Tuesday, May 08, 2007

The Grails US Tour: JavaOne Day 0 + G2One

Well its the morning of JavaOne Day 1 and now for my Java University report. So basically I did a half day Groovy & Grails talk at the Java University and the response was brilliant. There were a 150 people and doing a half day event really gave me the time to get into the detail of Groovy & Grails and do some good demos. The audience were mostly blown away by the awesome things you could do with Groovy & Grails and it was fantastic to hear the response. After hearing that some of the other talks were a disappointment it was good to hear mine got a tick in the box.

Next up was No Fluff Just Stuff's G2One event which was good too. I wish though I had had more time to do a longer more interactive session as 30 minutes felt to short to get my points across, but it was good fun and I met some interesting people who were interested in Groovy & Grails as over 200 people showed up for the event which is a great turnout. Ted Neward conducted a panel discussion featuring myself, Guillaume, Dierk, Neal Ford, Andy Glover and Jason Rudolph (who I finally got to meet) that was great fun.

The attendees asked some of the typical questions such as IDE support, JRuby vs Groovy and of course "When is Grails going to support Maven!". I believe we were able to answer most of them in an effective way. Most Java people are still a little afraid to leave the comfort of their trusty IDE which is understandable.

After the event I stumbled across James Strachan who I had yet to meet, it was late in the evening and James was a little on the merry side, so we didn't really have a chance to chat much, but made the introductions and hopefully we will during the conference.

I also met Alex Tchakman of JetBrains who is leading the effort to develop a Groovy/Grails plug-in for IntelliJ IDEA. It was fantastic to hear how excited he is about IntelliJ and the future of the Groovy/Grails plug-in for it. I can't wait for October when it will be unveiled to the public.

Finally, I woke up this morning to the news that we have been biled. What did Rod Johnson say? "You haven't made it until you've been biled". Groovy and Grails rock :-)

4 comments:

Josh Devins said...

Hey, I attended the JavaU session and thought it was great. I haven't had time to review the remainder of the material provided (you know, sleepless JavaOne nights and all), but I'll get to it.

One followup question I never asked was this. How does Grails scale? Can you recommend how one might want to implement Grails in a clustered environment? Right now we run about 20 JBoss servers in our web farm to handle all our traffic.

I had lunch with an AOL guy who said they are using Grails internally, but suggested that you can't cluster Grails. I suggested that Terracotta might have something to say about that. Thoughts? Advice? Thanks...

Graeme Rocher said...

Hi Josh,

Interesting that AOL are using it internally. There was a bug in one of the earlier version of Grails related to flash scope that prevented it from clustering, but I know of a number of people that have got it clustering on Tomcat.

Certainly it will be possible in any servlet container as Grails is just a standard Spring MVC app with some bells and whistles.

I'm glad you enjoyed the talk and hope to see you on the mailing list

Cheers
Graeme

Matt Stine said...

Graeme,

I attended the JavaU session and it was the best of the day by far. I'm a little frustrated with Sun as the door keepers wouldn't let me in early, and when I returned at the time they specified, you had already started! Not only that, they had run out of printed slides. They told us to write down our email addresses and they would email the slides, but I haven't received anything. Emailing the JavaOne staff so far has been unhelpful. Do you have a copy of the slides you could send me?

Thanks,

Matt Stine

Graeme Rocher said...

Hi Matt,

Sure, what is your email? Or send me an email to graemerocher__at__yahoo.co.uk