New England Software Symposium
September 12 - 14, 2008 - Boston, MA
Kenneth Kousen
Author of "Making Java Groovy"
Ken Kousen is the President of Kousen IT, Inc., through which he does technical training, mentoring, and consulting in all areas of Java and XML. He is the author of the O'Reilly screencast "Up and Running Groovy", and the upcoming Manning book about Java/Groovy integration, entitled "Making Java Groovy".
He has been a tech reviewer for several books on software development. Over the past decade he's taught thousands of developers in business and industry. He is also an adjunct professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute site in Hartford, CT. His academic background includes two BS degrees from M.I.T., an MS and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I.
Presentations
Grails Plugins: A Free Library of Functionality
One of the best features of the Grails platform is that its modular architecture makes developing plugins very easy. As a result, hundreds of plugins have already been developed and made available in the standard repository, with the number growing almost daily.
If you need to add functionality to your Grails application, look for an existing plugin first. This talk will survey a wide range of available plug-ins, including those for security, testing, building maps and charts, sending email, deploying to the cloud, and as many more as time allows.
Groovy by Example
Learn the basics of Groovy through a series of small, but non-trivial, examples. Rather than simply survey the language, in this talk we'll walk through a series of use cases to see how Groovy is used in practice to solve problems. The goal is to help Java developers who haven't seen much of Groovy get up to speed on the fundamentals.
We'll cover Groovy topics including closures, native collections, the Groovy JDK, iterators, file handling, database access, and more advanced metaprogramming topics like builders and metaclasses.
