Quoting John Denver seems suitable as this is the Colorado mountains, and Denver airport awaits tomorrow. Before that, my last blog from Colorado Software Summit 2007.
Even though the keynote were held by Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, the two presentations that stand out and overshadow all the others were the one on mashups and the one on grails.

The promise of mashups is to leverage visual programming and the power of integration of different data sources and existing GUI-components. Gregor Hohpe from Google (http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings.html) did the presentation on mashups, and using an RSS-feed from his conference Google Calendar , he managed to create a web application where all his conferences were mapped out on Google Maps. He used Yahoo Pipes to transform the RSS feed adding lattitude and longitude for the conferences, and feeding the transformed data into Google Mashup Editor to present these in a slick user interface, including Google Maps. All this in less than an our, not writing more than 50 lines of code and HTML.

Grails is a Groovy version of Ruby on Rails, combining the power of Spring, Hibernate and Groovy. Grails will generate all the scaffolding needed to run a web-application, and almost no code is necessary, except the writing of POJOs. Because of that, creating an application from scratch is fast as lightning, and the generated code is straightforward and easy to change. When a POJO has been created, Grails will both create the GSPs (Groovy Server Pages) and the database. The POJOs are mapped to the database tables using GORM (Groovy Object Relational Mapping) which is nothing more than a wrapper on top of Hibernate. Of course there’s an extensive tag library for use in the GSPs, which does all the dynamic stuff you need, ajax included. Needless to say, the most popular ajax-frameworks are also easily available from within Grails.

And with that, I’ll go and pack my suitcase, as my journey home starts tomorrow at 0515.

Popularity: 265 points