GroovyVan.com // Vancouver Groovy/Grails UG

Join us for the Vancouver Island Java Meetup at the Vancouver Island Technology Park in Victoria on Wednesday, January 23rd. I’ve signed up for a talk on Groovy & Grails.

What’s Groovy? Groovy is a free, open-source dynamic language for the Java runtime that compiles straight to Java bytecode and lets you mix and match Java and Groovy code and works out-of-the-box with all existing Java libraries. Groovy offers higher-level functions and iterators (=closures/code blocks), built-in syntax for lists, maps, markup, regular expressions, ranges, and much much more.

What’s Grails? The talk will conclude with a look at Groovy’s web framework called Grails that offers an up to 10x productivity boost over classic Java web stacks using plain old vanilla Java code thanks to convention over configuration, the Don’t-Repeat-Yourself (DRY)-principle, meta programming and much more.

Thanks to Manfred Moser for organizing and hosting the Victoria event. Upcoming talk slides will include:

• Why Groovy? What’s wrong with Python (Jython), Ruby (JRuby) or Smalltalk (Bistro)?
• One Language Can’t Do It All: Beyond Hairballs and Spaghetti Code
• Scripting vs. Systems (Hard-Core) Programming / Groovy vs. Java
• First Impression – Servus Groovy Example
• Second Impression – Higher-Level Functions, Loops and Data Types
• Third Impression – Groovy Beans vs Java Beans
• Groovy Goodies Missing in Java
• Groovy Lists: Built-In Syntax for Lists
• Groovy Maps: Built-In Syntax for Maps
• Groovy Loops: Higher-Level Loops Using Closures
• What’s a Closure (Code Block)?
• Closures in Action: Groovy Collections vs. Plain Old Java Collections
• Groovy Adds New Methods to Core Java Classes
• Groovy Template Strings: Expressions in Strings
• Groovy Strings: Here-Doc Strings and More
• Built-in Syntax for Regular Expressions (Regex)
• Groovy Markup (XML) Syntax
• Groovy SQL
• Groovy Java Interop: Static Typing Optional
• And much more

See you all there.