The Groovy & Grails eXchange 2014 (from left to right): Guillaume LaForge, Graeme Rocher, Russell Winder
After the success of the Groovy & Grails eXchange at Skills Matter, we spoke to the event’s second keynote speaker Graeme Rocher. Graeme is the project lead of Grails at Pivotal as well as CTO at G2One Inc, an open source services organisation providing training, consultancy, support and products around Groovy & Grails. He gave us some insights into what the new Grails framework is capable of, why contributions are so vital to the success and evolution of the Groovy language, and why he left London for Spain’s beautiful Basque Country.
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You recently delivered a keynote talk at Skills Matter’s Groovy & Grails eXchange 2014 with a preview of the 3.0 rewrite of the Grails framework. Can you give us an overview of what the new version is capable of?
We’re previewing Grails 3, which is what we’ve been working on for the last six months or so now, which is a lot more flexible than Grails 2. You’re able to target multiple environments via the notion of profiles, so a Grails application could be potentially deployed in other targeted environments whether it be traditional Servlet, Netty or Batch. It’s also written to be built on top of Gradle, so the build system is completely new and more robust thanks to Gradle. And it has a completely rewritten code generation layer API which is now formalised, whilst before it was just a bunch of disconnected scripts. It is now much more robust. And it’s of course built on top of Spring Boot, which means that you can run your applications as a JAR file or you can write applications that are just little Groovy scripts, so you get much more flexibility in terms of how you create Grails applications.
With the core Groovy team being so small, how important are contributions to the success and evolution of the Groovy language, and do you need more people to get involved?
The contribution is essential to the survival of both projects and we’re constantly on the look out for new contributors. Groovy has done exceptionally well in this area, especially in the core with around 50% of contributions from the community, and it continues to operate very much as a community-run effort and that’s fantastic. Grails is a little bit more divided. We get massive contribution from the plugin community via plugins and that’s really buzzing and continuing to evolve, and that area of plugins in Grails is significant by itself. We get fewer contributions to the core, but they are still significant and we rely heavily on that. And of course we’re always on the look out for people to contribute.
You co-founded G2One – the Groovy/Grails Company – with Guillaume LaForge. How did it start, and did you ever expect it to become as successful as it did and ultimately attract the attention of SpringSource?
Well, you always have those hopes and dreams when you’re creating a startup so we went into it hoping to be very successful and in the end we were! But in terms of how it started, it was really around 2007 when I was presenting Grails at JavaOne and I got to meet Guillaume (LaForge) and the community and really get to know people, and we started spinning some ideas around and got in touch with some fantastic investors and the idea came to fruition to start a small startup. What we created was compelling enough for SpringSource to acquire and we still believe it is.
You co-authored ‘The Definitive Guide to Grails’ with Jeff Scott Brown, which explains the roles that Groovy and Grails are playing in the changing Web (amongst other things!). Can you summarise what roles these are and why they’re important?
The web is clearly evolving in terms of having much fatter clients and smaller services at the back end and these kind of Micro Service applications are definitely very well expressed in a concise language like Groovy. You can see that when you look at Spring Boot, how well Groovy fits into creating these types of small, focused applications that fit into Micro Service architectures where you have an essentially REST-based backend with Mobile and HTML frontends. Grails 3.0 with its profile support allows flexibility in creating small micro applications are what we like to call “Modular Monoliths”.
You’re based in Bergara in Spain’s Basque Country. What’s it like working there as a tech professional, and do you ever think about locating to a more tech-focused city such as London or Berlin?
Well, I lived near London for 12 years and London in itself was and is a fantastic hub for technology and innovation and a great place to be for creating a startup or for being in the tech industry in general. In terms of where I live at the moment, the Basque Country is a beautiful area, and it certainly has a tech community especially around the cities like Bilbao and Donostia. But it’s no where near the size of London. In terms of why I’m here, its mainly family reasons. My wife is from the area so its very much a family decision being here. But I’d certainly recommend London if anyone is really into the tech industry as a place to work and be
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