Notes from the Groovy and Grails meetup

I went to the Groovy and Grails meetup which was basically the highlight of CommunityOne, although it wasn't technically part of communityOne. It was put on by No Fluff Just Stuff and G2One.

It started with Guilluime giving the state of the Union on Groovy and Grails. Then came folks from LinkedIn talking about their experiences using Grails and finally by Mathew Porter of Contegix talking about why they use Grails internally instead of Rails as they do a tremendous
amount of Rails hosting. This was very interesting and he made two big points.

1. Grails scales for less cost (hardware)
2. The Grails platform is more stable and they don't have to constantly upgrade the technologies, re-train developers, etc.
   
   

After the presentations they formed a panel of No Fluff Just Stuff experts and talked about subjects like the future of Java, where languages fit with the platform, SOA, etc. It was a lively discussion and interesting to see the experts contemplating the same issues that the rest of us humble developers have.

It was nice to meet and talk to folks there. I met Dave Klein JUG leader (from where evades me), Jeff Brown and Guillaume Laforge of G2One fame, Dierk Konig , writer of the fantastic Groovy In Action (GINA) and my beloved Webtest plugin for Grails, and my favorite Tech writer Scott Davis who is also the Chief Editor of aboutgroovy.com (correction, I had before stated that Scott Davis was the CE of groovyblogs.org which is Glen Smith). All very cool people to talk too and very passionate about groovy and grails.