Scott Davis
Rocky Mountain Software Symposium
Denver · November 9 - 11, 2007
Author of "Groovy Recipes"
Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.
Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009, Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.
Presentations
Groovy: The Next Generation of Java
This is the year of the dynamic scripting language. Ruby (and Rails) has won the hearts and minds of many independent software developers. JavaScript is experiencing a renaissance thanks to the wild success of AJAX and websites like Google Maps. And Groovy (JSR-241) brings the same level of excitement and “scripting goodness” to the Java platform.
Groovy and Java: The Integration Story
I'm attracted to Groovy because of its spirit of inclusiveness. Because it extends my platform of choice, not replaces it – include a single JAR in your classpath and you are Groovy-enabled. Because it offers full bidirectional integration with Java. Because it offers a nearly flat learning curve for experienced Java developers. Come see how you can use Groovy to augment your existing Java codebase.
The Secrets of GORM
GORM (the Grails Object/Relational Mapper) is one of the many high points of the Grails web framework. GORM is a thin Groovy wrapper over Hibernate, but that doesn't begin to capture excitement of what GORM brings to the party. Imagine being able to call book.save() and book.delete() on your Book class; calling Book.get(1) to retrieve your book from the database by primary key; using Book.list() to pull an ArrayList of Book objects into your application. Now imagine getting all of that functionality (and more) for free with each new class you define. No interfaces to implement. No abstract classes to extend. Persistence that is transparent, automatic, and simple to use: GORM.
KEYNOTE: No, I Won't Tell You Which Web Framework to Use: or The Truth (with Jokes)
“Which framework should I use?” is the question most often heard on the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour. It's well worth asking. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. After years on the tour, most speakers have crafted a response that would make any Washington politician proud – long on style, but essentially, “Well, it depends…”
Real World Grails
Scott Davis is the Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com. The website, in addition to being, umm, about Groovy, is implemented in Grails. This talk shows you how to get started with Grails, but also talks about the experience of using it in a live, production web site.
Advanced Grails
Many demonstrations of new technology focus on the shiny turnkey features – “Look at what this thing magically does for you out of the box!” While Grails has many gee-whiz scaffolding features, it is a framework first. A framework should “make easy things easy and hard things possible.” (Apologies to the Perl community for co-opting their battle cry.) This talk focuses on the hard things that are possible with Grails, but require just a bit of glue code to implement.