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Title: Groovy Programming
Proposer: russel_winder
Type: Workshop
Duration: all day
Description: Introducing Groovy and how to use it.

Groovy is a dynamically type language running on the JVM, designed to be symbiotic with Java. Groovy has traction within the community in many directions.

• For providing dynamic language capabilities within Java systems, thereby avoiding direct use of Java reflection.
• For rapidly creating new applications founded on Java frameworks.
• Test: Spock is the rapidly rising star of test frameworks. It covers the full spectrum of testing needs from unit test to functional requirement, bridging the gap between unit test frameworks such as TestNG and JUnit4, and full BDD frameworks such as Cucumber.
• Build: Gradle is becoming the build framework of choice supplanting Ant and Maven.
• Web applications: Grails is a solid and well used system for creating Web applications using Groovy harnessing the industry standard frameworks Hibernate, Spring and Quartz.
• Rich clients: Griffon is a framework for creating rich clients using Groovy and supporting both Swing and JavaFX.

This 1-day workshop is a practical, “hands-on” introduction to the Groovy programming language and how to use it, targeted at people who have some programming experience, but who are not necessarily Java programmers. By the end of the workshop you will be in a position to use Groovy for scripts and applications, and perhaps more importantly, be able to continue to investigate Groovy and its capabilities.

People will be expected to bring their own computers (assumed to be laptops), with software pre-installed. It matters not which operating system is used as the JDK and Groovy is available for all of them. NB A full JDK needs to be installed, not just a JRE. Full installation guidelines will be sent to people who sign up for the workshop.