Another year, another great Dallas TechFest event…
There were some great new speakers, Ken Sipe was my favorite with his Gradle talks.  The story on Gradle is one worth listening to, regardless, of how ingrained Ant or Maven are at your organization.  The best place to go if you’re new to Gradle is their website. The Gradle documentation is great.  Java “developer-types” can start with this Gradle tutorial geared to building Java projects.
There were also some great returning speakers, I especially liked Arun Gupta, with his Java EE Workshop.  A few years ago, I wouldn’t consider starting a new enterprise Java application without the Spring stack.  To be honest, in my mind, Spring == Enterprise Java.  However, after seeing Arun’s talks the last two years, Oracle and the Java EE 6 stack have rapidly closed the gap on SpringSource, and now just might have a story to tell in the enterprise development space.  I highly recommend you follow Arun on Twitter, or subscribe to his blog.  The content is outstanding and the current Java EE story is really impressive.
This was my first year as a presenter at TechFest, after having been involved as an organizer the past 4 years. Â I gave a double session on The Grails Framework. Â The attendees were great. Â Lots of great participation and an all-around good time was had by all. Don’t forget to tell Tim that you want him to use the website we built next year. Â 😉
Grails Workshop - Dallas TechFest 2011