AnyWare

I just got back to the countryside after a rather enjoyable day at Grails Exchange 2007. I’ve never been to a developers conference before, unless you count the old ATARI ST demo coding party or two of my youth. The Barbican was a good venue… but man that is one horrible mofo of a lump of concrete hell. Single-glazed windows everywhere too, the heating bills must be INSANE I tell you. The event was well organized by Skills Matter and there was a good "workshop" kind of atmosphere.

Anyway I met some great people and saw some great talks. I started the day with Scott Davis‘ keynote "Groovy and Grails by the numbers" which served, for me at least, as a strong motivational talk on spreading the Groovy and Grails word. I thoroughly enjoyed it and his showmanship.

Then we had an interesting panel discussion, though I confess that I was busy documenting the g:meta and g:encodeAs tags while it was going on, and struggling due to codehaus server problems. I mentioned these in my slides and realised that I hadn’t documented them yet, shame on me.

Next up was Joe Walnes talking about Sitemesh, a baby he created back in 1999 - yes that is correct, it is nearly 10 years old! I knew very little about sitemesh and thanks to his energetic talk I know a lot more. I have some plans to incorporate some more sitemesh features into Grails soon, now that I know what is possible.

I watched an interesting presentation by Joe Walker on DWR (Direct Web Remoting) which now includes support for Comet and some pretty crazy concepts like being able to "send" an object to all the currently connected client browsers and have it appear in their DOM. I’m going to have to look into this some more as it seems ripe for some Grails plugin work but it seems hard to see where this fits in in terms of comparative advantage compared to other ajax libraries. It is certainly a lot cleaner in the client and server due to the stub code generation.

Next up I saw Graeme give a good talk on new groovy MOP features such as "missingMethod" and some sweet dynamic programming patterns. I think MOP manipulation is going to become more and more mainstream as the APIs and mechanisms become clearer.

I then checked out Tsuyoshi Yamamoto’s session on the Acegi plugin for Grails. The plugin looks good and does what you’d expect really for something wrapping Acegi… but something about Acegi just feels so wrong, at least in Grails land. I was sitting there scribbling notes about how I want to do authentication and authorisation for normal webapps (vs enterprise LDAP/CAS/SSO hell) for normal people. Hopefully I’ll get somewhere with it soon, I already have Authentication working but the mechanisms need refinement and then bolting on an authorisation plugin too. It just can (and must) be so much simpler than Acegi makes it.

Then it was my turn. I wondered about my content being a bit too simple for the crowd, but it was late in the day and everyone needed a break. I think most people enjoyed it and I certainly enjoyed giving it. It’s was only my second presentation like this ever, and I’m pleased with how it went although I’m not sure how good it will seem once it goes into the video podcast….

Anyway, people gave me some nice comments on the style of it - I went through major hoops to try to avoid bullet points and people were smiling rather than groaning. 77 slides were included. There’s a lot more work involved in this kind of presentation, it took ages to put it all together! Hopefully it will come easier in time.

Thanks to Bernd Schiffer, Jez Rayner, Joe Walnes, Scott Hickey for his loan of DVI->VGA (WHY did they change the plug between iBook and MacBook?!), Jeff Brown, Stuart Clayman, Glen Smith, Dierk Koenig, Sven Haiges and all the other fine people.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Programming, Groovy and Grails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.