Groovy and Grails presentation at Lexis Nexis

March 14, 2009

My friend Curtis Mitchell invited me to speak to some of the developers at Lexis Nexis about Groovy and Grails. I was honored to speak, but also slightly nervous. For some reason I’d got it in to my head that they were a Java development shop. *Me* presenting to experienced Java developers makes me slightly nervous. I don’t know all the terms or have the battle scars to relate to them. I’ve not done EJB work, nor J2EE work (JEE now?), etc – so that was making me a bit nervous.

I got there a bit early, then realized I’d forgotten my stupid macbook vga adapter (one of the more acute drawbacks of having a macbook). Then I realized they were mostly a .net shop, which made me even more nervous. Why was I here? How would I relate on a technical level?

I ended up using my slides for “Groovy/Grails for non-Java developers” which seemed to work out OK. There were a few aspects of Groovy they seemed impressed with over C#. At least one specific point I remember is the automatic private properties and automatically compiled get/set methods – I think that appeared cleaner to some of the devs there.

I got some good questions about some of the Java aspects, and just some of the dynamic aspects of Groovy. Some of the devs seemed pretty up on dynamic language stuff in general, and talked of some of the stuff going on in the upcoming .net DLR. I learned about extension methods in .net 3.5, which seem to be a similar way to modify existing classes (like adding new methods on to the sealed String class, for example). Whether or not you can add stuff at runtime with extension methods, I dunno – forgot to ask.

All in all, after a few minutes I relaxed more. I quickly changed my brain from thinking about Groovy/Grails specifically, to 1) talking more generally about dynamic languages (some slides had Ruby and PHP example code too) and 2) bashing Java the language for its verbosity relative to dynamic languages like Groovy. Once I’d made the presentation more about “here’s what’s going on in Java re: dynamic languages”, it felt more comfortable to me, and hopefully to the audience. I wasn’t there to get them to switch from .net (no good reason to do that!) but I think it gave some of them a fresh view of what’s going on in other camps, and also what dynamic languages bring to the table re: productivity.

Thanks Curtis and the L/N gang for your invitiation and hospitality (and cheap sodas!)