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Vladimir Vivien and I had a great time Tuesday night at the Tampa JUG presenting an introduction to Grails. We stepped away from the standard Tampa JUG presentation format and only put together a few presentation slides and then did some live coding. We created a small Grails application from scratch, working with just a few domain objects to demonstrate contraints, relationships and Grails’ convention. I worked from the command line and with TextMate and Vladimir worked with IntelliJ and the JetGroovy plugin. I think we had a great group of developers in attendance who were interested in what Groovy/Grails has to offer. We had a lot of great questions and I know some of our attendees were really impressed with how quickly we got up and running with our Grails application. Even though we went over our normal time limit, we didn’t have enough time to really get into all the details and features of Grails but I know some of the Tampa JUG members that were in attendance are at home or at work creating their own Grails projects. I have posted the slides and our JUG demo here.

This month at the Tampa JUG November 18th meeting, Vladimir Vivien and I will be teaming up to put together a presentation on Grails and Grails Plugins. Our plan is to limit the number of presentation slides and really focus on a nice demo that demonstrates how easy it is to get work done with Grails. Spread the word and come out to the Tampa JUG’s November meeting to get a crash course on Grails and Grails Plugins.

I had a great time in Sarasota last night presenting Taking a Look at the Google Web Toolkit. It was a nice introductory walk-through of what is in place for Java developers to create AJAX, HTML, and Java applications without having to focus on JavaScript libraries and browser compatibility. The group had a lot of great questions and I was overwhelmed with the amount of IT that is going on in the Sarasota area. I would like thank all that attended and Dave from the Sarasota JUG for having me out.

I will be presenting, “Looking at the Google Web Toolkit”, at the Sarasota JUG on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008. It will basically be an intro to GWT, as I am not an expert. We will be looking at what the Google Web Toolkit offers to Java developers and how we might be able to leverage this tool in our Java Web development environments. Here is the presentation abstract:

In this session we will walk through the features of the Google Web Toolkit from a Java developer’s perspective. From installation to application development and deployment, we will see how the Google Web Toolkit can help Java developers get work done. Google Web Toolkit takes our Java code and produces HTML and JavaScript to create a fully functioning Web 2.0/AJAX based Web application. We will discuss problems encountered when developing AJAX Web applications for cross browser support and how the Google Web Toolkit has solved our problems. Of course, we will also look at some code and we will see what it takes to create our own Java Web application with the Google Web Toolkit.

The presentation materials will be online after the presentation and more information can be found at the Sarasota JUG’s site, www.sunjug.org.

Last night was a great night to talk about Ant and enterprise development at the Tampa JUG. I presented Apache Ant: Using Apache Ant for Enterprise Development to a nice group of developers interested in the many facets of Ant. We discussed some of the core concepts behind Ant and the extensibility available through integration with many Open Source tools like NCSS, JUnit, Cobertura, Ivy, Subversion and many other tools and servers. I would like to thank all that attended and Vladimir Vivien for having me out to speak.

Last night I had a great time presenting XFire: The Tool for Easy Web Service Development at the Tampa JUG. I would like to thank Vladimir Vivien and the attendees for a great discussion about XFire.