I got in today at 0830 for some breakfast, talked with some coworkers and tablemates, then moved out to the first session.
My first session was once again with Jeff Brown of G2One. He talked about Test Driven Development with Groovy and Grails. TDD is one of those things that I know I should do but don’t discipline myself to do. Groovy does some nice things that I like from Ruby. Duck-typing is great when you are working with tests. You aren’t writing a bunch of interfaces just to make the compiler happy.
Another interesting test piece is the Expando class in GroovyTest. Expand allows you to create a class that pretends to be anything you need such as a file. Therefore you can test object that, for instance, write to the filesystem without actually writing to the filesystem in your unit test.
Interesting clarification was the differences between mocks and stubs. Mocks have strong expectations and stubs have loose expectations. The stubs in GroovyTest are slick. You call new StubFor(class) and get a stub back that you can overload the functionality of, allowing you to change the functionality of a Groovy or Java class for the purpose of your test.
For my second session I had some hard choices to make. I selected Mark Richards talk on Java Persistence over the Powerful Metaprogramming Techniques with Groovy with Jeff Brown, but it was a tough choice. Mark is a Director and Senior Architect at Collaborative Consulting LLC and the Author of Java Transactional Design Strategies.
Mark was a dynamic speaker and really engaged people. His focus was that there will never be a silver bullet for persistence. Each toolset has it’s strong points and weak points. He started talking about the types of Java persistence frameworks, specifically Object-Relational Mapper, SQL Mapper and Standards Based Frameworks.
One of the big differences between an ORM and a SQL Mapper is that where ORM maps objects to tables, a SQL Mapper maps objects to result sets. This has hefty implications if you need to change from MySQL to Oracle. In a ORM the SQL is generated by the API so you don’t need to do anything but change the dialect used by the ORM.
iBatis is a SQL Mapper that keeps the mapping of statements, result sets and such in XML. Since the SQL is not generated automatically you have the chance to tune your queries.
He tangented off to a couple of things. One was the Triangle of Knowledge. The first area is what you know, the second area is that which you don’t know, and lastly is the things that you don’t know that you don’t know. This is important in learning anything new, you can focus on the things that you NEED to know, as opposed to know that you don’t know and therefore can look up. I like to think of this as Just In Time knowledge.
The big finale was talking about the impedance mismatch between reporting queries and ORMs. An ORM is great when you need CRUD operations, but the moment you need to run a complex reporting type query there is no longer a table to map to and no key to get the data from the cache. iBatis makes things easier in that case, but CRUD is a pain. The end result is to combine ORM and SQL mapping frameworks. One limitation, however is that you cannot combine iBatis and Hibernate in the same transactional unit of work. Therefore it works when you have a project with separate CRUD and reporting areas of function.
My brain is a bit full, so I am glad that lunch is next!
BTW: Acronym of the day: RDD — Resume Driven Development. i.e. when someone makes choices based on what technology they want on their resume instead of the requirements of the project.
It has been an interesting day. I talked my boss into letting me use my annual ‘tuition’ reimbursement to attend the Pacific Northwest Software Symposium put on my No Fluff Just Stuff in Redmond. The conference is different in that they cover hard core topics with no marketing spin. They do not have an expo hall, just breakout room with speakers that know their stuff.
I arrived at the Redmond Town Center Marriott at noon and checked in. Some of my coworkers, developers for whom this was training, were already there and we talked for a bit. The event started at 1300 with a short introduction session and then it was off to my first breakout session.
I spent the majority of the day in one room listening to one guy speak. Jeff Brown is the VP of Professional Services at G2One and a member of the core Groovy and Grails development teams. The first session was an introduction to Groovy, a dynamic language that runs inside the Java Virtual Machine. I learned a few interesting things, but Groovy is similar in a lot of ways to Ruby so it wasn’t too much of a stretch.
The second session with Jeff was about Grails. Grails is a Java web framework built on top of Groovy. While the end result is a WAR file, you do not have all the nasty configuration files to wire together all the parts of your application. Grails includes Hibernate, Spring, log4j and other technologies but takes the heavy lifting away allowing the programmer to get to the core of the data domain and business logic.
Third was a session on advanced Grails where Jeff covered relationships, templates (what Rails calls ‘partials’), custom tag libraries (worth the price of admission right there!), AJAX and more. This session was largely a live coding exercise and we walked through most anything that someone could come up with. While this was going on I created a basic Grails app myself and mucked around a bit.
Jeff was a really good speaker and was focused on getting the most content across that he could. I enjoyed his sessions and learned a far bit.
Then came dinner with great cheese bread and a terrific chocolate cake. I ate more of that than I should have.
After dinner we heard a keynote from one of the presenters, Jared Richardson. Jared, the co-author of a great book called Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects, spoke about what he called "Career 2.0". The focus of this keynote was that you need to treat your knowledge as you would any other investment. No one else is going to invest in you like you will. Diversify your investments so that you are more insulated from the whims of the job market. Acknowledge it will take effort, set goals and plan accordingly.
Also he talked at length about sharing the things that you know. He pushed hard on blogging; blog about every problem you solve, every mistake you make and correct, every thing you research. If you write lots you get better at writing and you make a name for yourself. I liked the concept of getting beyond resumes to name recognition.
Anyway, I really enjoyed today and am looking forward to tomorrow. More to come…
Tags: career planning, confrence, education, grails, groovy, java, nfjs
