Kenneth Kousen

Lone Star Software Symposium: Dallas

Dallas · May 20 - 22, 2011

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President, Kousen IT, Inc.

Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, several time JavaOne Rock Star, and a Grails Rock Star. He is the author of the Pragmatic Library books “Mockito Made Clear” and “Help Your Boss Help You,” the O'Reilly books “Kotlin Cookbook”, “Modern Java Recipes”, and “Gradle Recipes for Android”, and the Manning book “Making Java Groovy”. He also has recorded over a dozen video courses for the O'Reilly Learning Platform, covering topics related to Android, Spring, Java, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle.

His academic background include BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut.

Presentations

Groovy Web Services, Part I: REST

Groovy has excellent networking capabilities and is great at processing XML, which makes it a natural for working with RESTful web services.

Groovy Web Services, Part II: SOAP and JAX-WS

Although RESTful web services have gotten better press, SOAP-based web services are often the backbone of many large enterprises. The user-friendly advances in JAX-WS 2.* make developing such services much easier. As with most Java topics, Groovy simplifies the development of web services as well. Since it is particularly well-suited to XML processing, Groovy is quite helpful in the web services and SOA worlds.

The Gradle Will Rock

Build processes are a pain point in most organizations. Ant is mature but very low level, Maven is powerful but hard to customize, and so on. The Gradle project brings the power and flexibility of Groovy to build files and processes.

Spock: Logical Testing for Enterprise Applications

The Spock framework brings simple, elegant testing to Java and Groovy projects. It integrates cleanly with JUnit, so Spock tests can be integrated as part of an existing test suite. Spock also includes an embedded mocking framework that can be used right away.

Improve Your Java with Groovy

Groovy was never intended to replace Java. Instead, it expands Java capabilities and makes developers' lives easier. In this presentation, we'll survey many ways to make your Java systems easier by adding Groovy.