Sessions at GR8 US 2012 on Sunday 29th July

This workshop will give existing Java developers the information they need to use Groovy. Topics will include basic data types, strings, collections, closures, builders, XML, Groovy SQL, and more. Code includes test cases from JUnit, Groovy mocks and stubs, and Spock, and everything will be built using Gradle.

Functional programming has been around for a while, however, they have sharply raised to prominence on the JVM with the emergence of languages like Scala, Clojure, Groovy, and JRuby. Programming in functional style is not about picking a set of syntax, it is thinking in a particular idiomatic style and programming using a set of constructs. One of the better way to learn this is by doing it. In this workshop, we will take ten different tasks, discuss how to do them with the all-too-familiar imperative style and then how to program it using functional style. We will then implement our design for each task using a language that provides functional style of programming on the JVM.

Domain Specific Languages have two main characteristics, fluency and context. Creating external DSLs has the advantage of good validation. However, we have to struggle with parsers. Internal DSLs offer the benefit of using the language as the host and its compiler as the parser. For a language to be a host, it needs two important characteristics: low-ceremony and metaprogramming. In this workshop you will learn how to create internal DSLs using Groovy metaprogramming and scripting techniques. We will start with a short warmup of metaprogramming techniques and then dive into creating DSLs.

Grails is considered one of the killer apps of the Groovy ecosystem. It is an integrated, end-to-end framework that brings rapid productivity to the Java web applications. This workshop is an introduction to Grails for web developers. In addition to the basic topics of domain classes, controllers, and services, the workshop will include as many plugins as time allows.