2GX: Groovy/Grails featured on eWeek

The nice chaps at eWeek turned up at the 2GX:Groovy/Grails Experience and interviewed me and Scott from aboutGroovy on the subject of Groovy and Grails and its relationship to Java. Check it out

2GX: Standalone Spring BeanBuilder from Grails

At 2GX - The Groovy/Grails Experience, I did a presentation on empowering Spring with Groovy DSLs which demonstrated Grails' Spring BeanBuilder in action.

The demo showed how Spring and Hibernate can be dynamically configured at runtime using BeanBuilder and then interacted with via the Groovy shell. I promised a few I would make it available so here it is.

You'll need Groovy 1.5 and Gant setup before you start then just type:

gant start

Enjoy.

2GX: Keynote - The Amazing Growth of Grails

So, I'm back from the 2GX - The Groovy/Grails Experience which was yet another event, brilliantly put together by Jay Zimmerman and the No Fluff crew. The good news is, if you missed out there is another one in the fall/autumn months in San Jose, CA.

The attendance was excellent for such a focused conference with close to 200 people in total all buzzing about Groovy & Grails. I delivered my "State of Grails" keynote on the Thursday evening which went into some analysis of where we are since the release of Grails 1.0 from a growth perspective, but also from a technology perspective.

I wasn't planning to, but a few people at the conference asked me to post my slides to help persuade managers etc. of the viability of Grails, not just from a technical perspective, but from a growth and community perspective. So if you're in the same position, check out my slides, the following is a summary of the contents.

When we released Grails 1.0, Codehaus' bandwith usage went up by a staggering 40gb. The downloads have been in the 10s of thousands since the release and luckily Contegix, the kind folks who host Codehaus, have freed up some extra bandwith for the servers.

The mailing list traffic on the Grails user mailing list has gone through the roof, averaging close to 140 messages a day in January and looking the same for Feb:


The traffic is contributing to make Grails one of the most vibrant communities around anyone one Java web framework according to Nabble:


Further evidence of the growing community is the Grails plug-in eco-system where Grails now has no less than 47 user contributed plug-ins in the plug-in repository representing nearly 2 million lines of user contributed code:


Blog traffic is also on the up, a year ago the blog traffic for Grails was merely a blip on the horizon (all probably posted by me ;-). Now according to technorati people are talking about Grails, a lot:


Clearly, we still have a long way to go to make Grails as hugely popular as things like Spring and Hibernate, but we're heading in the right direction which is great news.

See you at the Groovy/Grails Experience

Last time there was a major Groovy/Grails conference, we promised to get Grails 1.0 out in time for the conference, somehow we slipped a few months ;-)


This time there is no such slippage and the 2G - Groovy/Grails Experience is coming to Reston, Virginia on the 21-23 of Feb! Organised by the No Fluff crowd, it features an amazing amount of great Groovy & Grails talks from some great speakers (other than me of course ;-).

I'll be doing 3 talks on various aspects of Grails and can't wait, its going to be a great event. See you there!

Grails 1.0 is out the door!

We've put the finishing touches on Grails 1.0 and its out. Time to celebrate with some sleep.. enjoy!