John Wilson, The Wilson Partnership

John Wilson is a consultant and teacher with over 35 years experience in the IT industry. He has been using Java since the first public Beta.

He has a long standing interest in widening the appeal of the JVM platform by implementing languages which are complementary to Java. John joined the Groovy project in 2003 and has contributed to the core run time system and much of the XML processing support.

Tutorial: "Domain-Specific Languages in Groovy"

Track: Tutorial

Time: Tuesday 09:00 - 12:00

Location: To be announced

Abstract:

One of the most productive ways of using Dynamic languages like Groovy is to construct "little languages" or Domain-Specific Languages to allow programmers to replace pages of Java code or XML configuration files with a few lines of code. As well as increasing productivity, DSLs reduce errors and increase readability by removing redundant syntactic "noise".

Groovy users have access to DSLs to:

Generate XML and HTML documents without needing to worry about encodings, and well formedness
Build complex Swing and SWT applications.
Parse and decompose XML documents using powerful GPath expressions
Do Spring configuration without XML and without the verbosity of Java
Do date and time manipulation (e.d. myTime = 3.days + 7.hours) without having to suffer by using the Java Calendar API

This tutorial will show you how the "magic" is performed and will teach you how to build your own "little languages" in Groovy.