Hi Seb, nice to touch base with you again. Tell the reader who you are?

Hi ! My name is Sébastien Blanc, I'm 34, 2 kids and I'm a JEE Software Engineer. After spending several years in the Netherlands, I'm now settled on the french Riviera working for the Sopra Group Company with an assignement for a very prestigious customer.

Like Cédric Champeau I discovered programming with my Amstrad PC1512 when I was 8 and I never stop programming since then.

You were at GR8Conf two years ago, and now you're here again. What will you speak about this time?

I will give 2 talks this year : One about Groovy DSL, together with Corinne Krych, We will show case a spin-off of real life example of a Groovy DSL deployed on large scale inside a big company.

My second talk will be about Grails and Mobile Web Applications : I will show how Grails is well deisgned to produce Mobile Web Apps and I will show cool stuff like Mobile scaffolding, Geolocation and Geospatial requests with MongoDB. I will also introduce some of the exciting (personnal) projects on which I'm working on (Phonegap plugin for example).

How did you start with Groovy and Grails?

I discovered Grails during Javapolis (Now called Devoxx) 2006. Graeme showed us how easy it was to create your own Tag library with Grails. 

Since then, I've never been stop using it. In 2009, I created my first Plugin, iwebkit, and I had the chance to demonstrate during the Groovy&Grails Exchange 2009 in London. 

At the same period, I've been an active member of the Dutch Groovy&Grails user group together with Erik Pragt.

During all this time I've tried to evangelize my company to Grails&Groovy with some great successes.

Today, back In France, I continue my ""Grails Quest"" ; beside the chance of working on a Groovy project for my customer and continue to work on the two areas I love : Mobile Web & Grails.

I've just started a new user group: The Riviera GUG  and besides Gr8Conf EU, I will also be presenting at Devoxx France and at Gr8Conf US.

What do look forward to at this GR8Conf?

Well, the agenda is as always amazing, it will be hard to make a choice. In 2010, for the second Gr8conf edition there was only one track, so no choices to make but now ...

I'm also very happy to meet the whole community again, the Hackergarten, the speaker's dinner ...

Do you have anything to add, before ending this interview?

Well, I have some ideas for the hackergarten about new plugins on which I'm working on and I think that could be in interesting subject to work on !

Cool, thanks. See you in June

Thanks! I'm very excited to attend again the Gr8Conf after having skipped the 2011 edition! 

sbglasius

Hi Guillaume, my friend. Nice to have you here. Tell us about yourself, in the event that there are readers not knowing who you are?

Hi all, I'm Guillaume Laforge. I'm the project lead of Groovy, and I've been working on the project for quite a number of years... 8 already!

GR8Conf is moving closer. What will you present at the conference?

Groovy 2.0 should be ready and released before the GR8Conf conference starts, so I'll take this opportunity to present all the cool things we've been working on in this important milestone in the life of the project.

And how did you get started with Groovy?

Back in 2003, at a small software vendor I was working at, I was looking for a "Java scripting" solution, to further customize our application for our clients. There was not even a handful of alternative languages for the JVMs back then, and Groovy really stood as more active and promising of the pack, and that's how I got to join the original founders, James and Bob, and helped shape the language and its ecosystem to what it is today.

What are you going to focus on, at GR8Conf?

Being focused on Groovy itself, you don't always have much time to play with all the nice technologies / frameworks / libraries of the whole Groovy ecosystem. So it's going to be a great opportunity for me to learn about all these projects, and investigate where they can be of use in my daily needs, etc. I'm really looking forward to chatting with all the guys behind those projects, and thanking them for what they bring to the ecosystem.

What else can you tell us?

As I said, Groovy 2.0 should be out by then, announced officially at a conference for the first time, so I hope you will all like what we're bringing in this release, and hope to exchange with our users to hear about their feedback.

Well, I can hardly wait till it's June! Nice talking to you and see you there!

I hope everybody will enjoy this conference, have fun and have the opportunity to meet all the nice people we have in the community. I'm impatient to meet you all in Copenhagen!

sbglasius

Presented by Rob Fletcher

Hi Steve, great to have you here. Tell a bit about yourself?

I'm currently a Senior Technical Consultant with Cantina, out of Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Cantina is a consulting design and development firm focused on the connected experience, including web, smart phone, tablet, connected TV, and the infrastructure to make it work. At Cantina I’ve worked with many different clients and industries including PUMA, Putnam Investments, Innocentive, New England Sports Network (NESN), Ascend Learning and Hachette Publishing Group. In addition, I help organize the Boston Grails User Group (GUG).

I have been developing software for a living for the past decade, holding a variety of positions and working with a variety of frameworks and languages. After a few years in the industry, I went back to graduate school at Tufts University to earn a Master's degree in Computer Science, where I studied machine learning and data mining while working as a developer for the school. While I'll always have a soft spot for algorithmic work, my strength lies in developing for the web. Over the past few years I've been focused on building REST APIs and dynamic, Javascript-heavy front-ends.

Tell us, what you will be covering at GR8Conf?

Good question. I'm a big proponent of applications where the business logic and data are served up via a REST API, which allows for development of decoupled, interchangeable interfaces to display and manipulate the data in different ways. 

However it is generally not necessary for the API to always send the same sets of data, or for the UI to render in the exact same fashion to different devices. 

To address these issues I will discuss several architecture and design principles, including responsive design, progressive enhancement, semantic CSS, and client-side HTML generation, which we've come to view as falling under the HTML 5 'umbrella'. "HTML 5" may refer to the components listed in the actual W3C spec (e.g. audio/video tags, local storage, web sockets, canvas, etc), but not all of these are universally accepted across all browsers. When our clients ask for "HTML 5" they are not necessarily asking for a 3d app rendered via WebGL. 

My workshop will touch on all of these. I will discuss RESTful API design and why Grails has become my tool of choice. I will present the concepts of responsive design and progressive enhancement, along with several powerful frameworks and tools that have sprung up in recent years that help tame Javascript development. The majority of this workshop will be highly interactive: attendees will be guided through an application build that demonstrates these techniques so that they will gain real hands on experience.

Please bring a laptop. Alternatively, you could make a new friend and pair program with someone else.

What brought you to the world of Groovy and Grails?

Until around three years ago the primary languages I used were Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby, along with some of their related frameworks for constructing web applications (e.g. Django, Cake, Spring). After joining Cantina, I was introduced to Grails and became an immediate convert, particularly after using straight Servlets and Spring for so long. It was soon after this that I helped set up the Boston Grails/Groovy user group.

I know you were attending GR8Conf EU last year. What do you expect to bring home from the conference this year?

If one has any interest in the GR8 family of languages, attendance is a must! Meeting some of the biggest names in the Groovy ecosystem and seeing fascinating and informative presentations gives you the impetus to immediately try out the new techniques and software you’ve seen demonstrated.

I encourage people to take a look at the presentation lineup; that should be enough to convince anyone to attend. Specifically, though, I'm looking forward to attending as many of the Gradle sessions as I can along with the presentation on Netflix's Asgard system. 

Some final words, before this interview is over?

As a reminder to those out there thinking of attending: this workshop will be interactive. Please bring a laptop. Also, Freddie Mercury was born on the island of Zanzibar.

Thank you for your time, it was nice talking to you.

Thank you, too! I'm really looking forward to this year's conference.

sbglasius

Hi Ivo, tell us about your background for speaking at GR8Conf

I work for Ixor, a Belgian company specialized in agile Java and Groovy projects.

In the past 4 years, I've exclusively worked on Grails projects. Most of them were small projects build by one or two persons, until two years ago, when I started on a major enterprise application for a telco.

What is your topic for the conference?

I will talk about using Grails for large applications in an enterprise environment.

While working on the telco application, we quickly realized that we were pushing the boundaries of Grails. Only dealing with web services (no direct database access) and building a custom UI component library were features that did not fit into a typical Grails application. So we created a few new plugins and made some contributions to the Grails core to make our development scale.

I will also cover how we managed code size and complexity and what build infrastructure we used.

How did you get into Groovy and Grails?

I've been following Groovy and Grails since the very beginning, but only until four years ago I got the opportunity to use them in a small project. Since then I used both in every project I worked on!

What's your favourite thing about GR8Conf?

This year I'm especially interested in the Gradle stuff. The Gradle people are doing a great job and I hope to learn a lot during the conference.

Furthermore I look forward to discuss the inns and outs of Grails with the core developers.

Anything else you would like to tell the audience?

My last year's talk about webflow resulted in the livesnippets project that provides in depth documentation and sample apps for webflow and some other Grails plugins. Hopefully I can come up with something new this year.

Thanks for your time! See you at the conference

See you all at GR8Conf!

sbglasius

Hi Andreas, let the reader get some facts about you?

I'm from Stockholm, Sweden, where I live with my family. I started doing web development a little more than ten years ago. At first, I did mostly front end development and was active in the web standards movement. Soon I started doing back end development by writing my share of lousy PHP code. Lousy or not, I learned quite a lot during that time and especially that simplicity sometimes is the best solution.

When the Ruby on Rails hype started I jumped on that train and tried quite a few MVC frameworks in different languages and environments, but Ruby was the clear winner for me. I loved the simplicity and most of all the dynamic features of the language. At 2008 I started working as a developer for my current employer, FindOut Technologies, where I'm now the CTO. They where mostly doing Java then, so from the background I had it was natural to start looking at dynamic languages on the JVM and that's how I found Groovy and Grails. Soon after that I started SweGUG together with Leonard Axelsson (@xlson).

Since then I've been lucky enough to be able to work with Groovy and Grails on a daily basis with only a few short breaks, all in all I think I've been involved in 12 Grails projects of varying sizes.

What will you be presenting at GR8Conf?

I will be talking about two subjects, Grails and MongoDB, and how to keep your Grails code clean. 

In the MongoDB session I will give a short intro to MongoDB and how to use it with Grails and I will also share a real world example of how we managed to decrease page load time 20 times by using embedded collections. If the demo gods are with me, I will also give a short demonstration of a MongoDB powered Grails application.

In my other session I will try to share our best practices and the tools we use to follow them. I will talk some about the roles of the different Grails artifacts and the role of TDD. I will also show some bad examples and how to make them better. I hope it will be an interactive session were the practices I share can be discussed, questioned and improved. I will also talk about the role of Javascript in our Grails projects, how we (mis)treat Javascript is one of my pet peeves.

For  you, what is the best part of GR8Conf?

As always I mostly look forward to meet all the people. I'm also looking forward to the Gradle stuff wich is a subject that's been on my to-learn list for quite a while now. If I should mention something else it must be what's coming in Groovy 2.0 and new features of Spock, but I think the whole list of presentations looks great.

Thank you, and see you at the conference!

And thank you, I really look forward to attend this year too, it's my third time and the previous visits have been great. Other organizers have a lot to learn from you guys, keep up the good work.

sbglasius

This interview was made during Hackergarten at last years GR8Conf. This year Burt will also be presenting at GR8Conf!

;

Hi Cédric, nice to have you with us. Tell us a bit about yourself?

Hi! My name is Cédric Champeau, I'm 33, husband, father of two boys and I am another french Groovy guy living near Nantes in France. I am a core Groovy committer and I'm working for SpringSource on the Groovy language. As many geeks, I started coding young, at 8, on an Amstrad PC 1512, mostly copying source code you had in magazines at that time (in basic, but also assembler!) Since that period, my passion for programming never decreased and I am very happy to work on a programming language such as Groovy today, because I'm more interested in developing tools than developing applications!

What is the topic you will be speaking about at the conference?

Since I joined SpringSource, I spent a lot of time on the development of Groovy 2.0, and especially, I worked on two features known as static type checking and static compilation. In this session, I will explain what those two concepts cover, and who they are made for. I think this session will be instructive for people coming from a Java background and who start looking at Groovy and may feel frustrated about the lack of type checking. For Groovy gurus, the session will also be of interest if they tend to write "critical" parts of code in Java (or another JVM language) and that they would like to be able to write a full application in Groovy.

GR8: Hi Luke. Tell us about yourself.

G'day there. I'm from a small town in rural Australia, though I'm now living in London. It's a rite of passage for Australians to live in London for a time and it also puts me in a more reasonable timezone for collaborating with my colleagues. I work for Gradleware, the company behind the Gradle build tool.

I've been working as a software professional for about 7 years now and have been using Groovy for about 5 of those years I think.

GR8: What will you be covering at your first GR8Conf 

I'll be talking about both my personal open source project and Gradle of course. Geb is a groovy based browser automation tool, which means it is effectively a Groovy DSL for Selenium 2. I'm looking forward to giving this talk to a very Groovy savvy audience.

My Gradleware colleague, Peter Niederwieser (a.k.a Mr. Spock) and I will be giving a 3 hour Gradle bootcamp which is always a lot of fun. It's a great opportunity for people to get introduced to Gradle, or to go deeper if they are already using it.

I'll also be doing a session on using Gradle to release software, focussing on releasing open source software to Maven Central and releasing Grails plugins with Gradle. This should be fun and hopefully will lead to even more great open source Groovy projects in the future!

GR8: How did you get started with Groovy and Gradle

My first real job was to write a resource provisioning and access control Identity Management system in PHP and Perl. It didn't take long to realise that there must be better tooling out there for this kind of work. After a brief stint with Rails I realised that the JVM was where I wanted to be. I then found Grails, and the rest is history.

I released my first Groovy open source project not long after, called Gldapo. It's kinda like GORM for LDAP repositories. I guess the encouragement and support I got from the great people in the Groovy community really cemented my fondness for the technology and the people around it.

GR8: What do you look forward to at GR8Conf, this being the first time there?

The Groovy community is progressive by definition. Almost everyone who uses Groovy does so because they were looking for a more effective way to do some tasks. That leads to a lot of innovation and exciting new ideas. I see Groovy as a utility knife that every JVM software professional should have in their belt. What better way to sharpen such a tool than being in the presence of so many great Groovy minds?

GR8: Any closing comments?

There is one thing. My Gldapo project that I mentioned earlier is looking for a new custodian. Between Geb and work on Gradle I can't give it the attention it deserves. So if you're interested in Groovy and LDAP, get in touch.

GR8: Thank you for taking time out to do this interview!

Thank you. I look forward to chatting over a drink or two with yourself , the speakers and all of the attendees in Copenhagen.

 

sbglasius