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Monday, October 05, 2009

First Groovy and Grails training is in the bag

I made it through my first test run of Groovy and Grails training for DevJam this past Saturday. Had a couple of snafus occur. Nothing major and easily fixed. Did learn a couple of things though:

Don't put developers on an operating system that they don't know for training

The DevJam training has Mac minis which boot either Mac OS X Snow Leopard or Windows Vista (via Bootcamp). I had the systems booted to Mac OS X for the training. Unfortunately all of the developers that came to this training were unfamiliar with Mac OS X, but willing to try it. Bad move on my part. I ended up answering far too many questions on the operating system and which tools were were going to use. Oracle SQL Developer also gave me problems in the Mac OS X environment when trying to update the tool with the MySQL drivers through its software updating system.

If you think you have enough code examples, you don't!


I had about 10-12 Groovy code examples to demonstrate various features of the language. Far too few for the questions that cropped up. Luckily, it was Groovy and writing new code examples or changing existing code examples was pretty straightforward. Kudos to Groovy for being very easy to explore and play with. The participants thought very highly of the interactiveness of the coding during the session.

Don't try to do both Groovy and Grails in a single day.


I knew going in that doing both was going to be very difficult. I just didn't realize how difficult it would be. Again, due to operating system and tool snafus, I didn't finish up the Groovy stuff until well into the afternoon. Not much time for Grails. I was looking forward to the exercise in Grails and we didn't get very far with it.

Automate the packaging of the student materials in electronic format.


We decided to put all the training handouts, examples, and anything else helpful for the students on 4 GB flash drives and give the flash drives to the students to keep. That's good. What's not good is missing some things on the flash drive and updating flash drives during the course. Next time I'll use an Ant build script to build a distribution and clean out any Subversion metadata from the student materials.

The Groovy Eclipse plugin seems to be making headway.


One of the participants in the group, Nick Spilman, had his laptop along and was using Eclipse Galileo and the new Groovy Eclipse plugin during the Groovy portion of the training. He thought it worked well with Groovy. I used IntelliJ 9.0 EAP (Maia) and that also works well. Looks like SpringSource (or shall I say VMware now) is getting serious on the tooling for Groovy and Grails.

Need to spend more time on understanding Groovy's meta-programming facilities.


It's one thing to use Groovy and use its meta-programming faclities (aka MOP) successfully in your own work. It is a far different thing to try and teach others about Groovy's meta-programming facilities. Teaching a concept, especially a concept as complicated as meta-programming, is extremely difficult.

Performing test runs of presentations and trainings is essential.


I'm very pleased that I was afforded the opportunity to be able to offer a couple of test runs of this training to some developers before offering it to the public. Like anything else, it takes practice and feedback to get good at something. I have another test run of this training later this month and I'm sure it will be much better than it was the first time out.

3 comments:

  1. Sounds like a fun class Chris. Glad it went smoothly for the most part.

    I'm forgetting if you're familiar with mercurial (or git), but that seems like an ideal tool for the "automating the packaging of student materials in electronic format" item.

    Just check your presenter source tree into source control at the beginning of your session. Have a folder for any test scripts you come up with along the way and then commit all of the changes periodically or at the end of the class.

    Then you'll have a nice record of what you changed, and can also easily get back to your original state if you screw up your code while trying to get something working live.

    At the end you could either zip up the repo, or (if the class is savvy) have them pull down the changes to their local machines right on the network.

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  2. I don't have any experience with git or mercurial. I have mercurial installed on both Mac systems and have a bitbucket account, but I just haven't had the time to really sit down and play with it. Definitely something I need to do now that the weather has turned crappy and all us Minnesotans start the 6 month winter hibernation.

    Thanks for the advice.

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  3. Great job Chris. I am glad it went well for you.

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