Ken Kousen is a technical trainer, software developer, and conference speaker specializing in Java and open source topics, including Android, Spring, Hibernate/JPA, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle. He is the author of the O’Reilly book “Gradle Recipes for Android” and the Manning book “Making Java Groovy”. He also has recorded several video courses for O’Reilly, including two on Android, three on Groovy, two on Gradle, and one on the Spring Framework.
In 2013 was awarded a JavaOne Rockstar award. His academic background include BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut.
Use Groovy to access web services, work with both relational and NoSQL databases, write Java applications in a fraction of the code, and more. This talk will present a variety of small but non-trivial examples of Groovy in action, using techniques ranging from closures to parsers and slurpers to metaprogramming and AST transformations.
The Spock testing framework is one of the most popular projects in the Groovy ecosystem. Spock tests are cleaner and simpler than their JUnit counterparts, and Spock includes a mock library as well. Spock tests work for Groovy, Java, and mixed systems. Best of all, the framework is very easy to learn – after this presentation you’ll be ready to write Spock tests right away.
Learn the fundamentals of the Grails framework through example applications. Topics will include domain classes, controllers, transactional services, producing XML and JSON data, working with Ajax, unit and integration testing, and as many plugins as time allows.
