Marc Palmer

So I talked at Grails Exchange 2007 about how we used Grails 0.4 through 0.5.6 to deploy five commercial branded websites in 2007.

Skills Matter asked for all the slides up front, like most conferences do, but I "refused" because if you are doing a presentation that is not death by powerpoint, printed/pre-available material ruins the experience and stops people paying attention.

Finally I have put the slides into a PDF (24MB) so they can be viewed alongside watching the video of the talk. There’s also an HTML version here so you don’t need to download it all first. The video of the talk rarely includes the slides so following it is a bit of a tricky endeavour. Please note that these slides are not complete because the "Render slide for every stage of build" option in Keynote doesn’t do what it says. It doesn’t render build items that are part of smart builds… so when you get to the "Build scripts" slide, you have to imagine the other text coming up one by one… Bean/Spring configuration… ORM Mapping… Deployment descriptor… Log configuration… Test database… Servlet Container… and then "bang".

I’m new to presenting and it shows, but I had a good time doing it. I’m a big fan of Presentation Zen and I really dislike bullet point presentations. The Presentation Zen book rocks – I only wish it was out before I did my talk! Your talks will be changed forever for the better if you buy it and read it. Garr Reynolds, the author, has a great blog.

However people laughed at the right points which was good fun circa slides 14-16. You end up with a lot more slides with this kind of approach, and its hard work to put it together, but its more fun.

It is hard to apply these principles to the "this is how you code it" part of technical talks… I’ll continue experimenting with it. I find large chunks of code in presentations hard to follow, and quite boring frankly. I’m more impressed by the results of the code and a little info about how, for the rest I’ll use docs / a book.

Thanks for everyone who came to my talk at the end of the day back in October – like I said on the day it wasn’t exactly going to tax people mentally, a bit of light entertainment Grails propaganda. Sorry it took so long to get the slides up, but you’ll see why I had to wait for the video to be live before I did it.

Grails 1.0 is coming soon…

I only just caught up with Rick Hightower’s great post on why Sun should ditch JRuby and support Groovy.

For all of us in the Groovy camp it’s a no-brainer. We love the dynamic nature and productivity of Groovy, we’re still a stone’s throw from our good friend Java, and we’ve got the hottest new web framework on the block in Grails. And on the JRuby side you’ve got a work in progress port of a language far from Java in its nature, that not only has to deal with its own implementation challenges but also with the issues inherent in Rails which is surely the primary reason for having JRuby.

Nobody wants to code Ruby in a Java VM do they? They just want the RAD gains of Rails. It’s obvious to me – JRuby would not exist at Sun if two years ago a Rails-like framework was possible with plain old Java.

Do we need to remind Sun why they changed their stock symbol to JAVA? Java is nigh-on de facto in enterprise / web services. Rails has barely made a dent here, for good reason.

Grails 1.0 is just around the corner, Groovy 1.5 is out. There is a commercial business behind both now. It’s high time Sun woke up and smelled the groovy coffee! Here’s a slide from my Grails Exchange 2007 talk which I think illustrates where I’m going. (courtesy of the excellent iStockPhoto.com)

Glen Smith has an amazing talent for spotting impressive things you can do with Grails in just a few lines of code. Like "The Joker" in the first Batman movie, I can’t help but think "Damn, where does he get those toys?"

In his latest post chronicling his development of a Grails based Blog application, he has effortlessly added ajax based autocomplete of tags.

However this is just the latest in a string of absolute gems. His blog is required reading for those who know that Grails rocks but sometimes don’t know how to demonstrate it concisely. That includes me!

Oh well it’s all just fun and games but I have some hopes/feelings about what might come out of Steve Jobs Apple keynote at Macworld 2008.

My predictions are:

1. iTunes video rentals, as reported in the press. I hope the 24 hour limit does not apply though, it seems very lame
2. To back this up, I think there my be a new Apple TV device with built in iTunes store direct in the TV, perhaps with a new remote or other control to make web browsing/shopping more enjoyable than with a normal apple remote. I think we may see video recording direct to the apple TV too, and much bigger hard disks, with Blu-Ray drive built in and maybe true 1080p high definition support.
3. A new firmware update, as reported, for iPhone adding some new features.
4. Maybe a date for the new 3G iPhone
5. Maybe a new cinema display / Apple LCD television set to run with Apple TV
6. Maybe a new iPhone-style multi touch laptop / sub-notebook as has been much rumoured.

Let’s see what happens…

The Open Eye campaign group has opened a UK government petition that UK residents can sign up to online to urge the government to stop forcing children under 5 years old to learn reading and writing – instead of learning through natural play as is widely recognized to be more effective.

Please take a look and sign up to the early years petition if you can.