Jeff Brown

Presentations

What's New In Grails 2.0?

In this session, Grails core developer Jeff Brown will deliver an update on the latest and greats features of the Grails framework - a dynamic, web application framework based on the Groovy language and designed for Spring.

Jeff will cover all the new features of Grails 2.0 including agent-based reloading, unit testing mixins, really powerful new ways to express GORM queries and more. Attendees will gain key knowledge of the latest techniques for building Grails applications on the Spring platform.

A Thorough Introduction To Grails

Grails represents technology that offers great flexibility and power without the complexity introduced by other Java web application frameworks. Custom tag libraries are a snap. GSP Templates provide a simple mechanism for reusing UI elements. Sitemesh is integrated to help provide a consistent presentation across the entire application. GORM is super powerful ORM. Grails provides simple mechanisms for leveraging the power of Ajax.

This session will cover all of the fundamentals of the framework and will serve as a thorough introduction to developers not familiar with the framework and also include a number of tips and tricks for developers who do have experience with the framework.

GORM Inside And Out

GORM is a super powerful ORM tool that makes ORM simple by leveraging the flexibility and expressiveness of a dynamic language like Groovy. With GORM developers get access to all of the power and flexibility of an ORM tool like Hibernate without any of the complexity.

This session will cover a lot of the GORM API from the developer's perspective as well as diving into some of the implementation details. Knowing how some of this works under the covers will give developers an opportunity to not only improve their productivity with GORM but also open up possibilities of using dynamic metaprogramming in other aspects of their application development efforts.

Advanced Metaprogramming With Groovy

The dynamic nature of Groovy makes it a fantastic language for building dynamic applications for the Java Platform. The metaprogramming capabilities offered by the language provide everything that an application development team needs to build systems that are far more capable than their all Java counterparts. Taking advantage of Groovy's metaprogramming capabilities brings great new possibilities that would be very difficult or just plain impossible to write with Java alone. Building Domain Specific Languages in Groovy is easy to do once a team has a good understanding of the Metaobject-Protocol (MOP) and the method dispatch mechanisms used by the Groovy runtime environment.

This session will cover in detail a number of advanced metaprogramming concepts in Groovy. The discussion will cover using dynamic method interception, metaclass customizations and Groovy's Metaobject-Protocol (MOP) to build flexible applications in Groovy including implementing a Domain Specific Language (DSL).