Groovy Workshop
Tuesday, 9:00 AM MDT - Cotton Creek
This workshop will bring you up to speed on the specifics of the Groovy programming language. We'll touch on most of the major features of the language, from collections and closures to builders, AST transformations, and metaprogramming. Specific examples will cover topics from Groovy itself and will be supported by unit and integration tests and built using Gradle.
Featured topics will include: collections, closures, operator overloading, scripts and classes, unit and integration testing, AST transformations, parsing and building both XML and JSON, and working with SQL. If time is available, other projects from the Groovy ecosystem, like Gradle, Spock, and GPars, will be included.
A minimum comfort level with Java is assumed. Some exposure to Groovy would be helpful but not required.
Workshop Requirements
This session is a workshop. Please come prepared.
The workshop requirements are pretty minimal. You'll need:
- Java SDK 1.5+ (I'll be using 1.7, but 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 are all fine)
- Groovy 2.0+ (I'll be using the latest version, 2.1.6)
The Groovy downloads are found at the Groovy homepage, http://groovy.codehaus.org .
Groovy has a Windows installer, or you can just download the zip file, unzip it, set a GROOVY_HOME environment variable to point to the unzipped directory, and add the “bin” subdirectory to your path.
If you are on a Mac or Unix flavor (or Windows with cygwin), consider GVM, located at http://gvmtool.net . That works for both Groovy and Grails, as well as a few other projects.
No IDE is necessary, but if you prefer to go that way, the Groovy plugin for Eclipse is fine. If you want to use Grails as well, consider the Groovy & Grails Tool Suite, found at http://grails.org/products/ggts . IntelliJ IDEA is great and you're welcome to use it as an alternative.
About Kenneth Kousen
Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, several time JavaOne Rock Star, and a Grails Rock Star. He is the author of the Pragmatic Library books “Mockito Made Clear” and “Help Your Boss Help You,” the O'Reilly books “Kotlin Cookbook”, “Modern Java Recipes”, and “Gradle Recipes for Android”, and the Manning book “Making Java Groovy”. He also has recorded over a dozen video courses for the O'Reilly Learning Platform, covering topics related to Android, Spring, Java, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle.
His academic background include BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut.
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