Northern Virginia Software Symposium

November 7 - 9, 2008 - Reston, VA


Sheraton Reston
11810 Sunrise Valley Drive
Reston, VA   20191
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NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in RestonNovember 1 - 3, 2013.
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Jeff Scott Brown

Core Member of the Grails Development Team

Core member of the Grails development team, Jeff Scott Brown, is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource. Jeff has been involved in designing and building object oriented systems for over 15 years. Jeff's areas of expertise include web development with Groovy & Grails, Java and agile development.



Presentations

A Thorough Introduction To Groovy

Groovy is an agile dynamic language for the Java platform. The language and its libraries bring many things to the table to ease the process of building applications for the Java platform. This session provides a detailed run through Groovy with lots of code samples to drive home the power of the language.

Dynamic languages provide a lot of power and flexibility compared to statically typed languages. Groovy brings that power and flexibility to the Java platform in a way that is totally compatible with all of your existing Java code, tools and infrastructure. This session covers all of the fundamentals of Groovy and gives developers a whole lot of practical information they need to get started with the language.

Agile Test Driven Development With Groovy

Dynamic languages bring a lot of interesting elements to the table for teams interested in doing Test Driven Development (TDD). Groovy lends itself very well to TDD and this session demonstrates many features of the language and its libraries that help teams build more testable systems and build better tests.

The value of Test Driven Development (TDD) has become widely accepted. The practice has extended beyond just XP teams. Good TDD practices yield high quality software and help teams maintain confidence in their software as complexity grows. The dynamic nature of Groovy makes TDD easy and fun. Groovy may be used to unit test not only Groovy code but other code as well. Testing Java code with Groovy is a snap. Learn to use the power of Groovy to test your systems.

Powerful Metaprogramming Techniques With Groovy

Metaprogramming is a key component in building truly dynamic and flexible applications with Groovy. Groovy's metaprogramming capabilities bring great new possibilities to the table that would be very difficult or just plain impossible to write with Java alone. This session will demystify a lot of the magic that seems to be going on inside of a Groovy application.

When Java developers are first introduced to Groovy one of the first things they notice is how much easier things are in Groovy compared to Java. Boilerplate code typically generated by your IDE all melts away to nothing in a Groovy bean. Creating XML is a snap, not a tangled mess. File I/O is a breeze. Those developer productivity gains are an important part of the story. However, in addition to making easy the things you are used to doing the hard way Groovy brings whole new capabilities to the party that Java developers don't even think about because you can't do those things with Java. Many of those capabilities are made possible because of the powerful metaprogramming capabilities of the language. Learning the metaprogramming capabilities of the language takes developers the rest of the way to fully taking advantage of the power of Groovy. The metaprogramming capabilities offered by the language provide everything that an application development team needs to build systems that are far more capable than their all Java counterparts.

Grails - Agile Web 2.0 The Easy Way

Grails is a full stack MVC framework for building web applications for the Java platform. Grails makes web application development both fun and easy. This session covers all of the fundamentals of building web applications with Grails.

Businesses need rich web applications and developers want to be able to build those applications without the pain that usually comes along with doing so. Grails addresses these needs very well. Grails demolishes many of the pain points that Java developers have almost (not quite) become numb to after years of suffering. This session covers all of the fundamentals:

  • Introduction To Grails
  • Domain Objects
  • Controllers
  • GSPs
  • Custom TagLibs
  • GORM

Books

by Jeff Scott Brown and Graeme Rocher

The Definitive Guide to Grails 2 Buy from Amazon
List Price: $49.99
Price: $31.97
You Save: $18.02 (36%)
  • Grails is a full stack framework which aims to greatly simplify the task of building serious web applications for the JVM. The concepts within Grails, like interceptors, tag libs, and Groovy Server Pages (GSP), make those in the Java community feel right at home.

    Grails’ foundation is on solid open source technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh, which gives it even more potential in the Java space: Spring provides powerful inversion of control and MVC, Hibernate brings a stable, mature object relational mapping technology with the ability to integrate with legacy systems, and SiteMesh handles flexible layout control and page decoration.

    Grails complements these with additional features that take advantage of the coding–by–convention paradigm such as dynamic tag libraries, Grails object relational mapping, Groovy Server Pages, and scaffolding.

    Graeme Rocher, Grails lead and founder, and Jeff Brown bring you completely up–to–date with their authoritative and fully comprehensive guide to the Grails 2 framework. You’ll get to know all the core features, services, and Grails extensions via plug–ins, and understand the roles that Groovy and Grails are playing in the changing Web.

    What you’ll learn

    • Discover how the Web is changing and the role the Groovy language and its Grails framework play
    • Get to know the Grails Project and its domains, services, filters, controllers, views, testing, and plug–ins
    • Experience the availability of plug–ins for Rich Client and Ajax, web services, performance/utilities, scheduling, security, functionality, and even Persistence
    • See how Grails works with other frameworks like Spring, Wicket, Hibernate, and more
    • Create custom plug–ins in Grails

    Who this book is for

    This book is for everyone who is looking for a more agile approach to web development with a dynamic scripting language such as Groovy. This includes a large number of Java developers who have been enticed by the productivity gains seen with frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, JRuby on Rails, etc. The Web and its environment is a perfect fit for easily adaptable and concise languages such as Groovy and Ruby, and there is huge interest from the developer community in general to embrace these languages.

    Table of Contents

    1. The Essence of Grails
    2. Getting Started with Grails 2
    3. Understanding Domain Classes
    4. Understanding Controllers
    5. Understanding Views
    6. Mapping URLs
    7. Internationalization
    8. Ajax
    9. GORM
    10. Services
    11. Dependency Management
    12. Plugins

by Graeme Rocher and Jeff Brown

The Definitive Guide to Grails (Expert's Voice in Web Development) Buy from Amazon
List Price: $46.99
Price: $35.25
You Save: $11.74 (25%)
  • The rise of Ruby on Rails has signified a huge shift in how we build web applications today; it is a fantastic framework with a growing community. There is, however, space for another such framework that integrates seamlessly with Java. Thousands of companies have invested in Java, and these same companies are losing out on the benefits of a Rails–like framework. Enter Grails.

    Grails is not just a Rails clone. It aims to provide a Rails–like environment that is more familiar to Java developers and employs idioms that Java developers are comfortable using, making the adjustment in mentality to a dynamic framework less of a jump. The concepts within Grails, like interceptors, tag libs, and Groovy Server Pages (GSP), make those in the Java community feel right at home.

    Grails’ foundation is on solid open source technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, and SiteMesh, which gives it even more potential in the Java space: Spring provides powerful inversion of control and MVC, Hibernate brings a stable, mature object relational mapping technology with the ability to integrate with legacy systems, and SiteMesh handles flexible layout control and page decoration.

    Grails complements these with additional features that take advantage of the coding–by–convention paradigm such as dynamic tag libraries, Grails object relational mapping, Groovy Server Pages, and scaffolding.

    Graeme Rocher, Grails lead and founder, and Jeff Brown bring you completely up–to–date with their authoritative and fully comprehensive guide to the Grails framework. You’ll get to know all the core features, services, and Grails extensions via plug–ins, and understand the roles that Groovy and Grails are playing in the changing Web.

    What you’ll learn

    • Discover how the Web is changing and the role the Groovy language and its Rails framework play
    • Get to know the Grails Project and its domains, services, filters, controllers, views, testing, and plug–ins
    • Experience the availability of plug–ins for Rich Client and Ajax, web services, performance/utilities, scheduling, security, functionality, and even Persistence
    • See how Grails works with other frameworks like Spring, Wicket, Hibernate, and more
    • Create custom plug–ins in Grails

    Who this book is for

    This book is for everyone who is looking for a more agile approach to web development with a dynamic scripting language such as Groovy. This includes a large number of Java developers who have been enticed by the productivity gains seen with frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, JRuby on Rails, etc. The Web and its environment is a perfect fit for easily adaptable and concise languages such as Groovy and Ruby, and there is huge interest from the developer community in general to embrace these languages.