2Paths Team Blog

With forecasts of April snow, our 2Paths contingent of two headed off at the crack of dawn one Friday for Bellevue, WA to attend the No Fluff Just Stuff - Pacific Northwest Software Symposium (NFJS). Having only spent 10 minutes at the border (whew!), we arrived early enough in the Seattle area to fit in some Fluff (aka shopping and dining) before getting into the Stuff.

After a quick introduction by Evangelist Scott Davis, and with hopes of winning an IPhone by the end of the weekend, I headed right into his double-bill of sessions about Groovy. The first one entitled “Groovy, the Blue Pill: Writing Next Generation Java Code in Groovy” was a good gentle introduction to neophytes like myself on Groovy basics. Now that my interest was piqued, I was eager to continue on with Scott’s next session “Groovy, The Red Pill: Metaprogramming, the Groovy Way to Blow a Buttoned-Down Java Developer’s Mind”. Never mind the Blue Pill - the Red Pill is where it’s at!

Scott’s enthusiasm for Groovy was definitely contagious, and my mind started churning, trying to think of ways to start introducing Groovy into current projects or future projects at 2Paths. An allure of Groovy is that it’s a dynamic language and can be run on the JVM. Groovy is implemented in Java, so the two languages offer seamless interoperability. Groovy compiles down to Java bytecode, so Groovy code can call Java code, and vice-versa. This would make integration into our existing infrastructure much simpler.

The Blue Pill was starting to take effect, as Scott showed us the terseness of the language. No need to labouriously write getters and setters, amongst other many nifty language shortcuts. Who needs semicolons or parentheses anymore? Because Groovy really is Java under the hood, programmers unwilling to let go of that extra baggage can continue to use it and nothing will break. We were then shown demos on how much more quickly we could bang out Unit Tests in Groovy.

In the next session, the Red Pill stuff was pretty mind-blowing. Introducing method pointers, closures, the ExpandoMetaClass. Method pointers make our code more readable and understandable by allowing us to alias methods with semantics tailored to our own business logic. Closures are an exciting and powerful inclusion in Groovy that aren’t available in Java, allowing us to pass around executable snippets of code. And last but certainly not least, there’s the ExpandoMetaClass that lets us either do a lot of really cool stuff, or get ourselves into a heap of trouble. With the ExpandoMetaClass we can intercept methods and inject methods into any Class. Scott showed us some fun examples that got us all fired up wanting to try more!

With my introduction to Groovy setting the stage for the weekend, I went on to choose more sessions on Groovy (Design Patterns, Testing, Groovy with Spring), but also attended other sessions such as Spring Configuration, Regular Expressions, and GIS for Web Developers. I found most of the other sessions mostly affirming knowledge I already had, but augmenting it with good snippets here and there that were new to me. Venkat Subramaniam was the other main Groovy Prophet, and I came home with his book “Programming Groovy” in hand, eager to start integrating Groovy at least into our testing infrastructure.

The atmosphere at NFJS was inspiring, as the speakers all had great enthusiasm for the technologies they were touting, and the audience was generally equally as keen. It felt great to be in a large conference hall amongst so many other like-minded programmers, all sharing, and getting fired up about what we do, and our seemingly unlimited potential. I fully recommend NFJS (regardless of me not winning an IPhone), and would love the opportunity to go again!

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