thejavajar

Day three was an exciting day. I attended an awesome presentation about DSL’s in Groovy presented by Guillaume LaForge. I got to speak with him a bit, he is a great guy. I attended Christophe Coneraets and Jeremey Grelle’s presentation on the technical pieces of Flex and Spring. Flex is great (already knew that), but being able to make remote calls to Spring is where it’s at. Spring’s BlazeDS support is very Spring-like and that means you an leverage your spring knowledge to work with Flex remoting. I checked out Keith Donald’s presentation, “Working with Spring Web Flow”. I really like Web Flow. I like Web Flow with JSF because it makes sense when you have to use JSF and I also like the Web Flow hooks inside of Grails. Hamlet D’Arcy’s presentation, “Legacy Code, Groovy and You”, really spoke to me. Some of us work in environments that need to pay attention to some of his key points on re-factoring/re-writing and TESTING. At the end of the day, I attended “Groovy AST Transformations” with Venkat Subramaniam. First, he is a great speaker/presenter and I look forward to attending most of his presentations because he knows what he is doing. Second, AST transformations look really cool, but I need to let it digest a bit before I dig in. It is a great feature of Groovy, like MOP, but it can also be dangerous, like MOP, if you don’t know what you are doing. I am looking forward to attending “OSGI and Groovy Jump Start”, “Design Patterns in Java and Groovy” and “Grails Without a Browser” on the final day of the event.

What a great day of presentations. I checked out presentations on topics including, clustering Grails, RESTful Grails, Spring Roo, JVM optimization for Grails and then stopped by the Grails BOF. It was great to sit down and just hear about Grails from Graeme Rocher and Jeff Brown without an agenda other than a passion for the technology. I am passionate about technology and it is great to be around an incredible group of attendees/developers, speakers, authors and project leads/committers that are just as passionate, if not more passionate. The food has been great and all the other amenities have been incredible. The Roosevelt is a wonderful hotel/venue for the event and it is chock full of American history. SpringSource, a division of VMWare (had to sneak that in), has really got their stuff together. The NFJS crew knows how to put on an event and the word on the conference floor is that we will be getting a NFJS conference in Tampa. I will be posting more after day three’s activities and I will have some more posts that are a little more technical in the next couple of weeks.

Day One Recap:

Attended a nice reception with beer and wine provided by the event sponsors. There were some nice cheeses and fruits and a whole mess of SpringSource employees wearing their yellow SpringSource shirts (I would like one). I got a great event t-shirt, an event binder and a USB drive with all the presentation material.

The venue, The Roosevelt Hotel New Orleans, LA is incredible. SpringSource/NFJS did a great job on getting an incredible hotel for the event.

Dinner was great. Salad, pasta, Cajun shrimp and jambalaya with a red velvet cupcake for dessert.

During the keynote, speaker Rod Johnson discussed where Spring has been and where Spring is headed. He stressed SpringSource’s goals of developer oriented simplicity and the support of the community. Rod then gave the floor to Spring project leads (Jeremey Grelle, Mark Fisher, Graeme Rocher and Jon Travis?) to demo Flex, Spring BlazeDS and Spring Integration, Grails with Spring Tools Suite and Spring Insight. Spring Insight looks incredible!

Google App Engine’s support of Java was a long awaited, highly demanded feature of the service back when I first started messing around with original, Python version a little over a year ago. The excitement that App Engine brought to developers was echoed by the overwhelming request for Java support. Over the past 10 days I have created a few sample applications locally to give it a test. I went the App Engine Eclipse plugin route to get things started. It is a really nice plugin that delivers what you would expect from Google. Once installed, you can create a project and have it running in under a minute.

Once I got familiar with what I was working with, I decided to turn this sample application into a simple Spring Web Flow 2 demo. That is where development stopped. Unfortunately, there are a lot of JVM features/classes that are not accessible on App Engine that Web Flow 2 (and 3rd party libraries) needs for binding and flow execution support. Nothing against Google or SpringSource, I just did not get what I wanted.

Fortunately, I created a new sample app that is based on Groovy’s Groovlet technology and things were moving forward again. Just configure the GroovyServlet in your web.xml file and away you go. My next experiment will be to work with Grails on App Engine via the Grails App Engine plugin.

Overall, App Engine is great. It is really easy to use and the application dashboard features are amazing. Access to application and admin log files in a nice HTML based presentation. Quota detail that explains bandwidth, CPU and datastore utilization along with access to different versions of your application.  You can even grant access to other developers for collaboration efforts. All features you normally do not get from your company’s “Enterprise” admin group.

On a side note, Vladimir Vivien and I will be discussing Google App Engine at the Tampa JUG on August 25th, 2009.