This year's Gr8Conf Europe in Copenhagen started with a University day. During this day longer sessions are presented to dive deeper into a subject and use a workshop to give the audience hands-on exercises. I presented the Getting Groovy session with an introduction to Groovy. The presentation and accompanying document are available. During my session there was also Gradle bootcamp session. From what I've heard Peter Niederwieser and Luke Daley did a great job introducing Gradle to the audience.
After the lunch I visited My "Perfect" Toolchain Setup for Grails Projects presented by Stefan Armbruster. He gave a good overview of all aspects that relate to a good project setup. Not only the technical stuff like continuous integration, ticket systems, wiki, but also project organization and methodology were covered. It was good to hear the things we do ourselves on projects were also mentioned by Stefan. Stefan provided the audience with a pre-configured virtual machine to be used during the workshop. At the same time the session Creating Responsive HTML 5 Applications in Grails was presented by Stephen Pember. During a workshop the audience was instructed to build a HTML 5 application with Backbone.js
After these two sessions I had to choose between GAELYK bootcamp and Jumpstarting Griffon. I went to the Griffon session presented by Alexander Klein and Andres Almiray. Here we saw how easy it is to write a Griffon application especially if you know Grails. Griffon also provides a very good structure to group the MVC parts in a MVC group. A lot of things are automatically done with Griffon if we follow conventions. This makes writing a GUI Swing application easy. Then like with Grails we can install plugins to add extra functionality to the application in an easy way. After the presentation I was (again) very enthusiastic about Griffon and I really (really) need to work with Griffon in the near future.
The first day ended with Hackergarten. During Hackergarten we can contribute to an open-source project. And because a lot of the core contributors are in the room it is a great to 'hack' with them on the code. Unfortunately I couldn't attend Hackergarten, because I had to get up very early on this day to be on time in Copenhagen.
