Groovy and Grails

At the DevJam Jam Session on Wednesday, Mike Hugo gave a presentation on Groovy and Grails. I had heard Scott Davis speak about Groovy and Grails over a year ago and thought it was pretty cool, but back then it didn't feel real. Since then Grails has produced a 1.0 release; put simply I was extremely impressed. Mike is a very good presenter, his slides had very few words and some great pictures. He kept it lively with some humorous slides plus some succinct demos. I've been looking at Ruby on Rails off and on over the last couple of years. One of my New Year's resolutions for 2009 was to really dig into Rails and write a decent sized application. However, after Mike's presentation I began to think that a better investment of my time may be in Grails given that it runs on the JVM and plays very nicely with the Java language. I downloaded Grails yesterday and played around with it a bit. Very nice. Just like with Rails, it's amazingly easy to get a site up and running quickly. Grails is still a 1.0 release, so I have some concerns about it's maturity. However, it runs on the JVM and uses Spring, Hibernate and SiteMesh under the covers. Obviously all of them are very mature.

After the presentation by Mike, we entered the Fish Bowl round table discussion, which I believe is the best part of the Jam Sessions. I'm amazed by the brain power in the room at these sessions and I definitely like the Fight Club mentality. The conversation touched on a number of topics including the advantages / disadvantages of statically vs dynamically typed languages. The consensus seemed to be we're definitely seeing a movement toward dynamically typed languages. Someone even dropped the Lisp quote along the lines of Hackers and Painters ("...we could do that in Lisp back in 1968..."), which was interesting given that I just finished the book. One person, who seemed to know a ton about language theory (he even dropped F#), mentioned that he thinks that the gulf between the two is getting bigger and bigger: static languages are becoming more strongly typed and dynamic languages are/will become more dynamic. It makes sense to me given where I see the Java language headed and makes my desire to learn Ruby and Groovy that much stronger.