We are really excited to have a 3 day Groovy/Grails training event coming up in Chicago later this month. The training dates are August 26-28. The training will be held at the Hotel Indigo in Palatine.
This is 3 days of lecture and reinforcing lab work. Attendees should expect to write a lot of Groovy and Grails code with your training expert. There is no better way to quickly get your team up to speed on the technology, well beyond the basics.
As with all G2One training events, students will receive a free 12 month license to use IntelliJ IDEA. The IntelliJ guys have done a fantastic job of building first class Groovy and Grails support for the IDE.
For a full course outline and more information, please visit http://g2one.com/training/. Any questions may be directed to training@g2one.com.
Grails Training In Chicago Monday, August 04, 2008
G2One QuickCast Site Launched! Wednesday, July 30, 2008
G2One have launched the G2One QuickCast site. A G2One QuickCast is fast and furious little movie demonstrating something interesting about the Groovy language and/or the Grails framework.
The first movie available there demonstrates how powerful tools like Grails and Git can work together to support a really really agile development process. Watch this movie and try to do something like this with your web framework and your VCS. If you can't, your tools are not flexible enough. :)
Enjoy!
G2One Groovy Grails Training In North America Monday, July 14, 2008
G2One have announced our Groovy/Grails North American public training schedule for the rest of the year. The schedule is available at http://www.g2one.com/training/.
Our training events are a fantastic experience. G2One are the folks who lead and sustain the development of both Groovy and Grails. No one understands the technology better than the people who build it. G2One training events give developers an opportunity to spend several days with a technology expert covering everything from fundamentals to advanced language and framework features. The sessions include a perfect mix of lecture and reinforcing lab work. That hands on approach is a great way for developers to internalize the details. There is no better way to quickly get a team up and running with the technology.
Grails Plugin For Hudson Thursday, June 19, 2008
I am pleased to announce that we have worked up a Grails plugin for Hudson. Hudson is a really slick continuous integration server. Check out their site for more info on the engine itself.
It has always been possible to build Grails apps from Hudson but in the past this has involved writing shell scripts that are triggered by Hudson. This works but is not the slickest solution. What you really want is for the CI server to have knowledge of the fact that the project you are building is a Grails app and that knowledge will allow the tool to be more efficient about carrying out the build and also allow the CI server to provide Grails specific options for the build. This is where the new Grails plugin is heading.
Right now the plugin is very basic. In the system configuration screen you may configure as many Grails installations as you like. This is useful for situations where the same CI server may be building multiple projects with different version of Grails or maybe even building multiple copies of the same project with multiple versions of Grails. Below is a screenshot of the system configuration screen:
Notice that there is built in validation to make sure you have entered a valid path to your Grails installation.
When configuring a project in Hudson you have a lot of options for what should happen at build time. The Grails plugin adds a "Build With Grails" option and if that option is selected you can select from a list of common build targets to execute as well as type in any arbitrary targets you may want to execute. This is useful for executing Grails commands that are not in the list of checkboxes and for executing your own custom Grail scripts that may be part of your project. Below is a screenshot of the project configuration screen:
The first version of the plugin has not been released yet but will be soon. In the meantime, I would be happy to hear what kinds of capabilities you would like to see the plugin provide. Even in its current very basic state, the plugin is very useful as it makes configuring a Grails project in Hudson drop dead simple.
St. Louis Dynamic Language Interest Group Saturday, June 07, 2008
I have created the St. Louis Dynamic Language Interest Group at LinkedIn. If you have a special interest in dynamic languages and are in the St. Louis area or are close enough to the St. Louis area that you would like to be involved with the group, please take a minute to visit the group at LinkedIn and join us.
More information is coming regarding the goals of the group and what sorts of activities we may engage in. I want to give the group some time to populate before moving forward with those details.
If you have any questions about the group in the meantime, please don't hesitate to let me know.
Jeff Brown
Director - North American Operations
http://www.g2one.com/
New Grails Mail Plugin Wednesday, June 04, 2008
The new Grails Mail Plugin is really slick stuff. Very little effort has gone in to the thing so far and there is more to come but even in its current state this is really nice. More details are available at http://grails.org/Mail+Plugin but basically you get a method called 'sendMail' added to your controllers (or you could use an autowired mailService) that accepts a closure and the contents of the closure express the details of the message being sent. A simple example looks like this...
sendMail {
to 'fred@g2one.com'
subject 'Hello Fred'
body 'How are you?'
}
Take a look at the docs for more information. This is good stuff already. I think the simplicity of sending a message like this is pretty impressive but more impressive is how easy it is to build support for something like that in a dynamic language like Groovy. More and more folks are taking advantage of the Grails Plugin System to easily add capabilities like this to their web apps.
Enjoy!
Groovy Grails Training From G2One and Callista Enterprise Wednesday, May 21, 2008
G2One, Inc. and Callista Enterprise AB have announced a partnership to support Advanced Groovy and Grails training in Scandinavia.
Göteborg 2008-09-08
Stockholm 2008-09-15
Malmö 2008-09-22
The 3 day comprehensive course covers details from intro to advanced for both the Groovy language and the Grails framework. The course description may be found here.
As with all G2One training events, students will receive a free 12 month license for IntelliJ IDEA. IDEA's JetGroovy brings fantastic support for both Groovy and Grails to the IDE.
Please contact us at training at g2one dot com with any training related inquiries.
North American dates coming soon...
Pre JavaOne Groovy/Grails Meetup Next Monday Wednesday, April 30, 2008
We have been busy preparing for JavaOne and it is finally almost here. Yay!
We hope to see you at the G2One / NFJS Meetup Monday night. Click the link for all of the details and be sure to click the "register" link. Registration is free and the event promises to be a load of fun. Come hear the latest Groovy and Grails news from G2One, the latest word from the respected NFJS tour and finally a great expert panel discussion. Author signed copies of Scott Davis' Groovy Recipes book and Venkat Subramaniam's Programming Groovy book will be raffled off.
Don't miss it.
Between now and then, I hope to see some of you in Denver this weekend. :)
Another Big Week For Groovy And Grails Monday, February 18, 2008
This is definitely going to be another big week for Groovy and Grails. The Grails 1.0.1 point release was published today. This release contains over 40 enhancements over the 1.0 release from just a couple of weeks ago. The Grails community has been buzzing at full steam since the 1.0 release. This is fantastic stuff!
This Wednesday I am heading to the great New York City to speak at their JUG about Groovy. That is going to be a lot of fun. Immediately after that is the event that so many people (including myself) have been looking forward to for a long time. That of course is The Groovy Grails Experience in Reston Virginia, starting on Thursday Feb. 21 and running through Saturday the 23rd. It will be a while before this many of the key players in the Groovy/Grails community get together in one spot to talk shop. I can't wait!
Jeff Brown Interview At Groovy Zone Saturday, February 09, 2008
I had the great pleasure of doing an interview recently with Steven Devijver for The Groovy Zone. Today, that interview was published. Check it out at http://groovy.dzone.com/news/jeff-brown-grails-10-and-beyon. In the interview we discussed the Grails 1.0 release, the great plugin story that Grails has to offer, the upcoming Groovy Grails Experience and more. I want to thank Steven for the opportunity.
The Groovy And Grails Communities Continue To Buzz Thursday, February 07, 2008
A lot of things are going on right now in the Groovy and Grails communities. I have been really busy myself and have a lot of exciting things coming up. I am very excited about my role as Director of North American Operations with G2One and that is really keeping me busy.
I spent the first part of this week out in Silicon Valley with Graeme Rocher and Peter Ledbrook working on some really exciting Grails stuff. It was great to be out there with Graeme on the day that Grails 1.0 was released. The whole development team and user community have done an incredible amount of work on Grails to get to this point but I think Graeme himself deserves the props. Graeme conceived the thing and has been driving it very hard from the beginning with the focus and vision necessary to get the framework to this point. Well done Graeme!
Later this month I am going to have the pleasure of speaking at The New York Java SIG about Groovy. I speak at JUGs all the time but this one in particular I am looking forward to. A few months ago I was on the schedule to speak out there and due to an incredible string of bad luck, I wasn't able to make it. My flight was cancelled. My replacement flight was delayed. Once my delayed flight took off we ended up circling in the air for a long time waiting for some weather to settle down. Once I got to New York we found it near impossible to get in to Manhattan because it just happened this was the day of the huge water main explosion. I ended up spending the entire day on airplanes and in terminals just so I could get to my hotel, sleep and then fly home the next day. This time, things will no doubt go much more smoothly. I can't wait to get out there.
When I leave the New York Java SIG I will be heading straight to the airport to get to the event that I am even more excited about. That is The Groovy Grails Experience in Reston VA beginning on Feb. 21. The event is being put on by the same folks who have been putting on the hugely successful No Fluff Just Stuff symposiums for years now so I know it is going to be a great event. This is 3 days packed with talks all about Groovy and Grails. Of all the shows I do this year, this is probably going to end up being the one that is most exciting for me personally. All of my friends from the Groovy and Grails communities are going to be there and I know everyone is going to have a great time. This is the biggest Groovy/Grails event ever to be put together. It isn't often that we get an opportunity like this to get together so many players in the Groovy/Grails communities to talk about the technology. For folks who are interested in the power of Groovy and Grails and the vast possibilities that dynamic languages bring to the JVM, I can't think of a better way to spend 3 days. I am completely pumped about this event.
The Groovy Grails Experience Wednesday, December 12, 2007
The first major Groovy / Grails conference in North America is just around the corner. The Groovy Grails Experience is going to be in Reston Virginia on Feb 21-23, 2008. The event is bringing key players in the Groovy and Grails community together from all over the globe to put on what is sure to be a really exciting event.
Check out the speaker list. Graeme Rocher! Jason Rudolph! Dierk Koenig! Scott Davis! Andy Glover! Venkat Subranamium! Neal Ford! Brian Sletten! The list goes on and on... This really promises to be a fantastic event. I am really looking forward to it.
The event is coming along at a great time. Groovy is finishing up a really really exciting year that started with the release of 1.0 and ran right up to the release of 1.5 last week. We have seen a bunch of new public facing Grails sites go live this year as well as lots of internal application development being done with Grails. Grails is closing in on the very much anticipated 1.0 release.
Good times continue!
Grails 1.0 RC1 Has Been Released Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Grails 1.0 RC1 has been released! See the release notes for details about many of the new features.
This is fantastic news for the Groovy and Grails community.
In a few hours I am getting on a plane to London to speak at The Grails eXchange. I am really looking forward to finally meeting in person some of the folks I have been working with for so long now.
Maverick On Rails Sunday, September 09, 2007
Interesting Groovy Loops Detail Tuesday, August 07, 2007
While fixing a bug in Grails last night I came across something that I found interesting. At first I was really puzzled but now that I know what is going on, it all makes perfect sense.
A unit test that had been passing for some time just started failing. I isolated a specific revision of a specific file that seemed to be causing the test to fail. The test passes with version X of the file and the test fails with version X+1 of that file. I spent some time diffing the 2 revisions and couldn't find anything that seemed relevant. Eventually I figured out the specific change that was causing the failure. There was code that looked something like this...
someCollection.each { someElement ->
// do something with someElement
}
That code had been changed to look something like this...
for(someElement in someCollection) {
// do something with someElement
}
The code inside the loop was exactly the same for both versions. The only difference is the original code was using "each" to iterate over the collection and the new code was using a "for" loop to do the same thing. I puzzled over that for a bit trying to figure out what was going wrong and after discussing with my co-developers the problem eventually became clear. Code inside the loop was making use of someElement inside of a closure and later that closure was being executed. Consider this...
def listOfClosures = []
def numbers = [1, 2, 3]
numbers.each { number ->
listOfClosures[number] = { println "number is $number" }
}
listOfClosures[1]()
listOfClosures[2]()
listOfClosures[3]()
As you might guess, the output from that looks like this...
number is 1
number is 2
number is 3
Now consider this...
def listOfClosures = []
def numbers = [1, 2, 3]
for (number in numbers) {
listOfClosures[number] = { println "number is $number" }
}
listOfClosures[1]()
listOfClosures[2]()
listOfClosures[3]()
The output from that looks like this...
number is 3
number is 3
number is 3
With the "for" loop approach, the same "number" variable is used each time through the loop so by the time the loop completes, the value of "number" is 3 which is what is used by the time the closures execute. With the "each" approach, a separate variable is used for each iteration so each closure accesses the "number" that was around when the closure was declared. None of that is broken or a bug. I believe it is all working as it should.
Thanks to Charles Nutter and Graeme Rocher for helping with that.
My Apologies To The New York City SIG Friday, July 20, 2007
This past Wednesday night Andy Glover and I were scheduled to co-present at The New York Java Special Interest Group. Andy was going to give a 90 minute session on Groovy and I was going to give a 90 minute session on Grails.
Wednesday turned out to be crazy day in New York. Weather made it difficult for air travelers to make their way in to JFK Airport. The huge steam pipe explosion that happened in mid-town Manhattan made it very difficult to drive in to Manhattan. The whole story is a very long one but the short of it is that Andy's flight was canceled and so was mine. We couldn't get a second flight booked for Andy but we were able to get one booked for me. Unfortunately mine was an indirect flight and the second leg was delayed numerous times and I finally got to JFK to find that because of the steam pipe explosion in the city, the trip from JFK to the meeting location was well over an hour and by the time I got into the city, there was no point. I think the meeting was scheduled to run until about 8:00 and I think I got into Manhattan shortly after 8:00.
I was really disappointed myself as I have never had the opportunity to work with Andy before this event and I was really looking forward to it but mostly I felt bad for all of the developers in New York who made it to the show only to find out that there were no speakers. The New York developer community is really enthusiastic about Groovy and Grails and the large audience that turned up to see the show represents that. I am sorry that they were left to look at an empty stage Wednesday night. I promise all of them that we were scrambling all day to work it out and each time we came up with a solution another problem came up, mostly related to shut downs at JFK. I hope that many of the folks who came out to the SIG meeting will make it to the NFJS show in Princeton New Jersey the weekend of August 10th. I will not be there myself but my friends Jason Rudolph, Scott Davis and Venkat Subramanium will all be there with Groovy and Grails sessions.
Again, I offer my apologies to everyone who came out to the show Wednesday evening and I hope that you will invite us again.
Alternate Syntax For URL Mapping In Grails Saturday, May 19, 2007
One of the cool new features that was introduced with Grails 0.5 is Custom URL Mapping. The syntax for declaring the mapping looks something like this...
class MyUrlMappings {
static mappings = {
"/product/$id" {
controller = "product"
action = "show"
}
"/$blog/$year/$month/$id" {
controller = "blog"
action = "show"
constraints {
year(matches:/\d{4}/)
month(matches:/\d{2}/)
}
}
}
}
Since the release we have added support for an alternate syntax (which I happen to like) that looks like this...
class MyUrlMappings {
static mappings = {
"/product/$id" (controller:"product", action:"show")
"/$blog/$year/$month/$id" (controller:"blog", action:"show"){
constraints {
year(matches:/\d{4}/)
month(matches:/\d{2}/)
}
}
}
}
Dynamic languages like Groovy make these sorts of things really easy to support. Behind the scenes of this url mapping there there is no grammar file and no tangly parser to manage. The configuration file is plain old groovy code. Blurring the line between code and configuration files by using a DSL like this is so much easier in Groovy that it might be in a language like C++ or Java. You have got to love it. :)
Autism Visibility Continues To Increase
Dover Speedway has announced that the NEXTEL Cup race coming up there in June will be named “The Autism Speaks 400 presented by Visa”. NEXTEL Cup racing is huge here in North America and has a very large fan base. Autism Speaks is one of the largest foundations in the world that is dedicated to autism. I am happy to see them get their name on the marquee of an event like this. That can only help with awareness.
This is not the first time that autism and automobile racing have crossed paths. Jamie McMurray has an autistic niece and partnered with The Autism Society of American in 2004 when he drove the “Drive For A Cure” car. Tony Renna drove the “Cure Autism Now” car in 2003. There have been others.
It has been almost exactly 5 years since my youngest son Jake was diagnosed autistic. In those 5 years I have learned a number of things about autism and one of those things that I have learned is that there are not a lot of people who know much about autism. Awareness is increasing. That isn't because more people are reading medical journals in their free time. Aside from a dramatic increase in the number of kids being diagnosed autistic, the biggest reason that awareness is increasing is that more and more autism is showing up in the mainstream media. Recently some actors and other celebrities have been criticized for jumping on the “autism bandwagon”. These criticisms often refer to autism as the disease du jour. I don't have much to say about that except to say that raising awareness is an important part of this fight and when I see people going out of their way to help with awareness, I am happy to see that.
Cool New Features In Grails 0.5 Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Grails 0.5 was released today and this release is one of the most exciting releases yet. This release has closed the gap on a number of key features that needed to be knocked out before the coming 1.0 release. Some of the new features will be more appealing to some projects and other features more appealing to other pojects. For me some of the coolest new features added in 0.5 are Command Objects, List and Map Support in GORM and Custom URL Mappings. Hundres of JIRA issues have been addressed in this release and significant performance enhancements have been made. The development team got a whole lot done during this iteration. See the release notes for a more complete list of new features.
With the recent release of the first beta of Groovy 1.1, things continue to heat up in the Groovy and Grails communities.
This year I have been speaking at Java User Groups, internal training events and on the No Fluff Just Stuff Tour about Groovy and Grails and I am finding that folks in the Java community are really excited about both Groovy and Grails and the possibilities that these technologies bring to their projects. After a bit of time that really seemed kind of dull for the JVM, Groovy and Grails are making it all fun again and at the same time adding a lot of value to the enterprise by increasing productivity and expanding the possibilities. For example, defining a DSL using Antlr or similar technologies may not have been a realistic possibility for many applications but dynamic technologies like Groovy make things like that not only possible but simple to build. There are many many examples just like that which represent ways Groovy can help developers get their jobs done faster and more simply. Frankly, I don't think Grails would be anywhere near as compelling as it is if it weren't for all of the coolness made possible by Groovy. Grails has taken the possibilities that Groovy provides and leveraged them all over the framework to provide simple concise techniques for web application developers to use to build powerful web applications very quickly.
Grails has earned a lot of respect in the community by getting very far along in a short amount of time. While Grails applications are already being deployed in production environments, both private and public facing sites, the coming 1.0 release is going to push Grails right out there to the front of the pack. This is exciting stuff!
More to come... :)
I Have Been Tagged (Twice) Friday, April 06, 2007
I have been tagged twice recently. First by Jason and now by James. I suppose I need to be a good citizen and play along. :)
I am not really sure what the rules are here. I know that I am supposed to list several things that you probably don't know about me. I don't know if these things are supposed to be funny, embarrassing, personal, impressive, inspiring or what. I don't know if knowing the rules would help me figure out what to write anyway so I am just going to jot out some facts and hope that I don't suffer some sort of penalty for any violation I might commit. :)
I am a member of The American Go Association. I love playing Go, although I am not able to make as much time for it as I might like. My commitment to Go seems to come and go with periods when I will play a lot and periods when I don't play much at all. My friend Lianzhou Yu moved out of state a couple of years ago and that has affected my playing time. Lianzhou is one of the top players in The United States and was a great mentor to have access to. A few years ago my friend Brian Gilstrap and I got together in his wood shop (which I am envious of) to build a couple of Go boards. I am pretty happy with the way my board turned out. I wish I played on it more often. As it is, most games I play these days are played on my laptop against GNU Go.
I won the first large poker tournament I ever played in. The tournament was a charity event to benefit The National Alliance For Autism Research (now Autism Speaks). Having an autistic son, I was happy to contribute and participate in the tournament. There were about 130 entrants. When I heard about this event I gathered up the group of guys that I played cards with regularly and we ended up with 11 of us in the tournament. The final table at the tournament (final 10 players) included 4 guys from our group. In one of the final hands I made a mistake and then ended up getting pretty lucky to beat my friend Paul Jensen out of a big pot and that piece of luck put me in a position to win the tournament.
My name is Jeff, and I am a metal head. There, I said it. I am a fan of heavy metal music. Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Slayer, Sepultura, Opeth, Lamb Of God... all guilty pleasures.
I enjoy fly fishing. I tie all of my own flies. I fish mostly for trout in the cold water streams and rivers in Missouri. My late father-in-law introduced me to fly fishing more than 10 years ago. I find less time for fly fishing these days but I really enjoy myself when I do make time to get out in the water.
There was a time long ago when I really, really, really needed a haircut. Why didn't anyone approach me and say something like “friends don't let friends have mullets”?
Now I am going to throw to Dean, Lance, Brian, Eric and Nate.