Thursday, March 22, 2007

Groovy & Grails at Sun Tech Days - The Report

I've been meaning to write up a report of how my workshop on Groovy & Grails at Sun Tech Days went, so here it is. First off, I would like to say a big thanks to the guys at Sun for hosting me, it was great gesture and thankfully we'll see more of it at JavaOne.

As far as the workshop went, I really wanted to deliver something of value and probably ended up overdoing it as a I had over 160 slides (death by keynote!). Fortunately, the audience were extremely enthusiastic with the only hiccup being a gentlemen who was running a p3 450mhz machine with 256mb of RAM and Windows 98 (with MS-DOS!) not being able to get the Grails command line scripts running.

Interestingly, the majority of attendees were from either the banking or insurance industries, which reflects Grails' growth in the enterprise market space. There were many wow moments, and some concepts which were difficult to grok for a group of Java developers. Explaining closures was particularly fun.

Overall, the attendees seemed to enjoy the workshop and left brimming with ideas of how to integrate Grails into their existing systems. Job done.

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