JavaZone 2008 - Agenda -

Writing Domain-Specific Languages with Groovy

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Intermediate
Emerging Technologies

Room: Lab 1
Timeslot: 17.09.08 13:00
Speaker: Guillaume Laforge

Abstract

Domain-Specific Languages are an "architectural hot-spot", as coined recently by InfoQ editors. With dynamic languages such as Groovy, it is easy to create a mini-language modelling a particular business domain. Thanks to these DSLs, developers and subject matter experts will be able to share a common metaphor, to deliver, hand in hand, the final application to the end users.

Outline

Groovy offers a great deal of flexibility in terms of concise and expressive syntax, and through its dynamic nature. After an

introduction to the Groovy dynamic language, and to the concepts of DSLs, their motivation, strenghts and weaknesses, Guillaume Laforge,

project lead of Groovy and spec lead of JSR-241 standardizing the Groovy language, will guide you through the advanced Groovy concepts that will help you create your own embedded DSL. He will show you how to integrate them in your JEE application, and also explain how to best design such business languages to ensure their adoption by the end users, their quality, testability, andcapacity to evolve over time to suit the needs of the day.

In the IT industry, understanding the domain within which customers evolve is a key factor in the success of a project. From this domain and its wealth of concepts, as software developers and architects, we can derive a design that is aimed at solving problems encountered in the day-to-day business. So far, we mostly solved these brainteasers with computer science paradigms like Object-Oriented Programming, n-tier architectures, or with tools such as rules engines to stay close to the domain at hand.

In this session, our goal will be to investigate how the paradigm of Domain-Specific Languages can be leveraged to help our teams build solutions closer to our users' needs and requirements, and how it can provide a viable, efficient and expressive alternative problem-solving pattern. The technology of choice for enabling DSL solutions for your projects will be Groovy, a dynamic language for the Java platform.

Guillaume Laforge

Guillaume Laforge is the Groovy Project Manager, and Spec Lead of JSR-241, the Java Specification Request standardizing the Groovy dynamic language in the Java Community Process.

As Vice President Technology of G2One, the company dedicated to the development of Groovy and Grails, he provides professional services around those technologies (training, support, and consulting).

Guillaume co-authored the Groovy in Action best-seller book for Manning, and reviewed and wrote forewords for most of the Groovy and Grails books on the market.

You can meet him at conferences around the world where he evangelizes the Groovy dynamic language, and the agile Grails web framework.