Groovy/Grails Talk

Last chance for GR8 in the US conference $100 discount!

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:43:00 GMT

Register now! Save $100! Space is limited!

GR8 in the US is a one day conference dedicated to the software language Groovy, software development frameworks Grails and Griffon, and related technology. Eleven different speakers will present fourteen talks and two workshops. A round table discussion will conclude the formal sessions. The conference will close with a Meet
The Speakers Happy Hour and Networking event.

Guillaume Laforge, the Groovy project lead and co-author of Groovy in Action will be the keynote speaker. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer and author or co-author of the books .NET Gotchas, Practices of an Agile Developer, Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer and Programming Scala, will be delivering the kickoff speech.

GR8 in the US will be held April 16th, 2010 at the Holiday Inn Bloomington I-35W, 1201 West 94th Street, Bloomington, MN 55431, just minutes from the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport (MSP) and the Mall of America.

It will be fun! Come join us!

GR8 In The US Conference Agenda Now Available

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 22:25:00 GMT

The agenda for the GR8 in the US conference has been posted. There are eleven GR8 speakers giving presentations and leading hands-on workshops. What I find particularly exciting is that the conference will close with a Meet The Speakers Happy Hour where attendees will be able to meet and discuss GR8 subjects with the speakers and other attendees.

Register now! Save $100! Space is limited!

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. Guillaume Laforge, the Groovy project lead and co-author of Groovy in Action will be the keynote speaker. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer and author or co-author of the books .NET Gotchas, Practices of an Agile Developer, Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer and Programming Scala, will be delivering the kickoff speech.

February 2010 Groovy - Grails Job Market

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:45:00 GMT

The trend looks positive again this month, acheiving the highest rating at Tiobe since I've begun tracking (though not the highest rank), and the highest number of postings in all three categories at Indeed. Dice showed gains across all three categories, though did not reach new heights. Grailsjobs is the outlier with the number of postings remaining flat.

The TIOBE Programming Community Index for Groovy
Month / Year	Rating	Change	Rank
02/2010	0.261%	0.013%	40
01/2010	0.248%	0.078%	41
12/2009	0.170%	0.018%	44
11/2009	0.152%	0.152%	47
10/2009	--	-0.154%	--
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

Dice Keyword Search for Groovy and Grails
Month / Year	Groovy/Grails	Change	Grails	Change	Groovy	Change
02/2010	34	5	53	11	100	9
01/2010	29	2	42	6	91	0
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	4	35	6	68	12
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
02/2010	267	47	382	34	706	131
01/2010	220	109	348	160	575	248
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	-17	425	-52
08/2009	158	-10	296	22	477	70
07/2009	168	79	274	164	407	102
02/2009	89	18	110	-11	305	-80
01/2009	71	--	121	--	385	--

GrailsJobs Postings By Month
Month / Year	Postings	Change
01/2010	2	0
12/2009	2	-1
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

This is a non-scientific survey. It is meant to give the interested reader a general idea of trends within the GR8 technologies job 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 are always welcome. Please comment on this blog post with any suggestions you may have.

GR8 in the US 2010 Conference Registration Now Open

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:16:00 GMT

Registration for GR8 in the US is now open! Go to http://www.gr8conf.org/ to register. Save $100! Register today!

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. Guillaume Laforge is the Groovy project lead and co-author of Groovy in Action will be the keynote speaker. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer and author or co-author of the books .NET Gotchas, Practices of an Agile Developer, Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer and Programming Scala, will be delivering the kickoff speech.

GR8 in the US CFP ending 05.Feb.2010

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:11:00 GMT

If you wish to submit a presentation, go to http://www.gr8conf.org/proposal/create.

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. Guillaume Laforge is the Groovy project lead and co-author of Groovy in Action will be the keynote speaker. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer and author or co-author of the books .NET Gotchas, Practices of an Agile Developer, Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer and Programming Scala, will be delivering the kickoff speech.

January 2010 Groovy - Grails Job Market

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:17:00 GMT

The trends are up this month for Tiobe, Dice and Indeed. Grails Jobs showed a slight loss. The Tiobe rating is at the highest level it has ever been since I've begun tracking it. The rank (position) is not, however. After two straight months of declines across all keyword searches on Dice and Indeed, they both showed gains across all keyword searches.

Note that I have slightly altered the way the data is presented. For periods where there was no data, as in the Tiobe numbers from October, I've used zero for the relevant numbers. I felt this was a little better when looking at the month to month changes. I also ignored the fact that there is a several month gap in the Dice and Indeed data, thus comparing July numbers to February numbers. This will correct itself in a few more months. Finally, I've set the negative changes to red, hopefully making upturns and downturns easier to spot.

The TIOBE Programming Community Index for Groovy
Month / Year	Rating	Change	Rank
01/2010	0.248%	0.078%	41
12/2009	0.170%	0.018%	44
11/2009	0.152%	0.152%	47
10/2009	--	-0.154%	--
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

Dice Keyword Search for Groovy and Grails
Month / Year	Groovy/Grails	Change	Grails	Change	Groovy	Change
01/2010	29	2	42	6	91	0
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	4	35	6	68	12
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
01/2010	220	109	348	160	575	248
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	-17	425	-52
08/2009	158	-10	296	22	477	70
07/2009	168	79	274	164	407	102
02/2009	89	18	110	-11	305	-80
01/2009	71	--	121	--	385	--

GrailsJobs Postings By Month
Month / Year	Postings	Change
12/2009	2	-1
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	--

Guillaume Laforge Named GR8 in the US Keynote Speaker

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:29:00 GMT

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.

December 2009 Groovy - Grails Job Market

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:01:00 GMT

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.

Dave Klein Named GR8 in the US Sponsorship Coordinator

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:57:00 GMT

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.

Venkat Subramaniam Named GR8 in the US Kickoff Speaker

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:49:00 GMT

The organizers of GR8 in the US conference, Bill Turner and Shaun Jurgemeyer, announced today that Venkat Subramaniam has been named the conference kickoff speaker.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc. has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. He helps his clients succeed with Agile Development and various software technologies. He is a frequent invited speaker at various international software conferences. He's author of .NET Gotchas (O'Reilly), co-author of the 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer, and author of Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer and Programming Scala (all from Pragmatic Bookshelf).

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.

GR8 in the US Call For Proposals

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:32:00 GMT

The GR8 in the US conference, to be held April 16th, 2010, is now accepting presentation proposals. This one day event covers Groovy, Grails, Griffon and other GR8 technologies. There will be four concurrent tracks, both presentations and workshops, two guest speakers, a panel session, and a Meet the Speakers happy hour.

Submit your presentation/workshop proposals to GR8 in the US Call For Proposals.

November 2009 Groovy - Grails Job Market

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:52:00 GMT

Groovy is back in the top 50 in the Tiobe Programming Community Index, coming in at 47. The numbers are otherwise very anemic, dropping in most measures on Dice and Indeed. Where they did rise, the rise was insignificant.

The TIOBE Programming Community Index for Groovy
Month / Year	Rating	Change	Rank
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
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
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
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	--

October 2009 Groovy - Grails Job Market

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:07:00 GMT

Considering the Dice and Indeed numbers rose for the second straight month, stronger than any previous month tracked by this survey, and that the Indeed numbers rose significantly, it is surprising that Groovy dropped out of the top 50 in the Tiobe Programming Community Index. One possible explanation is that other languages saw a greater surge in demand than did Groovy. Another is that the Tiobe index does not correlate well with the employment market.

Numbers from GrailsJobs has been added to this survey beginning this month. There were no postings on the GrailsJobs board in September. As the only dedicated GR8 technologies job board that I know of, I would hope that it would be the best indicator of the GR8 employment market. The number of postings are insignificant and seemingly unrepresentative. If that remains true, GrailsJobs may not remain in this survey.

The TIOBE Programming Community Index for Groovy
Month / Year	Rating	Change	Rank
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
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
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
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	--

GR8 in the US 2010 Conference Official Date

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:37:00 GMT

At last we have an official date! April 16th, 2010. GR8 in the US 2010 is a conference focusing on Groovy, Grails, Griffon and all the other GR8 technologies we love. It will be held at the:

Holiday Inn Bloomington
1201 West 94th Street
Bloomington, MN 55431

This location is at the 94th St exit of Interstate 35W. It is just a short hop from the airport, the light rail, and the Mall of America, to which there is a regular shuttle. It is conveniently located to both downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul.

The tentative schedule of events and other information will be coming soon!

Hope to see you there!

On URL Mappings

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:02:00 GMT

What is obvious to one person often is not to others. For the GR8 conference, it is necessary to have a separate home page by region, as well as having a default home page when no region is specified. All of these are database driven. So, I created a HomeController and created two views: index and show. The index view is the default page and will show information for all conferences. The show view will show specific data for each of the GR8 conferences. I knew I would have to use URL mappings, but I am the type of person who does not read the assembly directions when he brings home the box from Home Depot. Handling the default view was very simple and only required the mapping:

"/"(controller:'home', action:'index')

My first thought about handling the region specific mappings was not nearly as successful. It was my thought to take the default controller/action/id mapping:

"/$controller/$action?/$id?"()

and add a closure wherein I test the controller value to see if it happened to be one of the region codes. One of my iterations looked like this:

"/$controller/$action?/$id?" {
    if ('$controller' == 'us') {
        controller = 'home'
        region= '$action'
        action = 'show'
    }
    else {
        "/$controller/$action?/$id?"()
    }
}

This didn't work too well and I quickly abandoned this path. I thought I might be relegated to statically defining the region mappings like so:

"/us" {
    region = 'us'
    controller = 'home'
    action = 'show'
}

Well, this will work, but I wanted something more dynamic. I didn't want to have to repeat the above block for each region, let alone for each variation of upper and lower case letters. Note, though, that an arbitrary variable, region, was set here. This is a nice thing to remember. Arbitrary variables are available as part of the params. So, I changed the block of code above to:

"/$region" {
controller = 'home'
action = 'show'
}

This worked great for mapping the various regions, but it has a glaring weaknesses. It overrode the default controller/action/id mapping when only a controller was specified in the URL. The controller name would be interpreted as a region, the request would be processed by the HomeController, the region looked up and not found and end up being redirected to the index view. Enter constraints. By adding constraints to the above, the region mapping is only triggered when the constraints are true.

"/$region" {
    controller = 'home'
    action = 'show'
    constraints {
        region matches: /(U|u)(S|s)|(E|e)(U|u)|(A|a)(U|u)/
    }
}

The only drawback to this is that if we ever want to add or change a region code, the pattern will have to be changed. Since this is something that should only change infrequently, it is a small price to pay. The pattern allows any combination of upper or lowercase letters for any of the three region codes: US, EU, and AU.

There is one more caveat, and that is a design choice I made and others may not. If some Grails smartypants thinks he will trick the system by entering the URL path /home/show thinking that he will cause problems will be redirected to the default home. Similarly, entering path /home/eu will get a page not found view. I don't care to try to handle these. People that behave will never have these issues.