The now famous GR8Conf conference dedicated to all things Groovy, is now coming to Australia, as announced on the GR8Conf blog! It will take place in Canberra, side by side with the Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC), on November 15th.

The GR8Conf Australia website is already up and is running a Call for Papers. So if you have a presentation on Groovy, Grails, Griffon, Gradle, Spock, CodeNarc, Gaelyk, etc, with introductions, deep dives, case studies, and so on, feel free to submit a talk!

If you’re in Germany, don’t miss the CamelCaseCon conference in Düsseldorf! A conference dedicated to the Groovy ecosystem: Groovy, Grails, Gradle, CodeNarc and Spock.
Dierk König, Hans Dokter, Peter Niederwieser, Joachim Bauman, Stefan Glase, will cover all these Groovy-related topics, so you’ll hear the latest news from renowned experts.

The GR8Conf is back! A conference dedicated to Groovy, Grails, Griffon, Gradle, Spock and more! This second edition of the conference takes place in Copehagen, Denmark, again like last year. And it’s solely dedicated to the Groovy Ecosystem, and all the GR8 technologies based on it.

Over two days, in a single track (to avoid missing important sessions because of too much choice), you’ll hear about:

• the Groovy dynamic language for the JVM
• the Grails web application stack based on Spring, Tomcat and Hibernate
• the Griffon swing application framework for rich desktop applications
• the Gaelyk lightweight toolkit for easily developing and deploying small applications to Google App Engine
• the Gradle build solution system
• the GPars parallel library for Groovy

And some advanced talk on:

I’m back from Devoxx, where I had a very pleasant stay, nice discussions with many attendees and speakers, and it’s always a great opportunity to meet friends you haven’t seen in a while! And this time, I was there with my friend Patrick Chanezon from Google, to speak about Google App Engine, Groovy and Gaelyk. I’ve uploaded our slides on Slideshare, and you can view them embedded here on this blog:

Google App Engine Java, Groovy and Gaelyk

I’m pleased to announce here the organization of a European conference dedicated to Groovy, Grails and Griffon:GR8 Conference — Copenhagen — May 2009

The GR8 Conference is an affordable two-day conference taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark, on May 18th and 19th 2009, organized by Javagruppen(Danish JUG) and SpringSource, dedicated to the Groovy dynamic language, the Grails web framework, the Griffon Swing framework, and other great technologies — hence the pun and code name GR8.

I’ve just uploaded my JavaZone slides of the Domain-Specific Language presentation available on Slideshare.

Abstract: Domain-Specific Languages are an “architectural hot-spot”, as coined recently by InfoQ editors. With dynamic languages such as Groovy, it is easy to create a mini-language modelling a particular business domain. Thanks to these DSLs, developers and subject matter experts will be able to share a common metaphor, to deliver, hand in hand, the final application to the end users.

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It’s a bit of a late notice, but if you’re in Paris these days, you may wish to come to the Paris JUG tomorrow night (Tuesday, September 9th). I’ll be presenting an introduction to Groovy (the dynamic language for the JVM), as well as a presentation on Grails (the agile and productive web application framework) with the help of my friend and former colleague Fabrice Robini.

You can register here and get more information about the agenda of that Paris JUG night.

I had the pleasure to participate in OCTO’s IT University (Université du SI in French) a couple weeks ago. The conference was really great, and I think France really needed such a high-quality IT event as there was no real good event like that until now. So big kudos to the organizers.

Apart from great food, excellent speakers covering interesting topics, I had the pleasure of spending time with my friends from the OSSGTP community (Vincent, Guillaume, Patrick, Mag, Didier, Fabrice, Erwan), with my former colleagues, and with some great guys like Ross Mason, Erik Meijer (with great tshirts as usual), and more. But perhaps the most impressive, interesting and emotional-heavy moment of the conference was the closing keynote by astronaut Neil Armstrong, as featured on the picture on the side. This man is so humble, interesting, funny, elegant, that everybody really enjoyed listening to him speaking about the space conquest, distilling some nice and funny anecdotes and making parallels with IT, the story of computers, etc. Awesome! It was such a big honnor to have him there!

If you’re in Paris, next week, make sure you don’t miss the “Université du SI” (IT University) conference, organized by my former colleagues from OCTO Technology. This conference is going to rock! Quite frankly, I think France was seriously lacking a good IT conference, and I think OCTO is going to deliver on that promise. I’ve been told they are pretty soon running out of entry passes as we’re close to the deadline, so it’s your last chance to register.

If you’re going to JavaOne this year, and if you’re interested in Groovy and Grails, you can’t miss G2One’s free Groovy / Grails meetup, Monday evening, 7pm, at the W Hotel, across the street from Moscone.

It’s going to be a great opportunity to meet the guys behind both Groovy and Grails, learn about the latest news about these projects, see some cool demos, and hear about customers who’ve decided to use Grails in their projects. You’ll be able to also get great Groovy books signed by authors Venkat Subramaniam and Scott Davis.