(I have been meaning to post this for a while, but life has caught up with me, including my company’s tech conference, where I was a speaker in one session and a panelist in another.)
On September 9-12, I had the privilege of attending SpringOne 2GX 2013 in the beautiful Santa Clara, California. It was my first time to visit California, let alone Silicon Valley (I don’t count my layover at LAX a couple of years ago).
Pre-Conference
My co-worker Brian and I flew into San Jose on Monday, and decided to take a tour around a few of the geek sites in the area. We took our rental car and meandered our way up to Mountain View, where we stopped for a quick visit to the Googleplex, and back down to Cupertino where we stopped to visit the Apple campus. It was a fun few hours before we headed to the Santa Clara Convention Center for the conference registration.
The Conference
The conference ran 9 concurrent sessions along two main tracks: 5 sessions in the SpringOne track, pertaining to the Spring ecosystem; and 4 sessions in the 2GX track, focusing on the Groovy/Grails ecosystem. Being as I am in the position in my company for leading a Grails-focused project, I chose to stay solely in the 2GX track. The sessions I attended were:
- Lift-off with Groovy 2.1 – Guillaume LaForge
- Advanced Web Development Techniques With Grails 2 – Jeff Scott Brown
- Road to Grails 3.0 – Graeme Rocher
- Type checking your DSLs – Cedric Champeau
- Making Spring Groovy – Kenneth Kousen
- Creating Groovy DSLs that Developers can Actually Use – Guillaume LaForge and Paul King
- Leveraging Groovy for Capturing Business Rules – Paul King
- Application Architecture in Groovy – Daniel Woods
- RESTful Groovy – Kenneth Kousen
- A Groovy Mullet: JavaScript in the front, Groovy in the back – Kenneth Kousen
- Testing Grails: Experiencies from the field – Colin Harrington
- Case Study – Using Grails in the Real World – Greg Turnquist
- Becoming Productive Groovy/Grails and Spring Developer with IntelliJ IDEA – Andrey Cheptsov
- Groovy is now first-class in the Spring ecosystem
- Grails 2.3 makes big leaps in functionality
- DSLs are a powerful toolthat you can use to bridge the gap between users and developers
- REST, REST, REST, REST
- Spring Boot is cool, but not sure how it fits in the scheme of the whole ecosystem
- IntelliJ is awesome for Groovy/Grails development (I already knew this, as I am a convert from STS)
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