By Guillaume LaForge

The latest major version of Groovy was released a few months ago, and it's time to have a closer look at what's inside!

This session will cover the improved Domain-Specific Language capabilities thanks to the command chain expressions. We'll move on to speak about the continued runtime performance improvement work to make Groovy the fastest dynamic language around. Then we'll see how more functional closures have become in this release, and we'll overview the built-in JSON support. And we'll review the most important AST transformations that have been added for removing even more boilerplate code from your code bases. And we'll finish with miscelanous coverage of improvements to the syntax, of improved and secured Groovy integration in your Java applications, and much more.

By Guillaume LaForge

This talk examines how dynamic languages in general and Groovy in particular take us toward the goal of writing programs for a particular domain using phrases that look familiar to subject matter experts from that domain. Groovy, is a popular and successful dynamic language for the JVM. It offers many features that allow you to create embedded Domain Specific Languages(DSLs) including Closures, compile-time and run-time metaprogramming, command chain expressions, operator overloading, named arguments and other concise syntax conventions.

The talk highlights many of Groovy's DSL capabilities through numerous realistic examples. We'll give the example, explain the tricks used to implement the DSL, including any pros and cons as well as tackle the often forgotten but key aspects of readability vs complexity, testability, evolution, and the various considerations to keep in mind while designing DSLs.

By Guillaume LaForge

Guillaume will speak 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.