GR8Conf Europe 2013 was such a blast! With close to well over 160 attendees, the conference was a real success, and went flawlessly thanks to the great organization of Søren and his crew. Big congrats to his team! And for the 5th anniversary of the conference, the Groovy cakes were so delicious! It was a pleasure to be back in Copenhagen to meet all my friends from the Groovy community.

I had a chance to speak about Groovy 2 and beyond, and I’m embedding the slides below, if you want to have a look at them. Also, if all goes well, we should even get a video recording of the presentation(s) this year, so fingers crossed!

Like every year, GR8Conf Europe takes place in the beautiful city of Copenhagen in Denmark. It’s where all the talented and cool Groovy ecosystem folks meet, and spread the love about their technologies, including Groovy, Grails, Gradle, Spock, GPars, and more.

I’ll be speaking about the latest developments on the Groovy 2.x branch, and what our plans are going forward. You can also have a look at the preliminary agenda published on the GR8Conf website, to see familiar names like Jürgen Höller, Venkat Subramaniam, Dierk König, Graeme Rocher, Burt Beckwith, Mr Haki, Luke Daley, Russel Winder… You’re sure to find some great content delivered by the experts themselves!

Last week, I had the pleasure to attend and keynote at the 5th edition of the Groovy / Grails eXchange conference, in London. I presented a talk around the new features of Groovy 2.0 and the upcoming 2.1 release, as well as a few words about what’s coming up next.

You can watch the video online, as SkillsMatter, the organizer of the conference, have put all the presentations online in record time!

And you can have a look at the slides hosted on Speakerdeck below:

On Thursday, at 15:30 GMT+1, I’ll have the pleasure to present a Groovy 2.0 update presentation live, online, in the form of a webinar. The webinar will be showcased through webex here. The video will later be made available on SpringSource’s YouTube channel, for those who want to see it afterwards at a more convenient time.

In the meantime, here’s the title and abstract of that presentation:

What’s new in Groovy 2.0?

Groovy is a very popular alternative language for the JVM that continues to bring more developer productivity and more performance after each release. In this webinar, we’ll dive through the new developments in the recently released Groovy 2.0.

Read more...

Last week, I was in Washington DC for the SpringOne2GX conference.

I’ve had the pleasure of presenting twice: first time on an update on Groovy 2.0 (and a recap on key features of Groovy 1.8), and a second time with my friends and colleagues Paul King (Groovy core committer) and Andrew Eisenberg (Groovy/Grails Eclipse tooling lead) about Domain-Specific Languages in Groovy.

Please see the slides published below:

Monday I’ll be flying to San Francisco for the JavaOne conference, where there will be tons of sessions and BOF speaking about Groovy or mentioning it, and where I’ll be participating at two sessions, one of the novelties of Groovy 2 and the ScriptBowl.

Let me highlight a few of those sessions:

• What’s new in Groovy 2
  Shameless plug, that’s my session, where I speak about some of the key features of Groovy 1.8, and then quickly delve into the major features of Groovy 2
• What’s new in Grails 2
  Graeme Rocher will cover and demo the key features of Grails 2.x
• Griffon, up close and personal
  Andres Almiray will tell us all about the Griffon rich desktop application framework
• The Groovy Ecosystem
  Again, Andres on stage here, to speak about the many projects built atop Groovy, for your build, for testing and more
• Walk through Groovy’s AST transformations
  Andres walks us through Groovy’s mechanism to plugin into the compiler to bring powerful compile-time metaprogramming abilities to your classes
• Design patterns in Groovy
  Venkat Subramaniam revisits classical design patterns as well as new ones
• Improving your Groovy kung-fu
  Dierk König highlight key features of the Groovy language and nice library you can leverage to make you a better and more productive Groovy developer
• A common development framework, from JSP to GSP, at CERN
  The CERN research center (the great hadron collider, etc) talk about their usage of Groovy and Grails, with concrete examples, screenshots and more
• GroovyFX: making JavaFX Groovy
  Jim Clarke and Dierk talk about the GroovyFX library, a thin DSL on top of JavaFX to express your creativity with JavaFX in a nice Groovy idiom
• Grezi and GroovyFX
  Bertrand Goetzmann and Stephen Chin speak about GroovyFX and show a concrete usage with the Grezi framework, to build powerful visual and interactive presentations
• ScriptBowl: the battle of the JVM based languages
  I’ll finish with the ScriptBowl, a friendly 2-round battle comparing some of the popular languages of the JVM platform. Hopefully, I’ll try to win again this year, but the competition is tough! Fingers crossed! Come in number to support me and make Groovy win again!

I was reading MrHaki’s interview on the GR8Conf website this morning, and he had some nice words and good points about why it’s important to attend the conference. You get to meet the creators and developers of the projects you’re interested in and have great content (emphasis mine):

I am looking forward to meeting all the great people that make up the Groovy ecosystem. Everybody is always nice, friendly and ready to help. The atmosphere is always nice and laid back.

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During the Cloud Foundry Open Tour conference in Moscow, I presented a new presentation of Domain-Specific Languages in Groovy. I’ve already shared the link here and there (twitter, Google+, mailing-list), but not yet on my blog. So consder this fixed now. This new presentation is inspired from the beta DSL chapter from the second edition of Groovy in Action, where you’ll learn how to create a DSL for a little Mars robot. This is a pretty practical approach, bottom-up, as you progressively build the DSL, rather than listing all the existing techniques and illustrate them. I feel the flow is a bit better that way. Anyway… enjoy:

Last week saw the first edition of Devoxx France. And what a success it was! The conference was sold out at 1200 persons. There was a great wealth of interesting topics and many passionate attendees to talk to. Overall, I come back home impressed that the first edition worked out so well, flawlessly, and was such a joy to attend. So a big thank you and congrats to all those involved in making Devoxx France such a great event!

This is this time of the year where all the Groovy hackers and fans are meeting together in Denmark, Copenhagen, for the GR8Conf conference. A conference dedicated to Groovy, Grails, Gradle, Griffon, Spock, GPars and all the Groovy ecosystem. If you’re interested in these technologies or are already using them, this is the opportunity you shouldn’t miss.

Also, you’re pretty lucky, because I have a ticket for half the price to offer you! But there’s just one seat I can offer at that price. So if you’re interested, please add a nice comment to this post, that may be fun, or explaining why you’d like to come, and in a few weeks, I’ll tell you who deserves to win this prize!