GR8ConfIN 2016 – For the GR8 developers in town RECAP

It was indeed an amazing GR8Conf IN 2016 with more than 200 participants, marvelous line-up of speakers and fully packed parallel sessions at The Lalit, New Delhi. This year the conference was sponsored by OCI, which is the new home for Grails. The entire conference was also live streamed by #fame with more than 4000 viewers across the globe.

GR8Conf IN, is the first Indian edition of the GR8Conf, a reputed and independent series of conference that happens in Denmark and the US every year under GR8Conf EU and GR8Conf US respectively.

Last year, GrailsConf 2015 witnessed an overwhelming participation from the Grails and Groovy developers community, from Delhi and NCR region and this year as GR8Conf IN, it was even bigger.

The day-long conference was packed with interesting and informative sessions from the thought leaders of Groovy/Grails ecosystem, which was attended by project leads, developers, members from different organizations including HCL, NIIT, Sapient, Infogain, Wipro Technologies, Info Edge India, JellyFish Technologies, Oodles Technologies and NexThoughts Software Technologies to name a few.

Though the presentations and the videos will be available on our YouTube channel next week, here’s a quick rundown of the conference.

The conference started with the keynote by Burt Beckwith, a former Grails core committer and Plugin developer who has created over 50 Grails plugins and is a frequent speaker at many renowned conferences. The talk was about Grails 3 and here are few key points from his talk:

1. Grails 3 initial or near future roadmap.
2. Touched a bit on updgrading applications/plugins to grails 3.
3. The unique selling points like Profiles, Traits.

After the keynote, the sessions were split into two tracks with some awesome learnings and key takeaways. The topics in each sessions were from the latest technologies of GR8 ecosystem.

Track I

The first session was on Functional programming with Groovy from Naresha K, Chief Technologist with Channel Bridge Software Labs. He shared :

1. Overview of Groovy Closure.
2. Higher order function using closures.
3. Map Reduce using closures.
4. Currying

Next Paul King, an active committer on numerous projects including Groovy, GPars and Gradle took the session on Concurrency with GPars. Starting with the common problems present while writing concurrent code he shared an approach about classifying the problem into categories which can help in choosing appropriate features of GPars. Then he discussed various features of GPars including Actors, Dataflow, Data parallelism, asynchronous execution and agents.

Jacob Aae Mikkelsen, senior engineer at LEGO Group, took the session on Geb for testing your Grails Application where he talked about :

1. Why functional testing
2. How to write Geb testcases.
3. Good practices and recepies.

Followed by Lunch break, Naresha K took the session on Designing with Groovy Traits where he shared :

1. Syntax and Semantics of Groovy Traits.
2. Interoperatibility with interfaces and classes.
3. Use cases for traits

Next, Burt Beckwith took a session on Fun with Spring security, where he discussed about how to customize authentication process in spring security.

Track II

Soren Berg Glasius, co-founder of GR8Conf started the first session in Track 2 with Advantages of Groovy and Grails, where he discussed how groovy is less verbose than java, syntactical differences with java, how we can write less code and be more productive.

Next, Prakash Balodi, Software Engineer at Quintype Inc did a presentation on Async Programming with RatPack where he talked about :

1. Basic introduction to Ratpack.
2. How does Ratpack provides support for writing asynchronous code?
3. How these features help in easily creating non-blocking and lightweight web apps.

Puneet Behl and Bhagwat Kumar from TO THE NEW took the session Dockerize it all, where they started explaining the infrastructure problems without using gradle. They also talked about:

1. How gradle is used to resolve such issues
2. Benefits of docker : Scalability, portability, deployment, efficient resource utilization.
3. Core components of Docker.

Followed by Lunch break, Soren Berg Glasius took the session Tour De Plugin where he talked about various Grails plugins like Twitter bootstrap, mail, greenmail, i18n plugin, spring security, and quartz.

Next, Paul King took the session Introducing Gradle where he talked about :

1. Advantage of using Groovy as that helps in providing a declarative style for builds compared to Ant/Maven’s imperative style
2. How Gradle is focusing on providing Rich Models for each and every domain that anyone wants to build
3. Overview of plugins(java, groovy, android), tools and an example of custom plugin.

After a short tea break, both the tracks were combined for a common session which was taken by Himanshu Seth, Head of Grails vertical at TO THE NEW, who showcased a case study on #fame, which is created using the GR8 technologies.

The main highlight of the conference was its panel discussion which had Burt Beckwith, Soren Berg Glasius, Naresha K, Paul King, Jacob Aae Mikkelsen and Himanshu Seth discussing on :

1. Increasing adoption of groovy
2. What is the future of grails?
3. Spring boot vs grails 3
4. Road map for groovy – about what’s the planned future of groovy
5. Availability of Reactive components in Grails

Many interesting points were discussed giving a lot of clarity to the enthusiastic audience who showed a lot of interest by actively participating in the discussion.

One could clearly feel the eagerness and passion amongst the participants with such questions.

Though it was quite a chilly weather outside, the excitement in the participants specially to meet the thought leaders kept the whole conference warm. A very BIG thanks to the brilliant speakers for taking out their time and sharing their knowledge and experience and making this conference successful. Also a big thanks for the participants for making this conference great in all aspects.

With this year’s successful conference, its time to now get ready and set the stage for the much bigger GR8ConfIN 2017..

Cheers!