Now that I'm on the Bay Area I thought it would be a good idea to join a JUG, so I've been to the last 3 meetings of the Silicon valley JUG. Yesterday night it was the turn to hear about Scala and JRuby (on Glassfish).

Bill Venners was first on Scala, it helps to be one of the 3 authors behind the Scala book =-) Bill made sure to present Scala as a Java (the language) based language with all the strengths of Java, mixing in functional programming, mainly coming form ML. Personally I think the syntax is a bit strange at first (I still don't like types to be defined after the variable) but the mutable/immutable paradigm is quite interesting, specially if it comes with language support. I'll be sure to keep an eye on Scala.

Next it was the turn for Pramod Gopinath to speak about JRuby on Glassfish. He had some problems running the demos but in the end he managed to show JRuby on Rails running in Glassfish in two modes: the first one was using goldspike (demoed at last year's JavaOne by Charlie) which lets you pack a rails app into a war, you just have to drop into your appserver and you are in business. The real surprise was the second mode, Pramod fired up glassfish on the background (using a jruby gem called glassfish_rails) and then he proceeded creating an app and modify it on the fly, no need to pack and restart the server, as regular Rails app go, how cool is that? (my money is still on Grails though).

During the freebies give-away I approached Mike Van Riper with a question "what about hosting a Groovy/Grails talk?" the reason being is that during the Q/A of the previous sessions Groovy was always present, he decided to ask the audience right away if they were interested in such a talk, half of the hands were raised immediately, so there you go, Groovy/Grails may be featured in a later svjug session =-D.

On a personal note I got in touch with one of my former students (it's been a while, jikes!), imagine that we had to travel a lot of miles from Mexico just to meet up at a Google hosted talk here in the Bay Area.