Kenneth Liu
Lead Developer for IEEE Spectrum
Ken is a software engineer for the IEEE based in the NYC metro area. He leads the development of several websites for IEEE Spectrum (http://spectrum.ieee.org).
Ken has been working with Groovy and Grails exclusively for the past two years and has over 15 years of experience building large Java-based applications in many diverse industries including publishing, pharma, automotive, telecom, and travel. Ken holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech.
Presentations
Modularizing your Grails application with private plugins
This talk will cover the most underrated feature of Grails -- the plugin system. Grails plugins are usually thought of as a way to add useful features to a new Grails application, but the plugin system also provides a powerful mechanism for reuse by breaking up a large application into reusable vertical slices.
I'll start with a brief overview of Grails plugin development and expand on this to show how to create private plugins to break apart a monolithic Grails application into reusable application components. I'll show how to implement default functionality in these plugins that you can override in different applications.
The talk will be presented in the context of a real-world case study, looking at how our team launched a new website by first extracting core parts of our existing Grails application into a private plugin. I'll also discuss some lessons learned.
I will also cover related practical considerations such as dependency management, release management, CI builds, testing, and application configuration.