Last week Copenhagen became the grooviest city in the world for a few days, as Gr8conf EU 2013 had it's fifth edition. Here's a quick report of what transpired during this awesome time.
The trip began with a quick stop at the annual Groovy DevCon. What's Groovy DevCon you ask? Well it's a meeting of people behind the Groovy language. Topics discussed in this meeting usually shape the future of the language and some of the projects related to it. This time Jürgen Höller was in attendance as the next version of the Spring Framework (version 4) will provide a much improved (and integrated) support for Groovy. Later that evening we had the traditional Speaker's dinner, a perfect occasion to catch up with old friends and make new ones.
During the University Day (May 22nd) Cédric Champeau and myself presented a workshop on Groovy AST transformations. Cédric did an amazing job building a comprehensive set of exersises and documentation (all of which available at https://github.com/melix/ast-workshop), full credit to the workshop's success goes to him 
He has written down his own conference report too. Basically what happened is I rambled for 30 minutes on my own experiences writing AST transformations then we switched gears into hacking solutions for each exercise.
Later that evening attenddees joined in what has become a Gr8conf staple: Hackergarten on Tour. We had over 50 participants working on 10 tasks. Some of the tasks included:
- Improving the GPars codebase for multiverse.
- Adding a @Transactional AST transformation to Grails; no more Spring proxies.
- a Griffon + JavaFX document viewer for Asciidoc sources, relying on Asciidoctor.
- Updates to a handful Grails plugins (JodaMoney for example).
- Improved code coverage for Open Dolphin, reaching 100%.
- Spock, Ratpack, Geb and more
Steve took the opportunity to interview some of us during the Hackergarten, videos were posted to Gr8conf's Youtube channel. I must confess that so far Hackergarten is my favorite part of the conference as it brings out the best of our Groovy community: friendship, synergy and lots of fun. We stayed there until the doors closed; I'm pretty sure some of use would had continued if we were allowed in the room for more time (sleep is overrated anyway).
The very next morning Søren declared the conference officially open for business by making an introduction and recounting the history behind it. Then came the turn for Venkat to inspire the audience with his keynote "The rise and fall of empires: Lessons for language designers and programmers", and inspire he did! There's one rule when Venkat appears in a conference: you simply don't miss his presentations. Now, the organizers made an excellent job building up the schedule, as it was hard to choose which session to go next as all of them were of high quality presented by talented people, this trend continued for the rest of the conference -- aside, there was a good number of newcomer speakers to the conference this year. Later in the day Venkat came back with a vengeance presenting "Functional Groovy", shedding some light on Groovy's functional capabilities in case you're fed up with procedural shenanigans. The first day was brought to a close with the Meet'n'Greet, that is, a big grill + beer party for attendees and speakers alike. The Gr8conf crew brew their own brand of beers, ales and malts which were delightfully sampled, tasted and drank by all.
Friday began half an hour earlier than yesterday, a fact Russel felt compelled to mention every 5 minutes during his talk "Is Groovy as fast as Java?", because why not, it was early after all 
Russel presented some shocking results when running Groovy with JDK8; I won't spoil them here, just be sure to check out his report, fork the code and test it for yourself. Next up was "Griffon Update" by yours truly. I asked the audience who was making use of the framework, turns out more than half was working with it already! The talk was a mixture of what has happened since last Gr8conf (remember Griffon 1.0.0 was released live on stage last year, the book was deveiled too). The slide deck has some interesting numbers in terms of growth and usage; turns out Griffon is being put to work in 86 countries around the world. There was a live demo moment too, where the latest feature "action interceptors" was shown in the context of the shiro and scaffolding plugins. Doctorpad (the Asciidoc viewer built during the Hackergarten) made an appereance as well.
I was planning to get another surprise shown during the talk, sadly fumbled the plans during my stay in Mexico a week prior to Gr8conf, so it'll have to wait for the next opportunity. However I managed to bring some cool give-aways
What is Gr8conf without Mr. Haki? I'm glad Hubert came back again and shared enlightening and very cool tips and tricks that Groovy 2.0 has to offer. Also, he's probably one the fastest type-while-speaking people I've seen; always a great show. The room was fully packed because ...
Lastly on my list of attended talks is Luke Daley and his Ratpack reboot. Luke showed us the latest tricks coming in Ratpack 0.9, including a full tour of the Java APIs. He dared to show Java code at a Groovy conference, yes, he's that guy 
Ratpack has matured a lot since Luke joined the team a few months back. He painstakenly pays attention to API design, tool support and documentation, which makes it much easier to get started with Ratpack.
A big shoutout to the Gr8conf Crew and sponsors for making Gr8conf EU an incredible experience and unforgettable event. Very much looking forward to the next edition!
Keep on Groovying!
