Thoughts From the First Philly Groovy and Grails Meet-up

I can’t begin to thank Scott Davis and Venkat Subramaniam enough for giving us a great start to the Philadelphia Groovy and Grails meet-up. It was great to see two seasoned speakers “on stage” at once, but even better two good friends that made the evening both interactive and informative. It was simply awesome.

It was great to have an active crowd as well, and I hope that everyone that attended was able to take away something from the evening. Scott and Venkat started with an agenda for the evening, but we quickly pulled them off track and wandered. I’m working from memory, but we roughly covered the following:

• Groovy is Java, except when it isn’t! Search for “Groovy the blue pill” or “Groovy the red pill” to see what that means.
• We saw several perfectly valid Java classes become elegantly simple Groovy classes
• Examples of Groovy metaprogramming and AST transformations (@Immutable, @Delegate and @Newify)
• What tools and IDEs might be considered for Groovy and Grails programming
• We learned that Venkat only uses a web browser that works with EMACS-like commands (it is Conkeror in case you are wondering)
• We were reminded of the evil lurking in Java with precision issues in double and float, and how Groovy avoided this issue

There were many more little bits of information, but suffice to say we covered a lot of ground. Thanks again to Scott and Venkat, and thanks to all that attended our first meet-up.

Please watch the meet-up group site for more information about our next meet-up.