Wednesday, May 09, 2007

The Grails US Tour: JavaOne Day 1

Another eventful day at JavaOne is winding to a close. It was another great day from a Groovy perspective with the Groovy session filling up with around 600 people in it with the rest losing out. Guillaume and Dierk did an awesome session about Groovy with some neat demos, which the audience really enjoyed. We then all went to a book signing at the Digital Guru bookshop, which was enjoyable.

The big news of the day was of course JavaFX. I've looked over the samples and can't really see why a new language is needed as it can be done with an almost identical syntax in Groovy's SwingBuilder. The only "feature" that seems to differentiate it is that you can bind multiple references to the same value. The result here is that if you change the value if changes all references to it. This of course can be achieved with Groovy closure's too. Nevertheless, it is too early to tell, I haven't had a chance to look at it in any detail so maybe I'm missing something.

Later in the day we had dinner with the JetBrains and the No Fluff guys and it was great to see so many people getting together and being enthusiastic about Groovy and Grails. Onto Day 2....

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am pretty much excited with JavaFX but my question is why not Groovy given that it is already a JSR?

translucent_eye said...

And they felt compelled to answer that here. I too believe that they should jump behind Groovy...

https://openjfx.dev.java.net/JavaFX_FAQ.html#Why_not_Groovy.3F

Why isn't Groovy enough?
Groovy and other languages have two specific traits which don't precisely meet these needs, namely that they are generic in nature and don't provide the appropriate abstractions necessary to optimize the UI design process and similarly are designed specifically for programmers other than content authors.

Graeme Rocher said...

I'm not sure why they didn't choose Groovy. I fear there is a lot of "not invented here syndrome" in Sun, nevertheless it is not normally Sun who ultimately dictates the direction of this industry, so we'll see what happens...

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