java university rapid web site development with groovy and grails
This blog post is ancient. If it is technical, the information is likely inaccurate, or at least out of date. If it is non-technical, it’s entirely possible that the relevant facts and my own opinions have changed significantly since it was written.
It is only preserved as part of this site’s permanent historical archive.
I’m currently sitting in this session - Graeme Rocher is the presenter. He is the creator of Grails, which is Groovy’s answer to the Ruby on Rails like development experience. He’s currently doing Q&A, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to write a short entry. So far this session is awesome! Graeme is a great presenter and has had the perfect balance of slides and live coding. Unfortunately they ran out of slides before I got to the presentation (more on the sometimes laughable logistics at JavaOne later), so I’m having trouble remember details to write about (they’ve promised to email me the slides). The first part of the session was an introduction to Groovy, Java’s “scripting” language. I had NO IDEA just how cool and powerful Groovy was. I am especially impressed with its MetaClass concept, whereby you can override almost every behavior of the Java language that you can imagine - method calling, operator overloading, etc. Imagine being able to do AOP type things without using AOP. Not only that, it has all of my favorite pet features like “everything is an object,” closures, dynamic lists, etc. It’s an OOP nuts dream. I’ll write more later.