By Andrew Glover

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development essentially focuses on meeting customer needs through reducing wasteful activities. For example, Agile developmental practices push for reducing repetitive documentation and for a rapid acceptance of change; yet, achieving these goals is by no means easy. While a process can enable increased collaboration, for instance, there are various tools that can effectively implement Agile principles. Once such tool is easyb (www.easyb.org), which is a Groovy based domain specific language, which facilitates collaboration by bridging those that define requirements (i.e. customers) and those who turn requirements into code (i.e. development). With easyb, collaborative teams can develop stories in a specific format which are then implemented as tests through a framework which marries the underlying application. This test suite enables change and produces accordance among Agile teams in short order.

In this talk, you will learn how to embrace collaboration and change rapidly by defining easyb stories that exercise a Java application end to end. You will learn how to define specific easyb structures, how to plug them into real code, and how to run them in an automated fashion. You will see first hand how non-coders can define tests easily and how the collaboration this brings yields working software faster.

By Andrew Glover

Groovy has been successfully leveraged at various companies around the world in order to build enterprise applications on the Java platform quickly. In particular, Groovy has proved its value at a large financial services client on more than one occasion to build mission critical applications in short order-- all while leveraging their existing investment in the Java platform from developer tools all they way to data center management.

From exposing legacy data models via RESTful web services to mission critical reporting applications built with GroovySQL and Spring to Groovy's core language features and much much more, I'll show you tips and tricks that separate Groovy from the pack and expose how one can quickly build real world applications that meet a business's needs quickly with fewer lines of code.

By Andrew Glover

Representational state transfer (REST) is a way of thinking, not a protocol or standard-- it's a style of designing loosely coupled applications that rely on named resources (in the form of URLs, URIs and URNs, for instance) rather than messages. Ingeniously, REST piggybacks on the already validated and successful infrastructure of the Web-- HTTP. That is, REST leverages aspects of the HTTP protocol such as GET and POST requests, which map quite nicely to standard business-application needs such as create read, update, and delete (CRUD). By associating requests, which act like verbs, with resources, which act like nouns, you end up with a logical expression of behavior: GET this document and DELETE that record, for example.

To quote Leonardo da Vinci, "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." REST embodies this thought and thus yields highly scalable, loosely coupled systems that, as it turns out, are simple to build. There are a few mechanisms for implementing RESTful applications-- Restlets and JSR 311 are two in a handful of options; however, they address one aspect of RESTful applications and ignore other aspects like an ORM and testing. Groovy's Grails gives you the ability to apply RESTful techniques with a full fledged web application framework that supports an ORM and testing to boot! As you see, using Groovy's Grails framework makes building RESTful Web services a snap.