My Grails Presentations at SpringOne / 2GX

I am greatly looking forward to SpringOne / 2GX on October 19-22 in New Orleans! The last Groovy/Grails Experience happened just before I joined G2One, and I didn’t have the opportunity to attend. I have worked with a lot of outstanding people within the GG community without meeting the majority of them, so it is exciting to be able to finally meet them face to face. It is also a chance to interact more with the community. I know many of you online only, and most of you know me only through GrailsUI, my blog, or screencasts.

I will be giving two presentations on Grails at 2GX. I’ve been working hard on both of them to have them done in time to get the slides to Jay before the deadline. Here is a preview of them.

GrailsUI Primer

Although called a primer, this presentation is more than just a quick introduction to GrailsUI. I will talk about the motivations behind the plugin, the reason it was created, and why many of the decisions behind it were made. I hope to make attendees understand how to fully utilize the framework, not just how to employ certain tags in the library. So we’ll learn not only how to create YUI components through GrailsUI, but how to harness all GrailsUI features in order to interact with those components fully.

Also, I’m not going to pull any punches when I tell you to learn JavaScript. GrailsUI can only do so much for you by setting up components with sensible defaults. But for further customization and event handling, users of GrailsUI must take advantage of the JavaScript language in order to hook into the behavior of the YUI widgets it creates. We’ll create widgets using core GrailsUI taglibs, then interface directly with those components to add custom behaviors through JavaScript event handlers.

This presentation will not be:

1. How to use the gui:dialog
2. How to use the gui:autoComplete
3. How to use the gui:dataTable

It will be a lesson on how GrailsUI internals work, and afterward you should be able to easily take advantage of all the GrailsUI functionality to the fullest. I really hope not only to teach you how to create components on your page with ease, but how to fully utilize them through JavaScript.

Grails in the Wild (GitW)

This presentation will be very different from the GrailsUI Primer. I wouldn’t call it a beginner’s lesson, because there will definitely be some advanced elements to it. But there I’m also including some very simple Grails tips and tricks that I hope will apply to users of all skill levels. Essentially, this presentation is all the things I’ve learned building Grails applications professionally for the time I worked for G2One and SpringSource. It is structured in the following way that defines a problem I was facing, then provides a solution to the problem, all under a certain topic within Grails.

The topics are things like: “External Config Files”, “Setting Default Config Values from Plugins”, “Rendering AJAX Data from Controllers”, “Custom Data Validations and Errors”, and “Metaprogramming with Plugins”. Within each topic, I’ll present a problem to be solved that applies to the topic, and my solution. Hopefully, I’ve come up with something useful for your Grails application.

In closing… I hope to see you at the conference! I’d very much like to talk to some of you that use Grails and GrailsUI at the conference, so please feel free to start up a conversation if you see me.