A Groovy Time at JavaOne 2009

Although there was a somewhat somber mood at JavaOne this year (thanks Oracle!), you couldn’t help but notice the awareness and general excitement for dynamic languages and in particular Groovy (here is some additional proof). And as my colleague Sten Anderson pointed out already, Groovy won the Script Bowl 2009 which was represented by the languages’ project manager Guillaume Laforge. Last year’s winner was JRuby due to a dazzling eye candy type of Demo, but of course, was a useless application for the real world like most demos are. I wouldn’t be suprised a bit to see Scala win it next year as it seems the momentum for it is growing.

A couple of us got the chance to walk back to the hotel one night with Guillaume who was very humble about the win and gave all the credit to the Griffon team for giving him a cool demo to show off. The demo is a Twitter meets Google Earth mash up called Twittersphere that actually was backed by NASA’s World Wind API. You can download the source code for the winning demo here. Very cool!

The next major Groovy event was the following night at the Griffon Birds of a Feather (BOF). Danno Ferrin and James Williams gave a thorough presentation about Griffon and what’s coming in the near future for 0.2 – such as runtime addons. For being a BOF and starting at 8:30 PM, there was a nice turnout which shows how popular Griffon is getting these days. Since Griffon builds on Grails 1.1, it is a very mature project despite the 0.1.1 version number. So, if you are needing to build a Java-based RIA and JavaFX is not for you… check out Griffon. In fact, as we found out later, Danno Ferrin managed to deploy his Griffon based Twitter client Greet to the newly released Java Store less than 24 hours after the opening of the store.

After the Griffon BOF was over we stayed around and watched Scott Davis interview Guillaume Laforge for his ThirstyHead series and Guillaume talked about current and future state of everything Groovy. Watch it here.

The next big and well attended Groovy event was Dave Klein’s Grails Enterprise Integration Strategies BOF followed by a live recording of the Grails Podcast show. Dave gave a good presentation on how to configure a Grails application to communicate with older JEE standards such EJB 2 and JMS. He also described how his company used Grails and JSF together in one web app taking advantage of using partials to call out to a JSF component to render out some HTML. He later told us that none of that made it into production as they ripped out the cancer he called JSF.

The Groovy Podcast guys (Sven Haiges and Glen Smith) came onto the stage and interviewed a panel of guests for their 87th episode. The panel consisted of Scott Davis, Dierk Koenig of “Groovy in Action” fame, and the three Griffon committers mentioned above. It was an entertaining show and it was cool to be there since this was Glenn’s and Sven’s first show since meeting face-to-face at this years JavaOne. Listen to the episode here. Thanks to Bryan Williams, Sven and Glen unexpectedly got an excellent recording for their podcast.

As we were going to the Groovy related talks we were hoping to meet other Groovy/Grails User Group members from different parts of the world but unfortunately we did not. A couple of us at JavaOne were representing the Chicago Groovy User Group (CGUG) by wearing black shirts with the name and logo on them (we were pleased when we received some compliments on them).

All-in-all, going to the G3 sessions, and meeting some key contributors of this community made for a fun and exciting conference even though more Groovy related sessions would have made it perfect. We can only hope for more dynamic language support next year as Oracle takes the reins.