The organizers of GR8 in the US conference, Bill Turner and Shaun Jurgemeyer, announced today that Guillaume Laforge has been named the conference keynote speaker.

Guillaume Laforge is the project lead of Groovy, the highly popular and successful dynamic language for the JVM. He co-authored Manning's best seller "Groovy in Action" with Dierk König, and is working for SpringSource (a division of VMWare) where he's working full time on cool and Groovy stuff. Guillaume worked hand in hand with the Google App Engine Java team before the official launch of the new platform to ensure that Groovy would run well on this new cloud. With this background in mind, he created Gaelyk, a lightweight toolkit for developing applications written in Groovy on Google App Engine, that he demonstrated at the Google I/O 2009 Conference. You can meet Guillaume at conferences around the world where he evangelizes the Groovy dynamic language, Domain-Specific Languages in Groovy, and the agile Grails web framework.

GR8 in the US is a one day conference dedicated to the software language Groovy, software development frameworks Grails and Griffon, and related technology. It will be held April 16th, 2010 at the Holiday Inn Bloomington I-35W, 1201 West 94th Street, Bloomington, MN 55431.

There were sharp drops in the number of jobs posted on both Dice and Indeed. This is really troubling, but maybe true for other software skills not tracked. Or, it may be indicative of the fact that the holiday season has begun and annual budgets have been spent.

On a bright note, Tiobe showed a slight increase as did Grails Jobs.

The TIOBE Programming Community Index for Groovy
Month / Year	Rating	Change	Rank
12/2009	0.170%	+0.018%	44
11/2009	0.152%	--	47
10/2009	--	--	< 50
09/2009	0.154%	+0.037%	46
08/2009	0.117%	+0.003%	48
07/2009	0.114%	-0.038%	47
06/2009	0.152%	+0.020%	36
05/2009	0.132%	-0.033%	41
04/2009	0.165%	+0.031%	36
03/2009	0.134%	+0.005%	42
02/2009	0.129%	-0.006%	40
01/2009	0.135%	--	38

Dice Keyword Search for Groovy and Grails
Month / Year	Groovy/Grails	Change	Grails	Change	Groovy	Change
12/2009	27	-8	36	-10	91	-7
11/2009	35	-14	46	-12	98	-17
10/2009	49	15	58	16	115	34
09/2009	34	15	42	10	81	16
08/2009	19	-8	32	-3	65	-3
07/2009	27	--	35	--	68	--
02/2009	23	11	29	12	56	25
01/2009	12	--	17	--	31	--

Indeed Keyword Search for Groovy and Grails
Month / Year	Groovy/Grails	Change	Grails	Change	Groovy	Change
12/2009	111	-145	188	-168	327	-303
11/2009	256	-8	356	2	630	-13
10/2009	264	103	354	75	643	218
09/2009	161	3	279	-20	425	-52
08/2009	158	-10	296	22	477	70
07/2009	168	--	274	--	407	--
02/2009	89	18	110	-11	305	-80
01/2009	71	--	121	--	385	--

GrailsJobs Postings By Month
Month / Year	Postings	Change
11/2009	3	+1
10/2009	2	+2
09/2009	0	-8
08/2009	8	0
07/2009	8	+5
06/2009	3	+1
05/2009	2	+2
04/2009	0	0
03/2009	0	-3
02/2009	3	+1
01/2009	2	--

This is a non-scientific survey. It is meant to give the interested reader a general idea of trends within the GR8 technologies market. Results from keyword searches of job boards should be considered carefully as the results represent the number jobs containing the keyword in the description. The numbers from GrailsJobs represent the total number postings by month. The numbers from Tiobe are pulled from the survey published this month. The numbers from Dice and Indeed represent the results of keyword searches as of the day this survey was published. Suggestions of other sources of job market information is always welcome. Please comment on this blog post with any suggestions you may have.

The organizers of GR8 in the US conference, Bill Turner and Shaun Jurgemeyer, announced today that Dave Klein has been named the conference Sponsorship Coordinator.

Dave is a consultant helping organizations of all sizes to develop applications more quickly (and have more fun doing it) with Grails. Dave has been involved in enterprise software development for over 16 years. He has worked as a developer, architect, project manager, mentor and trainer. Dave has presented at user groups and national conferences. The founder of the Gateway Groovy Users, in St. Louis, a contributing editor of GroovyMag, and author of Grails: A Quick-Start Guide.

GR8 in the US is a one day conference dedicated to the software language Groovy, software development frameworks Grails and Griffon, and related technology. It will be held April 16th, 2010 at the Holiday Inn Bloomington I-35W, 1201 West 94th Street, Bloomington, MN 55431.