Impressions from Greach 2014

02 April 2014

This is in no way a complete description of all talks, but my personal experiences in Madrid at Greach 2014.

First of all many thanks to Alberto and the rest of the crew for a great conference experience. It was great to see the bright minds of the Groovy community again :)

The buzz-word now is Micro-services, and several speakers came with (almost similar) definitions. I'm looking forward to the talks I wasn't able to attend will be available on Youtube, you can find the Greach channel here

==Braindump==

Guilaume opened Greach with the keynote: Groovy in 2014 and beyond, and managed to pull through even with a bad cold. Any contributions to the documentation is welcome for the comming 2.3 release. Groovy 2.3 introduces traits as a formal structure rather than manually using @Trait AST transform, and it will be out soon.

Funniest talk of the conference was clearly Burt Beckwith when he presented "Grails Worst Prctices". The talk was short, but filled with references and links that should be revisited. Burt also presented the new features in the comming Spring-security-core 2.0 release in his second talk.

Aacute;lvaro SÁnchez-Marichal followed with a description of how to Create RESTful API’s with Grails and Spring Security, including his own plugin for the security.

It was my first time experiencing Marco Vermeulen live on stage, and it was great. He described BDD with Cucumber and Groovy, with a perfectly executed demo, and the audience now know who/what Invader Zim is. On the second day of the conference, Marco demoed how to build micro-services with Spring boot, and here he found a clip of the cartoon, as the theme was the same.

I also attended two talks by David Dawson, both on architecture: "Architectural Flexinility using Groovy" and "Hexagonal Architecture in Grails". Besides using plenty trick questions and humor, David presents some nice ideas on how to structure code. I've never given it much thought that there are a difference between "Intuitive" and "Ease of use", but David is quite right.

The 3musket33rs presented how to make mobile apps using Cordova, Aerogear and other exciting stuff. In the first talk, the demo did not go quite as expected, but they repaired it in the talk on the second day, where they had prepared a screencast of the demo. The wifi at the conference was a bit flaky, which was the primary reason.

I'm really impressed with the work by Jorge Franco on Grooscript, the compiler for translating Groovy into Javascript. He did a nice presentation on the status, and the possibilities and linitations.

The final talk of the conference was by Schalk Cronjé, presenting his work on the Groovy VFS - a DSL for using apache VFS for handling files to and from remote servers. Since it was the last talk, Schalk had prepared a video with images from the conference mixed with the music video for EES feat. Vylla - "Individuality". Hopefully the music artist approves the video for the public. If you wish to get a graphic overview of some of the talks, Schalk is also the man behind the 'In a nutshell' illustrations. Check his twitter account for more than just this one from Mario Gracias excellent talk on Functional programming in Groovy.

Slides and other material