With a little delay, here's the interview with Guillaume Laforge

GR8 Conf:
Tell us more about you, your job, and how you got into Groovy, Grails and Griffon

Guillaume: 

My name is Guillaume Laforge. I'm the Groovy project manger and I'm working for SpringSource. I've been working on Groovy for the past 5+ years already.

Back in 2003, I was working for a software vendor that was creating a kind of application generation engine, driven by some metdata representing the business concepts, the UI widgets, etc. The problem we were facing back then was that for customizing the UI widgets, in particular, one had to create Java classes, compile them, put them in a JAR, and redeploy the application kernel. This was not very friendly, and we wanted to have a way to also define the behavior and look'n feel of those widgets from within the metadata designer interface. That's when I went for the hunt of some scripting language that I could leverage to store all that logic in the meta model directly. Groovy had just been announced by James Strachan and Bob McWhirter, and it was at the time the most promising and lively project of alternative languages for the JVM. I started looking at it, found many bugs, and since the project was Open Source, I even started looking at the code base. I quickly found possible fixes for the bugs I had encountered, submitted those fixes to the former project lead, and quickly became a committer, as the lead was fed up with all the patches I was sending him! Later on, about a year or two later, the initial founders left the project, and I took the lead of the project, to not let the language die.

GR8 Conf:
What are the topics you will be covering at this conference

Guillaume:

Along with my friend and co-organizer Søren, I'll present the conference to the attendees, its principles, and its inception. I'll also be speaking about the novelties in Groovy 1.6. And I'll cover one of my pet topics of mine: how to create Domain-Specific Languages with Groovy.

GR8 Conf:
What do you think the attendees will bring home from this conference?

Guillaume:

When the idea came to participate to a Gr* event in Denmark, along with Søren, we quickly realized that it would be tough if not impossible to cover all those GR8 technologies in a few hours, or even a day. We came to the conclusion that it would be better to create a 2-day event covering those technologies. Then, we wondered about the format and content of the conference, and we noticed that we wanted to provide attendees with some more advanced presentations that the usual boring introductions everybody's already seen here or there, but we also understood that attendees would want to get up-to-speed quickly with those technologies, and there's no better approach than doing some hands-on labs, rather than just pure lectures. So hopefully, attendees will bring some concrete experience on how to build and integrate all those great technologies together, and will be enlightened by all the potential of Groovy, Grails and Griffon in their daily work and projects.

I'm really looking forward to having a very fruitful conference and to meeting and chatting with all the attendees and my speaker friends!

GR8 Conf:
Thank you for the interview. Looking forward to seeing you on monday!

Guillaume:

Me too - can hardly wait!