Beginning Groovy and Grails

In the last session on April 13, 2009 on Jazz and Rational Team Concert at TCJUG , I have won the book Beginning Groovy and Grails: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional) in the lucky draw.

This is happening second time in the row that I have attended JUG meeting with Groovy message. In my last meeting the topic of discussion itself was groovy and this time around, it is the book. The message is loud and clear. Looks like everyone has started taking Groovy seriously. People consider it as gen-next Java language. After all, Groovy is not something which poises itself to compete with Java language. In fact it builds itself over the Java language. You run groovy programs on JVM. While relieving developers of many of the pains which comes with java, groovy provides many powerful features, missing and long sought in Java.
Having said that, I am still a doubtful thomas, when it comes to new technology. To build a secure, scalable, robust application, I would not put my bets on Grails. At least for now.

By the way the presentation slides for Jazz are not there yet on TCJUG website. Check http://jazz.net/ for more details.
Jazz is also a wonderful framework address the concerns of the entire life-cycle of project development. From requirement analysis to design and development; from testing to maintenance; from project management to project change management; it is built on the vision to provide one -stop- shop for all the needs.
Rational Team Concert is the product built on Jazz framework. The speaker has demonstrated many cool features of RTC. It integrates IDE, testing environment, team collaboration, version and cofiguration management, quality management in the other words absolutely every tool we use daily during the software lifecycle. It integrates all these tools at one place. PM will have the clear and accurate picture what is going on with the status and updates of each and every developer, tester will now what fixes developers are working on etc etc. Worth checking out. As far as I remember, the speaker said that this product is relatively new but it has achieved record sales in its category in IBM.

Rules within an Enterprise and their management with a BRMS, focus on JRules

I have attended a very nice session at TCJUG back in November 2008( I know I am very late in reporting that).

The speaker DJ Des Jardins made a very strong case for JRules. While there are many open source rule engines available in the market like Drools, JRules stands apart from all those because of its capabilities. If you see the presentation available at the site you can judge by yourself that JRules is simply superior compared to other rule engines when it comes to customization, options and flexibility. Check that out.

However, the slides are not very elaborate. To appreciate the full capabilities of JRules you may want to try it once.