❯ Guillaume Laforge

Groovy and Grails news, conferences and IDE support

conference groovy

As always, lots of great things are happening in the Groovy and Grails community. If you’d like to stay up-to-date with the news, but if you don’t want to spend the whole day reading our high-traffic mailing-lists, you should certainly consider subscribing to one of these two resources:

  • AboutGroovy: The community portal news site about everything Groovy and Grails, with frequent news items, podcast interviews, pointers to important resources.
  • GroovyBlogs: A JavaBlog-like news agregator agregating the Grooyv and Grails mailing-lists feeds, and many feeds from famous bloggers spreading the Groovy and Grails love.

Both of these resources have been developed in Grails! GroovyBlogs has even been developed in under 24 hours by Glen Smith!

Conferences

I also wanted to say a few words about upcoming conference events.

  • A preliminary search on JavaOne’s online catalog shows no less than 8 sessions mentioning Groovy! It’s alreday two more sessions than last year’s JavaOne! Of higher important to me, of course, are the two sessions I’m involved with:

    • TS-1742: Cool things you can do with the Groovy programming language, with Guillaume Alléon and Dierk Koenig.
    • BOF-6133: Grails: Spring + Hibernate development re-invented, with Graeme Rocher.

    So don’t forget to come to JavaOne and hear about the latest news about Groovy and Grails.

  • Now, for a shorter-term aspect, let me mention I’ll be at QCon this week, in London. I’ll be happy to present two sessions:

  • Sun TechDays in Paris: on March 20th/21st, I’ll be on stage at Sun’s Parisian TechDays worldwide tour to speak about Groovy as an alternative language for the JVM. Like last year, James Gosling will be present! And I still recall the pleasure I felt when Gosling told me he’d used Groovy on a couple of internal projects at Sun and said he enjoyed it a lot! That’s also what he has written in his foreword of our book: Groovy in Action. Speaking of “GinA”, I also encourage you to read Slashdot’s review.

  • Last but not least, the much awaited Grails eXchange conference will take place in London at the end of May: a dedicated conference to Groovy and Grails! This is the first event of this kind, but more are to be expected, both in the US and in Europe! An incredible line of renown speakers have already signed in: Rod Johnson, Joe Walker, Rob Harrop, Rod Cope, Dierk Koenig, Joe Walnes, etc… This is your best opportunity to meet all the guys who make Groovy and Grails, and to hear the latest tricks from famous Java champions.

Groovy IDE Plugins

Some additional Groovy news: the complaint we often hear about is the lack of tooling support. Groovy has had basic plugins for all the major IDEs and text editors, but this is not sufficient. Fortunately, IDE support is high on our list for 2007, and I can tell you there are some great things to come on that front:

  • First of all, the Eclipse plugin is making great progress, and code-completion is not very far. You should read Ed’s blog to see some nice screenshots of the completion he’s working on this month.

  • Some guys at Sun are also investigating how to develop and Grails IDE for NetBeans. It could be based on the stagnant Coyote Groovy plugin, and would provide wizards for Grails artifacts, as well as all the Groovy support that’s needed.

  • My favorite Java IDE is not forgotten either, since JetBrains is investigating how to retrive the GroovyJ plugin and to make it work as good as they made their JavaScript or Ruby integrations.

So you can expect a very high and good support for Groovy and Grails in the mainstream IDEs!

As I said, a lot is happening in the Groovy and Grails community, it’s hard to follow everything. 2007 is really the year of Groovy and Grails!