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Day three of 2GX was a pretty exciting day. I checked out a presentation aptly titled “Groovier Spring” with Scott Leberknight. Basically, what I took from the presentation was that Groovy is not just another programming language to be compiled and executed in the normal sense. It can used for configuration or even dynamic creation of classes (not objects) and rules or maybe even work-flow. For example, if you wanted to, you can embed Groovy into your Spring configuration files or bean xml files to include logic during bean creation. So, that is cool but why not load some Groovy scripts from your database, use the bean builder and configure some beans when you need them or if you need them? Why not inject what you need when or where you need it? Yeah, I will expand on that at a later date.

I also stopped in at a presentation by Venkat Subramaniam titled “BDD in Java and Groovy”. I am really a big fan of Behavioral Driven Development and even more interested in learning more about Agile Development as a whole. Basically, BDD lets you drop the technical talk and test your software from a more native(like plain Englsh) approach that can be shared and interpreted all the way from conception to implementation. For example if you were writing a inventory system, one test would like this:

Given a customer buys a widget
and there are fifteen widgets left on hand
when a customer returns the widget for a refund
then I should have sixteen widgets on hand

I would like to spend some time in an Agile development environment to see how it all works.

After lunch, Jason Rudolph, author of Getting Started with Grails presented “Refactotum”. Jason was digging into the Groovy and Grails source code and looking at how to improve what has been written. He also encouraged the audience to get involved with Open Source development and his presentation proved how effective the community can be with somewhat little effort. Jason discussed Cobertura and the importance of testing, real testing, effective testing. I took away a great quote that I will definitely use in the future, “comments lie, tests don’t lie”. He is right, comments are sometimes needed but most developers can just interpret the code and comments are rarely updated after a fix. JavaDocs are a key part of documentation and I would rather have well written, meaningful tests rather code drenched in source code comments.