Griffon BOF at Devoxx 2008
Generally, I prefer giving BOFs to regular sessions because there are more informal, intimate, and people feel less intimidated to stop you and ask questions. The downside is that most conferences seem to schedule them after 7 PM when most people are first getting a chance to relax so attendance can suffer a bit. Maybe a good place for them would be partway into lunch hour. Anyways...
Being the last BOF of the day but possibly bolstered by the carry-over from the Grails BOF before it, the room was pretty full with about 30-40 people. There was lots of interest and questions about bind/@Bindable and how Griffon stacks up to JavaFX. Several noted how SwingBuilder looks similar to JavaFXScript to which I pointed out that SwingBuilder was around first. Some were especially surprised at how much Java you could use with Griffon, eventually evolving to groovier code rather than having to make a break with all Java code and learn a totally new language. I could see the lightbulbs lighting up when they realized that not only does Groovy extend their ROI on learning Java but Griffon does the same for Grails. It's a giant sybiotic chain.
Thanks to Griffon co-despot Andres Almiray, I was able to demo SwingPad, a Griffon app to prototype Swing UIs without having to declare and initialize a SwingBuilder...very similar to GfxPad. 24 hours before our 0.0 release, we had basic Netbeans support (thanks to Geertjan Wielaga) and this was certainly a big surprise for this release. I only had a day to play around with it and change around my slides.
The cold I had been recovering from made an appearence and somehow I segued for a couple minutes on European Fanta vs. America Fanta.
Here are my slides:
Griffon: Re-imaging Desktop Java Technology
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: java groovy)