GR8Conf Europe 2011 has ended, and what a blast! To me, this was the best GR8Conf ever! We had 28 sessions, 25 speakers, 4 workshops, 3 days, two tracks, and the number of tweets about the conference was almost endless.

Here are some of, what others tweeted about GR8Conf after the conference:

@frankvilhelmsen

Frank Vilhelmsen

Now back at job again and going to look at "clean" POJ code and J2EE security. It has been a few good conferences #gr8conf and #gotocph

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@xlson

Leonard Axelsson

Been a great week with #gr8conf in Copenhagen and a long weekend in Malmö with @asalse and friends. Should get away more often.

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@michaelkrog

Michael Krog

Wow. #gr8conf in Copenhagen was great. I'll for sure be considering Grails for http://qashapp.com or other future projects.

@mrhaki

Hubert Klein Ikkink

#gr8conf conference report: http://t.co/ql0WTmj, http://t.co/vPPagZu, http://t.co/NZOX1bh

@marcopas

Marco Pas

Also many thanks to the Danish, a great country with wonderful people! #gr8conf #denmark

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@marcopas

Marco Pas

Back to normal after a wonderful time at #gr8conf, thanks to all participants that made my first visit to this conference one to remember.

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@smaldini

Stephane Maldini

#gr8conf was awesome... Groovy community is definetely amazing

@Tuathaa

Ilinca Vintila

back at work, trying to figure out which of all the cool features presented to implement first. thanks for an awesome experience #gr8conf

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@sternegross

@pscnunes

Paulo Nunes

Fantastic #gr8conf in Copenhagen. The enthusiastic groovy/grails/griffon community really makes you enjoy your job.

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@gitmonkey

Jan

I really enjoyed the #gr8conf,but I'm pretty exhausted.Had a great time listening to talks and exchanging thoughts.Thanks to the organizers!

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@mrhaki

Hubert Klein Ikkink

At home. Thank you for the great #gr8conf !

@pniederw

Peter Niederwieser

#gr8conf was a blast! Many thanks to the organizers.

@marioggar

Mario García

:-( #gr8conf is over. It was awesome.See you next year!!!! :-)

@sergicontre

Sergio Contreras

Congratulations for the event.Very impressed by the level of the sessions.10 for the organization and speakers. see you next year! #gr8conf

@mlkristiansen

Morten Kristiansen

Thanks to all the attendees, the speakers, and especially @sbglasius for a fantastic conference. Already looking forward to #gr8conf 2012

@apentity

Arne Pedersen

#gr8conf was a great conference thanks to all. Ill be there next year.

@AndreasArledal

Andreas Arledal

Big thanks to @sbglasius with crew for #gr8conf. I had a great time. Especially fun to meet old and new groovy friends.

@darthvader42

Stefan Armbruster

kudos to @sbglasius and all his helping hands for organizing this gr8 event #gr8conf

@breskeby

Rene Gröschke

Heading home after an awesome week at #gr8conf in cph. Thx to @vaclav_pech for guiding me to the airport

@brianjohnsendk

Brian Johnsen

On our way home from another brilliantly executed #gr8conf Looking forward to 2012!

@frankvilhelmsen

Frank Vilhelmsen

A a few snapshots pictures from the #gr8conf conference: http://bit.ly/ltnsWi

@skurt

Sebastian Kurt

All These great #gr8conf guys (Most of them...) http://t.co/zolyji6

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@marcinerdmann

Marcin Erdmann

Thx @sbglasius for a great #gr8conf, already looking forward to the next year edition, maybe as a speaker again....

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@ixchelruiz

ixchelruiz

#gr8conf Getting ready for the Speaker's panel. This conference has a huge & amazing number of Speakers!!

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #9: small, focussed conferences encourage lots of interaction

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@xlson

Leonard Axelsson

Big round of applause to @sbglasius & crew for arranging a truly GR8 conference! #gr8conf

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #8: the #groovy community is friendly, welcoming, and engaging

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #7: #groovy is versatile - from small scripts to big apps, imperative, 00, functional, concurrent, DSLs, ...

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #6: #groovy community is very much into automated testing at all levels. True professionals.

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@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #5: #groovy community is very much into automated testing at all levels. True professionals.

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #5: #groovy community has a "getting things done" attitude; proved by the @Hackergarten

@mittie

Dierk König

#gr8conf takeaway #4: #groovy performance has much improved and more is to be expected

As beging part of the organizing crew, I would like to express my thanks for all the nice feedback. I'm sure that next edition of GR8Conf Europe will be just as exciting as it was this year.

Stay tuned for more information later!

/Søren Berg Glasius

GR8Conf Europe organizing crew.

I'm delighted to say, that GR8Conf 2011 is in session. We have just started the 3rd European iteration of GR8Conf, and we got a room packed with attendees. We got 25 expert speakers, 28 sessions, two tracks and lots and lots of GR8 stuff ready for all the attendees.

If you are at the conference, welcome! If not, follow the #gr8conf hashtag on Twitter to read about all the exciting stuff going on.

Most of the GR8conf sessions will be recorded, and will be published later on Parleys. Thank you to Gennemtænkt IT for sponsoring the recordings.

/sbglasius

Less than a week to conference start... time is flying! I've got another interview ready for you, this time with Burt Beckwith from SpringSource.

Hi Burt, let the readers know who you are?

I was a Math major in school, but I've always been into computers - I was the first in my school to own a computer (a TRS-80, back in 1979). My interests were in statistics and numerical methods (and fractals but that was more for fun) so I did a lot of coding for that.

My first jobs out of school were statistics-related but I switched to software development in 1998, and started using Java and doing web development in 1999. I thought enterprise development sounded interesting and did a lot of work with EJBs and even wrote a book on WebLogic and J2EE but once I discovered Spring I was glad to leave that all behind.

And what do you bring to GR8Conf?

I'll be doing a talk on GORM (some advanced topics, tips and tricks, etc.) and a University session on creating plugins. I've created or rewritten over 25 plugins, so this is something I've thought a lot about. My goal is to talk about best practices and various types of plugins, touching on development practices, how to test, etc. It will be a participatory session where we'll create a real plugin and even release it during the talk.

What got you into Groovy-land?

I heard about Groovy around 2004 and saw a couple of talks at a local No Fluff Just Stuff. At the time it seemed interesting but impractical, and I didn't do anything with it. But I've done a lot of work with Spring and Hibernate and was looking to branch out beyond traditional Java, and I started looking at Python, Rails, and Grails around 2007. Obviously Grails made the most sense to me given my background.

I got a job at a Cambridge startup that was using Grails and was able to work full-time on it - this was at the beginning of 2008, just before 1.0 was released. I had worked with Acegi/Spring Security in a few Spring-based applications so I was curious about the Acegi Grails plugin. I fixed a couple of bugs and upgraded the plugin to use Spring Security 2, and that was the beginning of my work with plugins.

What do you look forward to at GR8Conf next week?

I'm interested in doing Hackergartens here in Boston so I'm looking forward to that to see how it's done. Also looking forward to the Neo4j talk since I've been working in the NoSQL space recently, and seeing Václav Pech talk on GPars should be cool. But for me the big draw is the social aspect - it's great to catch up with the speakers and to talk to users about their experiences and how they're using the technologies.

Thank you for your time. See you next week!

Thanks, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at the conference and checking out Copenhagen.

/sbglasius

We just want to let you know, that the GR8'est event in the Groovy community is still open for registrations. 

The conference features a tutorial day, two days conference with two tracks, hackergarten, 25 speakers and plenty of sessions to keep both new and advanced Groovy, Grails and Griffon users occupied for days!

The tutorial day is May 17th, and the conference days are on May 18th and 19th.

Just point your browser to http://gr8conf.eu/register to get your conference pas!