NFJS Dallas - Day 1 of 3

My first reaction to NFJS yesterday was how few people there seemed to be. This is Dallas! I expected more than the 100-150 that are here.

I attended the Groovy the Blue Pill, and Groovy the Red pill, and the one on Grails. All were presented by Scott Davis. Groovy looks very nice and I'll have to take a closer look to see if it will help us at work. Grails looks like it could make all of our CRUD apps much easier to develop.

Groovy looks great. I heard someone a couple of years ago say that if an IDE can do something for you like 'generate getters and setters' then why even have it in the code? This is one of the things that Groovy exposes. I would really like not having getters and setters in my business objects. Groovy uses BigDecimal, not float or double! How awesome is that? BigDecimal isn't perfect, but it is so much better as it is than floats! I'll never use floats again (I hope).

My main concern with Grails is that we usually have a layered architecture. Grails, out of the box, seems to want to put everything in the web app/layer. I'm pretty sure we can still use it, it just won't be as simple and straight forward if we don't follow convention and have to do configuration.

The keynote was by Neal Ford of Thoughworks. Very nice 'doom and gloom' for programmers in the US. Chindia will take over software development etc. Maybe I'll just become a custom furniture builder.

I met a guy from Mens Warehouse (Houston) - they are looking for java developers if you wanna move to Houston. I asked him if he knew Ralph D. and he did. Small world.

I also met a Dallas developer from Ethiopia. Apparently where he grew up was like a high plains kind of area and isn't used to the heat here in Dallas in the summer. Interesting... I always assumed all of Ethiopia was hot - Africa Hot (Biloxi Blues)


later...