What a fantastic time we all had at SpringOne 2GX in Chicago over the last week. My head is jam packed full of information and I have so many new things to add to my list of cool Groovy tech to explore! If you’ve never made it to one (this was my first), I can highly recommend it!

First things First: Relationships trump everything

The absolute best part of these events is the chance to hang out with our awesome Groovy community making new friends and catching up with old ones. Just have a scan of the Wed night Groovy and Grails BOF (click picture for a closeup) to get a feel for how fantastic our community is (somewhere in this picture are heaps of the names you’ve run across Scott Davis, Graeme Rocher, Burt Beckwith, Guillaume Laforge, Dierk Koenig, Paul King, Colin Harringon, Bobby Warner, Dave Klein, Jim Shingler and many more). The audio will be up on grailspodcast.com shortly.

 

Friends Old and New

There’s nothing better than catching up with old friends from the Grails community: Andres, Dierk, Scott, Graeme, Jeff, James, Paul, Peter, Luke, Dave & Ken. And it was doubly wonderful to make a whole bunch new friends: Colin Harrington (Grails Testing Guru), Tim Berglund (of the Tim & Matt Git Video fame), Peter Niederwieser (Spock author), Andy Clement (STS Grails IDE support and Agent Reloading) and Jim Shingler (thanks for the insights on Grails in the large!).

And then there is seeing all the great guys from the community including Bob Rullo, Bryan, Jeff Gortatowsky, and too many others to name. So great to see you all!

Grails In Action, 2nd Edition

You asked for, and it’s happening! The most common question heard at the Manning SpringOne2GX desk this week was “Grails in Action, second edition. When?” Thanks so much for your interest (signed heaps of books over the week too!). If you’d like one on the cheap, head over to the Grails in Action page, and use code spring3911 for a 39% discount!

The good news is that Peter Ledbrook and I sat down the Mike Stephens from Manning and thrashed out a plan to get this bad boy up and running. Stay tuned for some MEAP annoucements early 2011. Peter has already started talking about NoSQL coverage, testing deepdive, resources and dependency resolution coverage and tons of other refreshed Grails 2.0 content. I feel tired already! Can’t wait to get started! (Drop us a line if you have specific things you want covered - now is the time to get your requests in!)

Core Inspirations: where to from here?

In case you were interested in the topics covered from the sessions I went to, here are the things on my todo list after 2GX:

  • Geb and Functional Specs (Luke session got me thinking here)
  • Next Level Spock (Peter Niederwieser is such a champion - and sounds exactly like Arnie)
  • Taking the Grails Testing movement forward (Colin Harrington really charged me up for this)
  • NoSQL perspectives (Graeme’s session on Grails NoSQL was awesome! Super excited about this)
  • Coffeescript & Node (not sold on this one, but Scott has persuaded me to at least have a look at Node)

Glen’s Sessions

The 90 minute session format makes it really hard to maintain audience interest, but fortunately I had fantastic people in my session! I ran two sessions, one on refactoring the Grails view tier titled “Does my DIV look big in this?” (lots of Charlie Sheen references lead to a spate of #winning and #tigerblood tweets - it was such a fun crowd we had a ball).

For my second session, I put together a talk titled “Grails Hacker Triage: 10 Grails code smells and refactors” (crowd shown below). This talk was a little experimental and I had quite a few snags pulling it off, but again the crowd were really understanding and had great ideas for improvement next time. Thanks team! I’m going to turn this talk into 10 blog posts over the next month, so stay tuned to dump some “better practices” ideas on me.

So In Summary

This was one of best Grails events I’ve ever been to (so glad I skipped J1 this year to make it!). If you have a chance to get there next year, make sure you do. Great people and Groovy/Grails content made for some fantastic discussions and hangouts. Recommended!