The Grails US Tour: JavaOne Day 2

So I just finished my BOF on Grails + Spring & Hibernate. It went ok, I'm a little disappointed actually. My talk was at 9:55pm which is like the graveyard shift with fewer people than other sessions and tiredness had really started to set in for me after all my talks at NFJS, JavaU and then all the parties and dinners.

I fear I grossly overestimated the audiences' potential knowledge of Groovy & Grails, a schoolboy error of course. It was a fairly advanced talk showing mixing Java entities and Grails domain classes in the same codebase and using remote Spring services. I fear it may well have been more effective to have done a similar introductory talk as last years JavaOne.

I could kind of gage this from the audiences' blank looks as I was doing the talk which made me rush through some parts to avoid some of the complexity leaving the talk shorter than it should have been. I fear I left the audience thinking that Grails is complicated when in fact what I was trying to demonstrate was Grails is simple when you need it to be and flexible (spring+hibernate integration) when you need it to be.

Oh well, you win some you lose some, I'm trying not to be too down beat as it has still been very worthwhile as the buzz I got from the NFJS and JavaU talks plus the Groovy talk by Dierk and Guillaume was totally different. And we received some awesome news about the book sales. On day one the Groovy book sold out by 4pm and the Grails book was 4th on the best seller list. Check it out Groovy & Grails has proven really popular this year so its been awesome.

So much cause for celebration, even if my talk was not what I hoped it to be...