Greater Maryland Software Symposium
June 17 - 18, 2011 - Columbia, MD
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
Improve Your Java with Groovy
Groovy was never intended to replace Java. Instead, it expands Java capabilities and makes developers' lives easier. In this presentation, we'll survey many ways to make your Java systems easier by adding Groovy.
Among the topics we'll cover are: parsing and generating XML, simplifying your build, making testing easier, quick database access, working with Spring, and mixing Groovy and Java at the code level.
Spock: I Have Been, and Always Shall Be, Your Friendly Testing Framework
The Spock framework brings simple, elegant testing to Java and Groovy projects. It integrates cleanly with JUnit, so Spock tests can be integrated as part of an existing test suite. Spock also includes an embedded mocking framework that can be used right away.
In this presentation, we'll look at several examples of Spock tests and review most of its capabilities, including mock objects and integration with Spring.
The Gradle Will Rock
Build processes are a pain point in most organizations. Ant is mature but very low level, Maven is powerful but hard to customize, and so on. The Gradle project brings the power and flexibility of Groovy to build files and processes.
Gradle makes it easy to do dependency management, build subprojects, incremental builds, and more. Custom tasks are easy to add, and basic Groovy capabilities like closures, parameterized strings, and builders are all available. Gradle also includes many plugins that make developing Java projects, Groovy projects, web projects, and more very easy.
