Central Iowa Software Symposium
August 5 - 7, 2011 - Des Moines, IA
View the event details here ».
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
Groovy, part 1: Collections, closures, and the Groovy JDK
Want to use Groovy but don't have time to read all of Groovy in Action? This talk gives you a whirlwind introduction to its capabilities, from basic data types, Groovy strings, POGOs, collections, Groovy SQL, and the Groovy JDK.
Learn the basics of Groovy through code examples, including both scripts and classes. A complete set of test cases is included, as well as a gradle build script to download everything you need and run all the tests.
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: Logical Testing for Enterprise Applications
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.
Improving Spring with Groovy
Groovy and the Spring framework are old friends. Spring includes dynamic beans that can be modified while a system is still running, and of course the Grails framework is built on top of Spring MVC. Here we'll illustrate all the ways that Groovy works with Spring, and show how a developer can take advantage of those capabilities right away.
Examples will include using Groovy beans in Spring systems, refreshable beans, inline scripted beans, aspects in Groovy, and even the Grails Spring bean builder.

