GR8 Conference News

GR8Conf Down Under

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 06:03:00 GMT

In Australia, Craig Aspinall, Glen Smith, Paul King and Steve Dalton have announced a GR8Conf mini conference, taking place in Canberra, at the Australian National University on November 15th 2011.

The conference is held in parallel to the Open Source Developer Conference (OSDC) 2011, which runs from 14th - 18th November. Tickets for OSDC gives access to the GR8Conf mini conference, but it is also possible to buy tickets at a very reasonable price for the mini conference only.

The conference is currently has a call for papers open, and they will be announcing the schedule soon.

The GR8Conf Europe crew would like to welcome GR8Conf Australia to the family - we hope this will be a repeating event.

For more information, please see the Australian edition homepage

What was tweeted....

Mon, 23 May 2011 08:24:00 GMT

GR8Conf Europe 2011 has ended, and what a blast! To me, this was the best GR8Conf ever! We had 28 sessions, 25 speakers, 4 workshops, 3 days, two tracks, and the number of tweets about the conference was almost endless.

Here are some of, what others tweeted about GR8Conf after the conference:

@frankvilhelmsen

Frank Vilhelmsen

Now back at job again and going to look at "clean" POJ code and J2EE security. It has been a few good conferences #gr8conf and #gotocph

@xlson

Leonard Axelsson

Been a great week with #gr8conf in Copenhagen and a long weekend in Malmö with @asalse and friends. Should get away more often.

@michaelkrog

Michael Krog

Wow. #gr8conf in Copenhagen was great. I'll for sure be considering Grails for http://qashapp.com or other future projects.

@mrhaki

Hubert Klein Ikkink

#gr8conf conference report: http://t.co/ql0WTmj, http://t.co/vPPagZu, http://t.co/NZOX1bh

@marcopas

Marco Pas

Also many thanks to the Danish, a great country with wonderful people! #gr8conf #denmark

@marcopas

Marco Pas

Back to normal after a wonderful time at #gr8conf, thanks to all participants that made my first visit to this conference one to remember.

@smaldini

Stephane Maldini

#gr8conf was awesome... Groovy community is definetely amazing

@Tuathaa

Ilinca Vintila

back at work, trying to figure out which of all the cool features presented to implement first. thanks for an awesome experience #gr8conf

@sternegross

andre

heading to CPN ap.#gr8conf was a blast, very nice community & audience. thanks to the organizers for giving me the chance to do my talk!

@pscnunes

Paulo Nunes

Fantastic #gr8conf in Copenhagen. The enthusiastic groovy/grails/griffon community really makes you enjoy your job.

@gitmonkey

Jan

I really enjoyed the #gr8conf,but I'm pretty exhausted.Had a great time listening to talks and exchanging thoughts.Thanks to the organizers!

@mrhaki

Hubert Klein Ikkink

At home. Thank you for the great #gr8conf !

@pniederw

Peter Niederwieser

#gr8conf was a blast! Many thanks to the organizers.

@marioggar

Mario García

:-( #gr8conf is over. It was awesome.See you next year!!!! :-)

@sergicontre

Sergio Contreras

Congratulations for the event.Very impressed by the level of the sessions.10 for the organization and speakers. see you next year! #gr8conf

@mlkristiansen

Morten Kristiansen

Thanks to all the attendees, the speakers, and especially @sbglasius for a fantastic conference. Already looking forward to #gr8conf 2012

@apentity

Arne Pedersen

#gr8conf was a great conference thanks to all. Ill be there next year.

@AndreasArledal

Andreas Arledal

Big thanks to @sbglasius with crew for #gr8conf. I had a great time. Especially fun to meet old and new groovy friends.

@darthvader42

Stefan Armbruster

kudos to @sbglasius and all his helping hands for organizing this gr8 event #gr8conf

@breskeby

Rene Gröschke

Heading home after an awesome week at #gr8conf in cph. Thx to @vaclav_pech for guiding me to the airport

@brianjohnsendk

Brian Johnsen

On our way home from another brilliantly executed #gr8conf Looking forward to 2012!

@frankvilhelmsen

Frank Vilhelmsen

A a few snapshots pictures from the #gr8conf conference: http://bit.ly/ltnsWi

@skurt

Sebastian Kurt

All These great #gr8conf guys (Most of them...) http://t.co/zolyji6

@marcinerdmann

Marcin Erdmann

Thx @sbglasius for a great #gr8conf, already looking forward to the next year edition, maybe as a speaker again....

@ixchelruiz

ixchelruiz

#gr8conf Getting ready for the Speaker's panel. This conference has a huge & amazing number of Speakers!!

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #9: small, focussed conferences encourage lots of interaction

@xlson

Leonard Axelsson

Big round of applause to @sbglasius & crew for arranging a truly GR8 conference! #gr8conf

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #8: the #groovy community is friendly, welcoming, and engaging

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #7: #groovy is versatile - from small scripts to big apps, imperative, 00, functional, concurrent, DSLs, ...

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #6: #groovy community is very much into automated testing at all levels. True professionals.

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #5: #groovy community is very much into automated testing at all levels. True professionals.

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #5: #groovy community has a "getting things done" attitude; proved by the @Hackergarten

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #4: #groovy performance has much improved and more is to be expected

As beging part of the organizing crew, I would like to express my thanks for all the nice feedback. I'm sure that next edition of GR8Conf Europe will be just as exciting as it was this year.

Stay tuned for more information later!

/Søren Berg Glasius

GR8Conf Europe organizing crew.

GR8Conf Europe 2011 in session...

Wed, 18 May 2011 08:21:00 GMT

I'm delighted to say, that GR8Conf 2011 is in session. We have just started the 3rd European iteration of GR8Conf, and we got a room packed with attendees. We got 25 expert speakers, 28 sessions, two tracks and lots and lots of GR8 stuff ready for all the attendees.

If you are at the conference, welcome! If not, follow the #gr8conf hashtag on Twitter to read about all the exciting stuff going on.

Most of the GR8conf sessions will be recorded, and will be published later on Parleys. Thank you to Gennemtænkt IT for sponsoring the recordings.

/sbglasius

Interview with Burt Beckwith

Wed, 11 May 2011 20:44:00 GMT

Less than a week to conference start... time is flying! I've got another interview ready for you, this time with Burt Beckwith from SpringSource.

Hi Burt, let the readers know who you are?

I was a Math major in school, but I've always been into computers - I was the first in my school to own a computer (a TRS-80, back in 1979). My interests were in statistics and numerical methods (and fractals but that was more for fun) so I did a lot of coding for that.

My first jobs out of school were statistics-related but I switched to software development in 1998, and started using Java and doing web development in 1999. I thought enterprise development sounded interesting and did a lot of work with EJBs and even wrote a book on WebLogic and J2EE but once I discovered Spring I was glad to leave that all behind.

And what do you bring to GR8Conf?

I'll be doing a talk on GORM (some advanced topics, tips and tricks, etc.) and a University session on creating plugins. I've created or rewritten over 25 plugins, so this is something I've thought a lot about. My goal is to talk about best practices and various types of plugins, touching on development practices, how to test, etc. It will be a participatory session where we'll create a real plugin and even release it during the talk.

What got you into Groovy-land?

I heard about Groovy around 2004 and saw a couple of talks at a local No Fluff Just Stuff. At the time it seemed interesting but impractical, and I didn't do anything with it. But I've done a lot of work with Spring and Hibernate and was looking to branch out beyond traditional Java, and I started looking at Python, Rails, and Grails around 2007. Obviously Grails made the most sense to me given my background.

I got a job at a Cambridge startup that was using Grails and was able to work full-time on it - this was at the beginning of 2008, just before 1.0 was released. I had worked with Acegi/Spring Security in a few Spring-based applications so I was curious about the Acegi Grails plugin. I fixed a couple of bugs and upgraded the plugin to use Spring Security 2, and that was the beginning of my work with plugins.

What do you look forward to at GR8Conf next week?

I'm interested in doing Hackergartens here in Boston so I'm looking forward to that to see how it's done. Also looking forward to the Neo4j talk since I've been working in the NoSQL space recently, and seeing Václav Pech talk on GPars should be cool. But for me the big draw is the social aspect - it's great to catch up with the speakers and to talk to users about their experiences and how they're using the technologies.

Thank you for your time. See you next week!

Thanks, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at the conference and checking out Copenhagen.

/sbglasius

Interview with Peter Ledbrook

Mon, 09 May 2011 16:24:00 GMT

The interviews keeps coming. Here's the next one with Peter Ledbrook from our premium sponsor: SpringSource.

Peter, welcome to this interview. Please tell us a bit about yourself

I'm from the UK and have lived in London for over 10 years now. I was one of those bedroom coders of the early 90s and despite doing a degree in chemical engineering, I went straight into software development after university.

Since then I've wandered from C to C++, with some detours down Visual Basic lane, before ending up in Java land. I have now reached the stage where I definitely just want to get things done, so anything that helps with that gets my blessing.

You're the Grails guy from SpringSource, what will you cover at the conference?

The big ticket item for GR8Conf will be Grails 1.4. This is definitely a big release for us and I think many people will be excited by at least a few of the new features. 1.4.0.M1 may not be out by the start of the conference but it should be available very shortly afterwards if not.

I will also be talking about how Grails can be used in the enterprise environment - something that its foundations in Spring and Hibernate help with considerably. Perhaps attendees will pick up some ideas for selling Grails to their managers too?

My last talk will be on Grails yet again, but this time with a focus on making your Grails applications perform and scale well. This also gives me a chance to talk about Groovy++.

How did you get started with Grails?

I started with Grails back in the summer or autumn of 2006. Rails had just made it onto the front cover of Dr Dobbs and I was interested in having another go at developing a web application (I'd tried Tapestry before). I then discovered Groovy on Rails, tried it, and loved it. I couldn't believe how easy it was to get a working web application up and running!

I then got really stuck in and wrote some of the early Grails plugins: Remoting, JSecurity, and GWT. Grails also introduced me to the benefits of Groovy and I introduced Groovy scripting into our main application. It was a really good time and I found myself enjoying development again.

What will you focus on, going as an attendee at the conference?

I'm keen to find out where Gradle and Griffon currently stand because I unfortunately haven't been following their development closely. The same goes for Spock, which has really revolutionised unit testing in the Groovy world. It deserves greater penetration in the broader Java community in my view.

GContracts is something that I'm aware of, but don't know too much about, so I'm looking forward to finding out more detail. I can see it as a great way to document as well as enforce pre- and post-conditions.

Any closing remarks?

2011 is gearing up to be the year of the cloud. Cloud Foundry et al. are finally offering Grails developers simple deployment with minimum hassle. Expect to see great strides in this area during the rest of the year.

Thanks. See you at the conference next week!

Thank you. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in Copenhagen! And if anyone wants to have a chat while I'm there, feel free to approach me - I don't bite, honest

/sbglasius

Registration is still open!

Mon, 09 May 2011 11:33:00 GMT

We just want to let you know, that the GR8'est event in the Groovy community is still open for registrations.

The conference features a tutorial day, two days conference with two tracks, hackergarten, 25 speakers and plenty of sessions to keep both new and advanced Groovy, Grails and Griffon users occupied for days!

The tutorial day is May 17th, and the conference days are on May 18th and 19th.

Just point your browser to http://gr8conf.eu/register to get your conference pas!

The absolute last day to register is friday, May 13th.

Don't wait any longer!

Interview with Hamlet D'Arcy

Fri, 06 May 2011 14:34:00 GMT

Our next speaker in this interview series shares name with one of Shakespears plays, a play taking place in Denmark. Hamlet D'Arcy from Canoo. Hamlet is also the host of the Hackergarten event at GR8Conf taking place tuesday night. Remember that this event is free - even if you're not a conference attendee!

Hamlet - tell us about yourself!

I've been writing software since the late 90s. My first introduction to a real programming language was "Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours", and somehow I managed to find a job in Minneapolis programming hand-held DOS based devices like the wonderful Telxon PTC 710

(see the picture). To my knowledge, I am the only person to ever write a game for the Telxon devices. I spent a rainy Saturday writing "Brick", an ASCII-based graphics game where the player was an O character and had to dodge falling X characters and stay within a moving road made up of /, |, and \ characters. This was how I spent my free time in Minneapolis, and you can imagine my first few years there were pretty lonely. Eventually, I found my way to Java and then Groovy, which I've sadly never used to write any games. It's probably not a big loss for the indie-gaming community.

How cool is that?!! I guess you will not cover this at GR8Conf? :-) What will you cover?

My big University session is the 3 hour talk on Groovy AST transformations. The first half is a practical look at the technology and a demonstration of tools and libraries that you can start using in your projects today: the Groovy 1.8 AST transforms, GContracts, Spock, CodeNarc, and Groovy++. This is designed to be pragmatic and useful to everyone. The second half of the talk looks at implementing your own AST transformations, and it explains AST transforms as a series of case studies for the libraries from the first part. I'll explain the the implementation of some of the Groovy transforms and CodeNarc rules that I've written, and I'm working with Alex Tkachman (g++), Peter Niederweiser (Spock), and Andre Steingress (GContracts) to get case studies going for their projects. In fact, Andre and I plan to co-present the GContracts portion of the talk. We've been working hard on this content and I'm really excited to have three hours for the talk.

Also, on Wednesday I'm presenting Effective Groovy, which is an Effective Java-style take on Groovy programming. I've been evolving this talk over the last few months, and I finally think I have something that describes the ""feel of Groovy"". Groovy is a flexible language, and there are many coding styles to choose from... which can leave you wondering which one is the best. The answer is, of course, context dependent. But my aim with the session is to provide guidance about writing idiomatic Groovy, if there is such a thing. Beginner's Groovy looks a lot like Java, and expert's Groovy does not, and this session is about becoming that expert. At Canoo, I'm lucky to work with both Dierk Koenig and Andres Almiray, and I often get the chance to pair and do code reviews with them. I created Effective Groovy mainly as a way to share the things I've learned from them in the last year or so.

By the way, both of these sessions are being presented at GR8 in the US in June, as well, as well as Überconf in July. There are plenty of opportunities to see this content in the coming year just in case you can't make it to Denmark.

Lots of gr8 stuff. What got you started on AST transformations?

Around 2008 I wanted to know how languages were implemented but didn't quite know how to start learning. When needed an mini-language at work, I decided to implement it as an embedded language within Groovy, and the work eventually became the Groovy ArithmeticShell. I just kept plugging along and working on Groovy AST Transforms, eventually writing the AstBrowser and the AstBuilder. Last year I started working with the CodeNarc static analysis tool but was unimpressed with the number of rules in the product. I became heavily involved in CodeNarc and the product's progress has been huge. Last year at GR8 we had about 70 static analysis rules in the product. This year we have over 200 rules and a Gaelyk based CodeNarc Web Console. The CodeNarc story has changed tremendously in the last year, and there is even a full session on CodeNarc from Mr. Haki (Hubert Klein Ikkink) at GR8 this year. Mr. Haki's session was my favorite part of the show last year, so I'm really looking forward to what he has in store this year.

And what makes you tick at this years conference?

Hackergarten, what else? On Tuesday night we have 3 hours set aside for open source pair programming. The idea is that anyone shows up and can find a project to help out on. For instance, I'll be leading a group to write more CodeNarc rules. I'll help everyone set up the sources, IDE, and build, and guide them through contributing to the open source project. I know some of the other project leads are coming as well, so this is your chance to pair program with the experts and also give back to the community. At past Hackergarten's we've created patches for Groovy, Gradle, Codenarc, Griffon, GPars, and many other projects as well. If you have a pet project then it is also a good opportunity for you to recruit some other people to work on it with you. I encourage everyone to bring their laptops out to Hackergarten. Canoo is buying pizza and drinks, so you'll at least be fed.

Yeah - that's going to be GR8! Thanks for taking the time to do this interview! I'll see you in just over a weeks time from now!

Thanks Søren, I can't wait to get to Denmark and see all my old friends.

/sbglasius

Interview with Luis Arias

Tue, 03 May 2011 20:28:00 GMT

I'm close to wrapping up the interviews with all the GR8Conf speakers - still got a couple more to go. Todays interview is with Luis Arias.

And remember, that registration is still open, just point your browser at http://gr8conf.eu/register

So, Luis, give us some background information on yourself?

I'm originally from Colombia, was raised in the US, and have been living in France for a long time. I worked for a number or years in building document management systems and more recently in the wiki arena with XWiki. I suppose my work has always been close to back-end work and content. I am now very happy as lead developer for myBalsamiq, our online offer at Balsamiq, the maker of Balsamiq Mockups a tool for drawing mockups and communicating ideas.

What's the topics you will cover at GR8Conf?

I'm lucky to be covering two topics at this years GR8Conf ! On Tuesday afternoon Stéphane Maldini and I will be running the Grails Kickstart workshop. This will be the chance for Grails newbies to get a good overview, learn some essential design patterns, and have a look at some cool plugins that really make hard things easy for the Grails developer. On Thursday mid-day I'll be on my own to do a retrospective of my work on myBalsamiq. I'll cover some of the more useful things we learned during the process, some of the plugins that we have released, and give some ideas about where we will be going with myBalsamiq in the months to come.

Nice. How did you get into Groovy and Grails?

My involvement with Groovy started around 2005 with XWiki which has supported groovy scripting in wiki pages since the beginning. My involvement with Grails as a developer started a bit later, around 2008, with some custom project work in areas such as patent information archival and document production for the French Ministry of Health (I worked with Stéphane Maldini on this one). I haven't looked back since then and am full-time with Balsamiq and Grails since 2010.

What excites you you at this years GR8Conf?

Last year was awesome and I'm looking forward to see the progress in the Groovy ecosystem of technologies. my favorites being Grails and Gradle. I'm also looking forward to the Hacker Garten which was so good last year, I even managed to fix a Grails bug thanks to Peter Ledbrook's guidance! This year I really want to learn enough about Grails itself to be able to contribute more often to bug fixing. I'm very excited about all the changes in 1.4. Finally I'm very happy to be back in Copenhagen! Last year I got to have some great food and a very cold drink in the Copenhagen Icebar. We'll see how we can top that! I'm also looking forward to see some of the familiar faces in our community again.

Any last words before closing this interview?

I love the way the GR8Conf is developping with two tracks and a University this year! I'm very happy to have been selected as a speaker, I hope people who attend my talks will leave with some new ideas or techniques to apply to their own projects.

Thanks for your time. See you in two weeks time!

See you in CPH!

/sbglasius

Interview with Tom Fuller

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 14:26:00 GMT

It is yet again friday, less than three weeks from conference start. You still have time to register. While you do so, we're ready with another gr8 interview, this time with Thomas Fuller.

Tom, please say a few words about yourself?

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended Loyola University Chicago for my undergraduate degree in Computer Science and then went on to do a master’s degree in Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

I work as a contract software developer and I specialize in enterprise Java software development and have been in this field since 1999.

I moved to Ireland in 2001, then to Washington, DC in 2003, and finally to the UK in 2005; I currently live just outside of London.

Tell us, what will you cover at GR8Conf?

I intend to cover the Grails Infinispan Plugin. This discussion should be of interest to engineers who do not have much exposure to clustered caching.

In the presentation I will cover the business problem, the technology problem, and then we'll go over the technical solution and look at some code.

What got you started in the Groovy community?

I've been interested in Groovy since its intitial release and I've been writing code in Groovy on and off since then. Last autumn I had some time and I wanted to use it to do some research and I thought it would be good to get a project of my own going. I was looking at Infinispan around this time and so doing a plugin to allow developers to use Infinispan in Grails made sense.

As a contractor, having some work that can be used to demonstrate one's capabilities is good marketing material, so this project does serve multiple purposes.

What brings you to GR8Conf and why?

I would like to network with other attendees -- that's my primary reason for going to these events

Anything you would like to say before closing this interview?

I have an interest in both business ideas and technology and using technology to implement ideas that will [hopefully] generate revenue.

I plan to do another project with a colleague of mine and we are currently exploring options regarding what that is. We intend to use Grails as the platform, mainly because it allows us to move very fast.

Thanks for your time! See you in a couple of weeks time.

My wife and I travel quite a bit, however we've not yet been to Copenhagen, so we're very much looking forward to this conference.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to deliver a presentation at the Gr8Conf[erence] -- I hope everyone who attends my presentation enjoys it and get something out of it.

/sbglasius

Interview with Jochen Theodorou

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:35:00 GMT

Easter has passed and after some few days off work, I'm ready with yet another interview. This time we go to the core of Groovy and interview Jochen Theodorou from SpringSource - our main sponsor.

Jochen, tell us about yourself?

I am from Germany and I am the technical lead of the Groovy Project. The means I am more or less the technology guy behind Groovy. If there is a new feature suggested, then I will veto it, if I think it causes a problem later on. Also I am usually the resource when it comes to bug fixing or when helping other people to fix bugs in Groovy.

The topic of your talk is not hard to guess, but tell us a little about it anyway?

Like last year I will talk about Groovy performance. But last year I was planing and announcing, this year I will plan more and announce more... no, I will also show some results and the potential of all this.

How did you get started with Groovy?

Uh, that was I think early 2005 or late 2004 already. At that time I was thinking I should become active in the open source area and first wanted to make an installation tool based on the Debian system, that also for windows. After I found that I don't understand the dpkg source code at all I thought about writing my own system. Very soon I come to the need of an scripting language and back then Groovy was simply the most attractive one.

What is your favorite part of GR8Conf?

Well, I like the hackergarten ;) I like to have some face-to-face contact with the community.

Do you have more you would like to add?

That Groovy 1.8.0 will be out soon?

Thanks for taking time to do this interview.

I think initiating the GR8Conf was one of the best ideas someone had ;)

Thanks! That message goes out to Guillaume Laforge as well! See you in May!

/sbglasius