Last week we went to Copenhagen to attend the annual gr8conf.eu – a conference dedicated to groovy, grails and other technologies starting with gr (gradle, griffon, …)

The conference took place at the IT University, a great location with lots of space and perfect auditoriums where the sessions of two tracks were hold. I was impressed by the quality of the projectors – bright 1920×1200 pixel resolution images!

The talks at the conference were very good too. It was good to see and hear all the bright minds behind those great new technologies presenting what they are working on. Almost all of the important people in the groovy universe were at the conference and show how passionate they are about their projects.

The content of the talks were a mixture of information about the core technologies and experience reports from real world usage. The project lead of Grails, Graeme Rocher, held two talks, one about the Road to Grails 3.0 and one about Grails under the Hood. Both provided great insights about what and how the Grails team is working on for the upcoming releases. Some of the upcoming features and improvements include a solution for conflicts between plugins and the change to Aether for dependency management.

Another very nice session was „Groovy Goodness“ by Hubert Klein Ikkink (@mrhaki). He showed what @DelegatesTo, @TypeChecked and @CompileStatic enable. It was great to see how many other Groovy feature could be used that I had never seen before or had already forgotten about – a great tips and tricks session.

Jürgen Höller talked at his session „Spring 4 and Groovy 2“ about how the Springframework is going to support Groovy in the next major version coming this fall. Next to supporting JDK 8 features like lambdas and method references it will be possible to use the Springframework with Groovy in the same way as with Java. Spring will support Closures and many other Groovy language features. It will also provide a DSL to configure Spring via Groovy like with the BeanBuilder in Grails. It is really a big approval for Groovy that Spring wants to treat it on the same level as Java and officially considers it as a first class citizen for Springframework 4.0.

All in all the trip to gr8conf in Copenhagen was worth the effort because it assured us that the investments we made in Groovy and Grails is backed by a great community and many other companies. The best times are lying ahead for all those exciting new technologies.