Northern Virginia Software Symposium
Apr 29 - May 1, 2011 - Reston, VA
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 Web Services, Part I: REST
Groovy has excellent networking capabilities and is great at processing XML, which makes it a natural for working with RESTful web services.
In this presentation, we'll access multiple web services using Groovy, ranging from Google Charts to Amazon books to Twitter and more. We'll then build and deploy a RESTful web service, both with Groovy alone and using Grails.
Groovy Web Services, Part II: SOAP and JAX-WS
Although RESTful web services have gotten better press, SOAP-based web services are often the backbone of many large enterprises. The user-friendly advances in JAX-WS 2.* make developing such services much easier. As with most Java topics, Groovy simplifies the development of web services as well. Since it is particularly well-suited to XML processing, Groovy is quite helpful in the web services and SOA worlds.
In this presentation, we'll look at how Groovy interacts with JAX-WS web services. We'll build both clients and services and discuss both the benefits and drawbacks of using Groovy in your web service development.
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.
