So the conference has come to an end and several hours driving and a short night's sleep in my own bed and now I'm back at work. This was a great experience for me. I would definitely go back to a NFJS conference if I got the chance.
The final day was no let down. The four sessions I attended were great.
The recap:
Design Patterns in Java and Groovy
I know I've gone on and on about Groovy, but this class really got my attention. This was my first session with Venkat Subramanium. Venkat is the author of several books (one of which I already have) and a very charismatic speaker. What he did in this session was present several common design patterns in Java, discuss the complexity, and then write the same functionality in Groovy right there. This was an excellent session to see some Groovy in action and see just how simple and easy it makes very robust Java tasks.
Caring about your Code Quality
This was more of a speach presentation than a coding presentation. But with Venkat back at the helm that's not bad at all. This session covered why Code Quality is important and why caring about your own code quality is important. He shed light on a lot of common coding fallacies and practices. This is a very important subject that encompasses every facet of Software Engineering, not just the Java world. Great stuff.
Agile Test Driven Development With Groovy
This and my last session were both presented by Jeff Brown. This was an interesting class to me. It started differently than I expected with a background of unit testing and TDD. But once Jeff got into the coding section and really greased the testing wheels with some Groovy goodness it was really interesting. The simplicity of your code that Groovy provides really makes some remedial testing tasks almost too easy (compared to what it takes to do those tasks in Java).
Powerful Metaprogramming Techniques With Groovy
This session really got into the mud with the meta-programming capabilities provided in Groovy. His examples were pretty cool. He made several builders (xmlBuilder, outlineBuilder) and showed how simple it is to manipulate compiled classes on the fly to empower your code to really do what you want it to do, not just what your framework wants it to do. He explained a bit about the ExpandoMetaClass which is a very powerful tool in Groovy (and a tool that came from the Grails project). Again, good stuff.
Conclusion
This conference was very useful to me and my colleagues and I have decided that Groovy is going to be a tool we use in our framework. We'll start small using it as a helper for our unit testing, then we'll see where we can take it from there.
Until next time
Les
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