Pub language discussion in London

For those of you that aren’t members of the London Java Community there has been a pretty active discussion going on through the mailing list about learning a new language (and which one to learn).

The conversation will no doubt be continuing at the monthly social event (which goes out to members of the Clojure, Scala & Groovy communities in London) tomorrow night. Feel free to come down and fight for Groovy’s corner: http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/calendar/13588662/

London GGUG, 17th May – DSLs in Groovy & Grails 1.3

I’m pleased to announce that the next London GGUG on the 17th May will have a guest from the US: Peter Bell. He’ll be giving a talk on the practical development of a Groovy DSL with emphasis on the practical side. As he says on his blog, this is for both people that want to go further with DSL development and those that simply would like to see in what ways a DSL can help them.

I’ll be speaking on the new features that come with Grails 1.3, focusing in particular on plugins deployed to Maven-compatible repositories.

You can register for the event on the SkillsMatter website, where you can also see synopses of the talks and the speaker bios. Please register soon and I hope to see you there!

London GGUG in the new year

After a successful Groovy & Grails eXchange run by SkillsMatter last week, it seems that there is plenty of interest in keeping the London GGUG going on a regular basis. Several ideas were floated then, so I thought I’d bring them up here and elicit feedback:

1. Two or three standard talks of 30-45mins each about any subject. Topics I would like to see covered include (in no particular order):
   • Gaelyk
   • Griffon
   • Real life Grails on Google App Engine
   • Real life Grails on Cloud Foundry
   • Grails deployment and data migration
   • GPars and/or static Groovy
   • Writing AST transformations
2. 6 * 10-15min slots on any topic, first come, first served
3. Plugin-fest – anyone can get up and present for 5-15 mins on their favourite plugins (no agenda)
4. Crowd-programming on an app, plugin, Grails issues, or anything else

If anyone has other ideas on session types or topics, then please let me know. I’m hoping that I can organise one with SkillsMatter sometime in mid- to late-January, so place your vote on what type of session you’d like! I’m currently thinking of a session with 5 or 6 10-15 min talks on what people are using Grails for, with plenty of time for questions.

I hope to see you in the new year!