I attended two sessions Thursday and both were great. First I attended ‘Demystifying Spring Security in Grails’ by Burt Beckwith. Burt created a few applications with differing security styles using Spring Security. He is a really good presenter who has an obvious understanding of, and passion for, the Groovy/Grails ecosystem. He gave me several additional things to consider when writing applications that use Groovy and Grails.

My final session was ‘Design Patterns in Java and Groovy’ with Venkat Subramaniam. What a session. Venkat is such a great presenter that it’s hard to do him justice in a blog post. He really has a lot of fun and makes the audience have a lot of fun, too. Not only was it really entertaining, but the content was great, too. He spent the session time discussion many of our favorite Java patterns and how they would be implemented in Groovy. It was really nice to see how the code was reduced a significant amount into really concise, expressive statements. I would recommend this session to anyone who has a chance to see it.

All in all, I am very pleased with SpringOne 2GX. It was a great conference. The speakers were great. The content was great. I look forward to attending again.

The first session I attended was ‘Extreme Web Productivity with Spring Roo’ with Stefan Schmidt. I am really interested in Roo. Stefan dived in to some of the web side functionality that Roo offers and I have to say it is pretty compelling.

The next session I attending was ‘RESTing Easy with Grails’ with Andrew Glover. This was a really good session. I liked seeing how Andrew’s take on REST with grails contrasted with his partner at Thirstyhead, Scott Davis.

I then attended ‘Advanced Gorm’ by Burt Beckwith. Wow. What an eye opener. Burt showed how very simple ‘tutorial following’ style of development can get you into some trouble if you don’t understand whats happening under the covers. I took away a few things that I’m going to checkout when I get back to the office to make sure we are doing the best way.

My final two sessions were about plug in development with Graeme Rocher. These were just what I needed to fill a gap I thought existed in Grails – reuse. I knew about the plugin ecosystem, but hadn’t equated it with high level reuse scenarios inside of our company. He explained in detail how plugins work and went on to demo creating a couple of twitter plugins. It was a great session.

Today is the last day and I have a few sessions lined up.

My first session of the day was ‘Clustering a Grails Application for Scalability and Availability’ by Burt Beckwith. This was a good session. It was geared towards Tomcat and MySQL which we are not using, but I still managed to get some good nuggets of information that will, no doubt, prove useful in our Grails endeavors.

My next session was ‘RESTful Grails’ with Scott Davis. I’ve seen several of Scott’s presentations and he never disappoints. He is an energetic and entertaining presenter who is really dynamic and has a great passion for the topics on which he speaks. He laid out some really great stats on RESTful APIs at Google, Amazon, and ebay that really speak to how REST is taking over. I’ll leave it to him to detail the stats.

Lunch was great. NFJS has some killer meals and today was no exception. We had some good lunch conversations with others who seemed to work for organizations very similar to the one we work for. I’ve found that most of the people I’ve talked to work for organizations in really similar Spring/Groovy/Grails adoption modes to ours. It’s nice to know we’re not alone in our discovery and struggles.

After lunch I hit the ‘Whats new in SpringSource Tool Suite’ session. This was a good session. The speaker, Christian Dupuis, talked a lot about STS’s integration with Spring 3.0 and the capabilities STS will have as far as code completion and validation.

After much anticipation I got introduced to Spring Roo in the ‘Introducing Spring Roo: Extreme Productivity in 10 Minutes’ session by Ben Alex. He did a great job giving a high level overview of Spring Roo and setting up the follow up session that will give a more in-depth view of Spring Roo. I have to say that Spring Roo is impressive. I like the loose parallels with Grails without the runtime penalties (although I’m a Grails guy). He explained how it makes sense how they both fit in the landscape without really competing. I can say that I will definitely look to use Roo on future projects where we can’t/don’t use Grails. I’ll be doing some playing around with Roo over the next few weeks.

The last session I attended today was ‘Grails for the Enterprise’ by Robert Fischer. This was billed as an introduction to Grails, which I didn’t need, but I went anyways. And I’m glad I did. Robert gave an overview of the case for Grails with some emphasis on the parts/plugins he knew well because he had either created or contributed to them. When the open questions part of the session came, Robert did a 5 minute demo on creating a plugin that, if there wasn’t already enough reason, made the whole session worthwhile for me. It was a great session for me… the kind where you get an answer to a question or two that almost makes the cost of attending the conference worth it.

After all of the sessions, dinner was served and a keynote ensued. After the keynote speech, another reception took place where I got to mingle with some more good folks.

It was definitely a great conference day. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

Rod talked about the @Configuration annotation in Spring 3.0 that I think is awesome. Basically we can use annotations to specify a configuration class that can also use normal injection to load its dependencies and properties. Should make for much more flexible Spring config and less XML Hell.

Rod introduced Spring Integration and Blaze DS (Spring/Flex integration) and had a few SpringSource guys do a demo. It went over pretty well.

Graeme Rocher took the stage to talk about Grails. This was my favorite part. Graeme did a demo of the Grails support in the upcoming (Wednesday) STS release which showed some awesome Grails integration. I will definitely find out about debugger support while I’m here as that is my big Grails hangup right now. He also mentioned Intellij Community Edition, which I had no ‘idea’ about. I will definitely be checking into it. He also talked about the Grails community… high points being that there are over 300 plugins. He joked with an Apple-like “…there’s a plugin for that”.

Rod made an announcement about SpringSource TC Server Developer Edition which is 100% Tomcat, is Spring aware, and offers the Spring insight dashboard.

We were then treated to some STS integration with tools that have evolved from the Hyperic acquisition. They offer awesome looking performance evaluation capabilities. They are hoping to be available by year end.

Finally Rod talked about the VMWare acquisition. Obviously he thinks and hopes it leads to greater things for Spring, Groovy, and Grails in the future, in particular to cloud computing.

All in all, I am really excited to attend the sessions I have chosen so far and am looking forward to being immersed in the Spring and 2GX universe for the next 3 days.

I hadn’t used JRuby before, but had always wanted to mess with it. Celerity uses JRuby so I had my excuse. It only took a couple of hours to have a fully functional test case running. I used a ‘load test’ Ruby script I was using with Watir to run concurrent instances of the test case. With a single thread everything was excellent. But even just going to 2 threads caused the process to fail with an OutOfMemoryError. I tried increasing the heap size using the
-J-Xmx###m
option, but it didn’t help. Luckily, my twitter on the subject was replied to by ‘@jarib’ who helpfully pointed out that the error was a PERM GEN issue rather than a plain ol’ heap space issue. The solution was to use
-J-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
as the option. After doing that I could run 7 threads, enough to severely slow down my system, but still work without memory issues.

I’m definitely a fan of Celerity now, and I’d recommend anyone interested in web application testing look into it.