Recap: Groovy & Grails Workshop

On October 9th we had our second event: a workshop on Groovy and Grails. After a pizza and sandwiches sponsored by VX Company, Maarten Hoppen gave an introduction to Groovy, the language that is behind grails. In a nutshell, Groovy is a dynamic language influenced by similar languages such as Ruby and Python. Groovy, however, has a strong integration with Java, and therefore allows to easily adoptation by Java developers and easily integration of Java backend and Groovy frontend. Grails = Groovy + Spring + Hibernate. The dynamic nature of Groovy, without the need to compile into bytecode like Java, allows for fast development. Groovy and Grails bridges the enterprise Java world and the scripting world, which is up-and-coming as machines become faster.

After a short introduction, we got in pairs to work on the exercises. After a quick glance at the basics we have played with more advanced features: closures, how groovy handles with collections, with regular expressions. The evening was too short to complete the exercises so we all took that home with us. VX Company provided us with the course material, including hands-on exercises, and a CD with the necessary software, and in the end every one also received the book “Beginning Groovy and Grails“.