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.
The Spock framework brings simple, elegant testing to Java and Groovy projects. It integrates cleanly with JUnit, so Spock tests can be integrated as part of an existing test suite. Spock also includes an embedded mocking framework that can be used right away.
In this presentation, we’ll look at several examples of Spock tests and review most of its capabilities, including mock objects and integration with Spring.
Groovy is unusual among programming languages in that it doesn’t seek to replace its predecessor. You can freely mix Groovy with Java on a class-by-class, or even line-by-line, basis. If you are working with Java, there’s no reason not to make your life easier by adding Groovy where it helps the most.
Groovy helps Java in many ways, especially when processing XML or JSON data, replacing anonymous inner classes, adding tons of library methods that Java has needed all along, vastly simplified file and database manipulation, and much more. This talk will demonstrate how you can add Groovy to Java applications and simplify your development job immediately.
Learn Grails from basic principles to advanced concepts by building a small, but interesting, application.
We’ll start with basic domain classes, controllers, and views, and add in SiteMesh layouts, internationalization, transactional services, REST capabilities, and as many plugins as time allows.
Android applications no longer use Ant or IDE builds. The new build mechanism is based on Gradle, the popular build tool from the Groovy ecosystem. This talk will introduce Gradle to Android developers and show how easy it is to integrate into Android projects.
Topics will include using the Android plugin for Gradle, adding dependencies and alternate repositories, creating custom tasks, implementing both unit and integration tests, using alternative build types, product flavors and variants, and more.
