it? Well, you may have noticed that the economy isn't doing all that great lately. You may have also noticed that many conferences and training events have been canceled due to lack of attendance. I don't think that would happen with the SpringOne 2GX -- but why take the chance? If we want these types of events to continue, we need to support them. So if you haven't registered yet, head over to http://springone2gx.com and register. The early bird pricing, which will save you $400, ends July 31st! Why wait? You can save a good chunk of change while at the same time telling the organizers that they might as well start planning the next one!

You can also help by getting the word out. Tell your co-workers, colleagues, friends, neighbors, etc.

This is going to be an excellent conference. It will be way less crowded than JavaOne, and with much better sessions and overall experience. And it's cheaper to boot! There's just no good reason to miss this event. I hope to see you there!

It's Official: Grails has a DZone Refcard!

The Grails Refcard is now available for download at http://refcardz.dzone.com

Writing a refcard was a bit more challenging than I thought it would be. The main difficulty being determining what it should have in it. I put the question out here and on the Grails mailing lists and got some good ideas but no help in narrowing it down. Should it be solely a reference for experienced Grails users? An easy getting started guide for new Grails users? Should it just be a copy of the docs in a smaller font?!

I leaned more towards it being a reference for existing users but I know there are still many poor souls out there who don't yet know how much better their jobs could be with Grails. So, I settled on a hybrid approach. The first section is a brief introduction to Grails and some of it's key benefits. I could have done so much more here but hopefully it's enough to convince those not yet using Grails to take a second look. The rest of the card is dedicated to some of the concepts and details that I and others I know of have had to lookup most frequently. I know I didn't hit everyone's key points but hopefully I covered enough of them to make it useful.

Download it and take a look. The download is free and feedback is always welcome.

I would like to thank the folks at DZone for giving me this opportunity and even more for their support of the G3 community with first the Groovy Refcard and now the Grails Refcard. There's no Griffon Refcard yet, but they do listen so send them an email to let them know you'd like to see one or better yet, offer to write it. It's a fun and challenging experience.

Grails Enterprise Integration Strategies BOF

I will be leading a Grails BOF (Birds of a Feather session) this Thursday at JavaOne.  The BOF is from 6:30 to 7:20 pm in Esplanade 307-310.  

I hope to make this more like a traditional Birds of a Feather.  I will get the ball rolling by talking about some of my experiences using Grails in an EJB/JSF/Oracle/WebLogic shop and also a bit about ideas I've heard from others in other enterprise environments.  But then we'll open it up to the attendees to talk about what they've tried. What worked.  What didn't.  What they're currently dealing with.

Hopefully, we'll get a good discussion going and then to cap it all off, the Grails Podcast BOF, with Sven Haiges and Glen Smith is in the same room at 7:30.  It should be a GR8 night!  If you're at JavaOne come on out and join in.

Groovy Buzz at JavaOne

As suspected the G3 buzz at JavaOne is much higher than indicated by the technical session list.  You hear it in the hallway conversations; you hear it in the attendees questions at other sessions; and you heard it loud and clear at the Scripting Bowl (aka, the Alternative JVM Languages Bowl).  The contenders were Jython, Groovy, Clojure, Scala and JRuby.  The clear winner was Groovy!  Dick Wall, of Java Posse fame, came in second with Scala but based on audience feedback Groovy was the one!  

Guillaume Laforge was the Groovy representative and he showed off some cool demos with help from the grooviest guys in desktop development, Danno Ferrin, James Williams and Andres Almiray.  It was a great community effort and a great opportunity to show folks how powerful, easy to use and just plain fun Groovy is.