Paul King
Über Conf
Denver · June 14 - 17, 2010

Groovy Technical Lead - OCI Groovy/Grails Team
Paul King, a member of the OCI Groovy team, leads ASERT, an organization based in Brisbane, Australia, which provides software development, training, and mentoring services to customers looking to embrace new technologies, harness best practices, and innovate. He has been contributing to open source projects for nearly 20 years and is an active committer on numerous projects, including Groovy. Paul speaks at international conferences, publishes in software magazines and journals, and is a co-author of Manning's best-seller, Groovy in Action.
Presentations
Groovy Power Features
Groovy is a dynamic language for the JVM; it’s like a super version of Java. For Java programmers, it offers a syntax that closely resembles (in some cases exactly resembles) Java, but offers many improvements that not only greatly simplify code but also provide an enriched environment with many productivity features. In many cases, such features are promised in Java versions 7 and later, but they are available today in Groovy.
Groovy Power Features
Groovy is a dynamic language for the JVM; it’s like a super version of Java. For Java programmers, it offers a syntax that closely resembles (in some cases exactly resembles) Java, but offers many improvements that not only greatly simplify code but also provide an enriched environment with many productivity features. In many cases, such features are promised in Java versions 7 and later, but they are available today in Groovy.
Dynamic Languages Practices
Developer practices for traditional and agile Java development are well understood and documented. But dynamic languages (Groovy, Ruby, and others) change the ground rules. Many of the common practices,
refactoring techniques, and design patterns we have been taught either no longer apply or should be applied differently and some new techniques also come into play.
Agile Tools - Taking Your Agile Practices To The Next Level
Tools and practices as subscribed by the XP methodology are reasonably well known and used by the majority of agile project teams. As agile teams become more mature, so does their thirst for tools to push them to the next level of productivity.
XML and Web Services with Groovy
Groovy provides excellent facilities for parsing and creating XML. As well as providing syntactic sugar on top of traditional Java-based parsing approaches (e.g. SAX, DOM, StAX), it has its own XmlParser and XmlSlurper libraries which support XPath-like expressions at the object level (akin to LINQ in the .Net world). In addition, Groovy's markup builders provide an elegant and efficient way to create and modify XML.
Groovy also has various options available for SOAP and RESTful web services. We'll examine the most popular of these.