This weekend I attended the NFJS Rocky Mountain Software Symposium in Lone Tree, CO. It was hard to pass up a NFJS conference that’s 15 minutes from home. Overall the sessions were excellent. There wasn’t a single session I attended that sucked or was a waste of time, a first for any conference I’ve attended. I seemed to gravitate toward sessions by Ken Sipe and Stu Halloway followed by Groovy and Grails presentations by Jeff Brown and Scott Davis.
I gleaned several consistent overarching themes at the conference:
- Java is essentially Dead (Stu Halloway leading this sentiment)
- BUT the JVM is alive and well. In fact the JVM has transitioned from a write once run Java anywhere runtime to a dynamic platform for many languages (Groovy, JRudy, Scala, Clojure, Javascript, etc…. oh yeah and Java)
- Not doing Test Driven Development is basically irresponsible, especially with the explosion of dynamic languages
- Not doing Continuous Integration is basically irresponsible
I learned the Jeff Brown has developed and is about to announce a new Hudson plugin for building Grails projects in Hudson, a big and welcome improvement on specifying new ant targets, using the shell script option or whatever. Jeff also echoed much of what has already been said about the recent Spring Source acquisition of G2:
- Deeper integration between Grails and Sprint MVC
- The Groovy Spring bean builder will be moved into Spring
- And of course there will be closer collaboration between the Groovy, Grails, and Spring development teams, though the team will remain distinct.
I’m super excited about Git though Matt McCullough urged me to take a look at Mercurial…
Anyway, fantastic event and kudos to No Fluff Just Stuff.
