Yay! for day 3 of the No Fluff Just Stuff software symposium.

Let me start by saying that I should have attended other sessions not related to Groovy and Grails but I just couldn’t get away. This time Jeff Brown was the speaker. As a little background Jeff works at G2One, this is only the company behind the magic that is Groovy and Grails. So once I heard this I knew I couldn’t pass up on these talks and let me say Jeff delivered.

The first session was a thorough look into Groovy. Lots of code examples and comparisons between Java and Groovy. Very nice! The second session was a lecture on the benefits of Groovy when unit testing (yes developers we are supposed to do unit testing, maybe I will start trying this one day). This was actually a interesting point in my fascination with Groovy.

Jeff mentioned that when comparing dynamic languages with static languages it is extremely important that we conduct unit testing. This makes sense, when coding in static languages such as Java, we have the compiler who can tell us if we have code, notice I am not saying good code. With dynamic languages such as Groovy we don’t have the compiler to tell us if a method is not found or a class is not found… So basically we HAVE to write test cases!!! What?!! This is horrible!!! not really. This, is actually one of those negative positive thing, like when people try to impress a interviewer when they say that one of their weaknesses is that they work tooo hard.

Third session was more interesting meta programming with Groovy, I promise one day I will understand it all. Finally I got another demo of Grails.

Over all this was a magnificent symposium and I recommend that everyone tries to attend! I am looking forward to the next one in VA! April 24-26!!!!

Day two of the No Fluff Just Stuff software symposium was good but not as good as day one. Again I attended the sessions by Scott Davis. The first session was about making your web site faster. Scott showed us a very cool plugin called YSlow for another plugin called Firebug. Both of these tools can be used to analyze the content of your site. YSlow will actually grade your site and give you reasons for why the site is slow. I was really impressed with the plug in and I recommend it everyone else. Much of the criteria used by this plugin can be described in the High Performace Web Sites book.

The second session was a summary for Scott Davis’s GIS for Web Developers book. It was an interesting lecture and Scott again did an amazing job at simplifying everything…now I know the basics behind sites like google maps!

I was really looking forward to my third session which was all about JVM garbage collection. The presenter for this lecture was Brian Goetz. Brian did a good job presenting about garbage collection but although some of us seemed interested I was still drolling and anxious about Groovy and Grails. He did talk about jconsole and other utilities we can use as java developers to identify memory leaks, but this just wasn’t as fun.

Finally I decided to attend a lecture titled 7 Habits of Highly Effective Developers. I dont remember anything about it, I was just tooo tired by the end of the day.

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!