Back from the first day of the No Fluff Just Stuff Java symposium. It was a great day and I cant wait for tomorrow.
Although there were many session to choose from I spent most of the day learning about Groovy and the Grails framework with Scott Davis. I am sold, as soon as I got back I pulled out my laptop and started coding with Groovy.
Setting up was easy just download the zip file, set the PATH environment variable and code.
So my first two sessions were on Groovy, the first session was an intro to showing how Groovy and Java can interact, you can literally copy Java code paste it into a .groovy file and it will compile. The second session got into meta programming, whatever that is…I saw some very cool things but stuff that I had never dealt with since basic Java doesn’t deal with. I am talking about, creating pointer, closers?, and something else that I don’t remember the name of. So as Scott liked to describe the two languages. Java is the cake and Groovy is the frosting on the cake. If you are a Java coder I definitely recommend you looking into Groovy. Stay posted I will be adding some tutorials soon.
Grails! The third session of the day was all about Grails. What an amazing, technology/framework/platform. I havent been able to play with Grails yet but I will soon. What is amazing to me is that I am currently developing an application that uses Spring, Hibernate, Log4j, Tomcat……. and basically it took me a couple of days to configure, so that I could then start coding. Scott, with a little help from Grails, was able to do all this and build a webapp in less than one hour and maybe typed 10 lines of code.
Groovy and Grails learn it!
