This is is. GR8 Conference is running. Guillaume Laforge and Søren Berg Glasius have just finished their Keynote, where they talked about how the idea of the conference emerge, and how it was brought to life. There were also information about the speakers, the agenda and other practical items.

Not as technical as other keynotes, but short and to the point. Now we'ere ready to listen to the talks about the real Groovy technologies

Right now, Jonathan Felch is talking about how Groovy and Grails can be used in the  real world! He has done a large financial application. One of the reasons to use Groovy and Grails is the dynamic nature of the language, where you can quickly get a prototype up and running, and determin if it works in a given situation.

He evaluated lots of other technologies, but picked Groovy and Grails, because of short development cycles, dynamic programming, Meta-programming and DSL support, options to fall back on Java.

He then told about an interesting idea about caching large amount of data, to avoid recalculations. They would put of calculating a property value until needed, by using the dynamic nature of Groovy. At the same time, they used propterty changed listeners, to invalidate cache entries, when eg. a stock-price changed.

The entire talk will be published on parleys.com when it has been postprossed.

/Søren