Thanks to speakers, attendees and sponsors, Skills Matter's 5th annual Groovy & Grails eXchange was a great success. There was a real buzz throughout the two days, fostered by some great talks, open-space discussions, brainstorming and a very productive and creative Hackaton!

skillscast videos
We have recorded most of the talks, demos and slides, so check out the SkillsCast videos in the programme below, to learn about the latest innovative ideas, best tools and practices for enterprise web development with Groovy and Grails.

photos
Check out the photos from this year's event here

Thursday 8th December 2011
Track 1 08.30am - 09.30am    WELCOME, REGISTRATION, COFFEE & TEA     09.30 - 10.30    KEYNOTE - GROOVY UPDATE Guillaume LaForge talks about improved Domain-Specific Language capabilities and the continued runtime performance improvement to make Groovy the fastest dynamic language around. He explains how more functional closures have been added in this release and gives an overview of the built-in JSON support and important AST transformations, added to remove even more boilerplate code from your code bases. more...     10.45 - 11.30    DISCOBOT: GROOVY ON ANDROID In this session, Marcin Erdmann and Erik Pragt cover the development of a Groovy application on Android, and will provide some interesting background information on what was done to made this possible. more...     11.45 - 12.30    GAELYK Guillaume LaForge: Guillaume will speak to the Groovy Grails eXchange 2011 about Gaelyk, a lightweight Groovy toolkit for easily developing Groovy applications to be deployed on Google App Engine Java. We'll learn more about what the toolkit provides, how to leverage it for your own needs through some demos, demonstrating views and templates, URL route definitions, plugins, the many shortcuts to the App Engine APIs, the very readable Query DSL to query the datastore. more...     13.30 - 14.15    ENTERPRISE GRADLE This talk from the father of Gradle introduces you to the powerful concepts of Gradle through many real-world examples that are demonstrated live: advantages of declarative over imperative build systems, convention over configuration without rigidity, task definitions and dependencies, the benefits of plugins, deep multi-project support, runtime optimizations through partial builds, harvesting existing functionality through Ant and Maven integration, build migration and upcoming advanced enterprise features like parallel and distributed builds. more...     14.30 - 15.15    ADVANCED GRADLE Hans Dockter: In this talk, Hans Dockter covers many Gradle power features that are particularly helpful for the real heavy lifting often needed in enterprise builds. We'll start with the concept and advantages of autowiring the Task Dependency Graph based on the inputs and outputs. Hans talks in detail about the new dependency management features such as the new cache, customizable dynamic revision handling and customizable version conflict resolution. more...     15.30 - 16.15    SPOCK Luke Daley: In this talk, Luke Daley explains Spock's approach to state-based, data-driven, and behavior-based testing. Next, we will explore some of Spock's extensions, in particular the Grails plugin and the Spring TestContext Framework integration. Finally, we'll look under the covers of Spock and write our own extension. This talk features lots of code and live demos. more...     16.30 - 17.15    JUST KEEP PASSING THE MESSAGES Russel Winder: In this talk, Russel Winder looks at some problems coded up using GPars and compares them with old-style techniques. The result will undoubtedly be a huge move to use of GPars for all Java and Groovy based concurrency and parallelism. more...     18.00 - 21.00pm    HACKERGARTEN Welcome to the Groovy & Grails eXchange Hackergarten! Achievements     21.00pm    OFF TO SLAUGHTERED LAMB! Taking #grailsx discussions to Skills Matter's favorite pub: @theslaughteredlam - give them a foursquare mention or tweet, they deserve it!	Track 2             11.45-12.30    GETTING GROOVY ON THE WEB AND DESKTOP Andres Almiray: Discover how both the Grails and Griffon frameworks bring back the fun to web and desktop development. Grails and Griffon share a lot of history and code, its very likely that what you learn in one framework can be done in the other and vice-versa. Both are pretty much on par when it comes to communication across the wire, serialization or remoting; those are precisely the options that we'll explore in this session to build a Griffon frontend powered by a Grails backend. more...         14.30 - 15.15    THE GRIFFON EXPERIENCE Andres Almiray: In this talk for the Groovy & Grails eXchange, Andres Almiray covers the basics to get you started with Griffon. How applications are structured and built. Then we'll cover threading, testing, deploying, handling of legacy code and even network and database integration. more...     15.30 - 16.15    ASYNCHRONOUS IO ON THE JVM Peter Ledbrook: Node.js has now arrived for the JVM with the Vert.x framework, which has a Groovy API that takes full advantage of closures. Find out what Vert.x is, what you can use it for, and how to use it from Groovy. more...     16.30 - 17.15    METAPROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES WITH GROOVY Jeff Brown: In this talk, Jeff covers a number of advanced metaprogramming concepts in Groovy, including dynamic method interception, custom meta-class implementations and Groovy's Meta Object Protocol to build flexible applications in Groovy including implementing a Domain Specific Language (DSL). more...
Friday 9th December 2011
Track 1 08.30 - 09.30am    WELCOME, REGISTRATION, COFFEE & TEA     09.30 - 10.30am    KEYNOTE - BETTER PRODUCTIVITY: GRAILS 2. With the imminent release of Grails 2, it's time to find out just why we think you should upgrade. Or if you're not using it, why you should give it a second look. Learn about the new usability features that are targeted at improving your productivity, such as the new interactive command line, improved class reloading, and much better unit testing support. You'll also discover powerful new features such as 'where' queries, database migrations, and static resource (CSS, JS, etc.) handling. more...     10.30 - 10.45am    TEA, COFFEE & REFRESHMENTS     10.45 - 11.30am    USING WECEEM - AN EMBEDDABLE GRAILS CMS Marc Palmer: Weceem is the pure Grails CMS that can run as a standalone WAR or be embedded into your own applications. I will show you the basic features of Weceem, and explain how you can extend it with new content types using GORM, and how you can embed Weceem in your application to give you instant editable content within your web app. We will also cover how many simple websites with interactive elements can be created even with the standalone WAR edition. more...     11.30 - 11.45am    TEA, COFFEE & REFRESHMENTS     11.45am - 12.30pm    TACKLING DAY TO DAY GRAILS DECISIONS Andreas Arledal: Working on a day to day basis with a dynamic and constantly evolving framework like Grails can be challenging. Andreas will shares his experience how to: Get to use Grails in your projects Get a quick start with your new Grails project Involve people with little or no experience Choose the right plugins Approach design and architectural decisions Testing - Application Lifecycle Management & Deployment more...     12.30 - 13.30pm    LUNCH     13.30 - 14.15pm    A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A GRAILS STARTUP Tomas Lin & Donovan Frew: Secret Escapes is a private members flash sales travel site (built in Grails) that was launched in January 2010. Over the next year of the application's life, we had to quickly build functionality such as a CRM/CMS, custom theming support and AB testing. In this talk, we will talk about the technology, architecture and lessons we took away from building a real world Grails project. more...     14.15 - 14.30pm    TEA, COFFEE & REFRESHMENTS     14.30 - 15.15pm    CONTINUOUS DELIVERY WITH CLOUDBEES Marco Vermeulen & Nicolas De Loof: A talk about the transition from Continuous Integration to Continuous Delivery, taking it all to the cloud. more...     15.15 - 15.30pm    TEA, COFFEE & REFRESHMENTS     15.30 - 16.15pm    A CLOUD FOR DEVELOPERS: CLOUD FOUNDRY Peter Ledbrook: Companies large and small are starting to offer cloud hosting for applications. Cloud Foundry stands out as being a developer-oriented cloud platform, from its open source nature to its support for multiple languages and frameworks. It's also incredibly easy to develop and deploy applications to it. Find out what Cloud Foundry is and how it affects the way you write your applications. Then see just how well Grails is supported with a live demo. more...     16:15-16:30    TEA, COFFEE & REFRESHMENTS     16:30-17:15    KEEPING GRAILS ONE STEP AHEAD Grails has boosted web app development productivity immensely. But where are the next big gains to come from? This will be a short talk about some of my hopes for the future followed by an open discussion about what you think we should be doing to make Grails kick the ass of all those web framework wannabes. more...     17:15-17:30    #GRAILSX RAFFLES & THANK YOU     17:30-LATE    OFF TO THE SLAUGHTERED LAMB	Track 2             10.45 - 11.30am    HACKING THE SPRING SECURITY PLUGIN Burt Beckwith: In this talk Burt Beckwith looks at customizing behavior, from overriding configuration parameters to creating custom subclasses. We'll look at the internals of Spring Security and the plugin to become more familiar with how things work and interconnect and what the standard workflows look like. Includes some demo's on dding extra login fields, dynamic post-login redirects, and a custom authentication approach. more...         11.45 - 12.30    GRAILS-DATA-MAPPING, GORM & NEO4J Stefan Armbruster: Stefan shares his experience when porting the old neo4j to become a 1st class GORM citizen, followed by a mini case study on a Grails & Neo4j project at a large German telecom provider. more...         13.30 - 14.15pm    TESTING HTTP DEPENDENCIES WITH BETAMAX Robert Fletcher: Testing applications that communicate with external services via HTTP can be tricky and error prone. Betamax is a Groovy testing tool that can record and play back HTTP interactions so that tests are fast, reliable and repeatable. I'll demonstrate how to use Betamax to decouple your application from its external dependencies. more...         14.30 - 15.15pm    PRODUCTIVE GRAILS FUNCTIONAL TESTING Luke Daley: We all know we should be writing functional (i.e. web) tests for our Grails applications, but this can sometimes seem like too much work for not enough gain. In this talk we'll look at the current Grails plugins that are out there that can start to decrease the development and maintenance cost and make getting the coverage you need more achievable. more...         15.30 - 16.15    MAINTAINING TEST SUITES Andrew Kemp: This talk will focus on how you can use the Groovy support in Twist from ThoughtWorks studios to create understandable, maintainable test suites that grow with your application. more...         HANS DOCKTER INTERVIEW Guillaume LaForge & Hans Dockter: Guillaume LaForge talks to Hans Dockter about Gradle, exclusively for the Groovy & Grails eXchange more...