Groovy around the Globe - Australia & New Zealand

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Submitted by Steve Dalton on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 4:29pm
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This article is the first in a series that will examine the Groovy/Grails/Griffon community around the world - it first appeared in the November issue of GroovyMag.

We all love the technology, and this series will focus on the people that help to make technology great – colleagues from the farthest flung corners of the globe. This first article focuses on one of the the most remote regions: Australia & New Zealand.

A far-flung land

Tucked away in a oft-forgotten corner of the Southern Pacific are the sparsely-populated countries of Australia and New Zealand. Despite the relative isolation from the rest of the development community (and each other), there's been a long history of innovation and contribution to Open Source projects from the Aussie and Kiwi developers over the years.

Australia in particular is a very urban society: 82% of the citizens live primarily in the eight state and territorial capitals. However, the population of 22 million is spread over an area the size of Europe, which makes face-to-face meetings of the tech community a pretty rare thing. Despite the long and dusty distances separating the capitals, a great sense of community and collaboration prevails. New Zealand has an even smaller population (about two million) and the development community is even more thinly dispersed; however, there is also a surprising amount of activity coming from this remote land.

Conferences

Despite the geographic challenges, in the Open Source area there are two successful annual conferences in the region: Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC), and Linux Conference Australia (LCA).
OSDC has been running for six years now and is for developers using open source tools and languages. Having starting as a Perl/PHP conference, there are now plenty of Java and Groovy programmers that attend. The conference has a great atmosphere, and while there's always the discussions about what languages rock and which–well, don't–it's all in good fun and most attendees walk away with another skill in their developer toolkit. This year the conference is back in Brisbane and features four Groovy/Grails talks and a Groovy 'Birds of a Feather' (BOF) session during the Wednesday night (25th November) session. (A BOF is a kind of "unconference" within a conference, not unlike a mini-Barcamp.) If you're anywhere near Brisbane at the end of November: please, stop by.

Not strictly related to Groovy, another big conference in Australia is linux.conf.au. This conference is widely regarded as one of the best Linux-oriented conferences in the world, attracting hundreds of developers and users from around the world. Notably, it is also one of the few that Linus Torvals seems to attend. The conference format has now been replicated recently in the US. Like OSDC, Linux Conf tours around Australia/New Zealand: the next conference is in Wellington, NZ in early 2010.

User Groups

There are active Java user groups in most cities and active Groovy user groups in Brisbane and Sydney. The Melbourne Groovy group appears to be inactive–so if anyone from Melbourne is reading this – feel free to crank it up again. Auckland has converted their JUG into a JVM user group that covers all the JVM languages such as Groovy, JRuby, Jython, Scala and Clojure. There is a lot of rich Groovy content at these events and the group convenes regular meetings with really interesting titles.

Brisbane in particular has a very active meetup community, with most of the groups on the meetup.com site. There is a lot of cross collaboration between the languages, with members attending multiple meetups and a fair amount of interest in polyglot programming. The Groovy and Ruby communities are good friends and a few members straddle both communities.

The Groovy community in Australia is currently centered on Brisbane, primarily around the work of Paul King. Over the years, he has been a great Groovy advocate and has done an excellent job of introducing Groovy to a few key clients (such as Suncorp Bank). In turn, these clients have adopted Groovy extensively, and the word has spread. There is also some activity in Sydney centered around Thoughtworks & Atlassian who use Groovy internally and sponsor the Sydney meetup.

Contributors

Some of the key Aussie/Kiwi contributors include the following:

Paul King (Brisbane)

Paul has been contributing to open source projects for nearly 20 years and is an active committer on numerous projects including Groovy. Paul speaks at international conferences, publishes in software magazines and journals, and is a co-author of Groovy in Action (he is currently working on the 2nd edition). He is well known for his extensive presentations on Enterprise Groovy and Groovy testing, and has recently been talking with standard Java Developers on how to make their testing more Agile using Groovy. He recently also joined the GPars team, a project that has sparked a lot of excitement..

Glen Smith (Canberra) 

By day, Glen is an Enterprise Java consultant working for the Australian government in Canberra. By night, he is 'the voice of Groovy' to many when he co-hosts the highly successful grailspodcast with Sven Haiges. Glen has been developing in Grails since 0.1, is a frequent blogger and also the person behind the excellent Groovy blog site groovyblogs.org. 

One of his own projects is Gravl (http://code.google.com/p/gravl), the Grails-powered blog engine that runs his blog.

Lee Butts (Gold Coast)


Lee became a committer on the Grails project in 2007 and was one of the few non-G2One/Spring committers. Since the purchase of G2One by Spring, he has been less active on the core and has been working on a few plugins, notably the webtest (http://grails.org/plugin/webtest) and amazon (http://grails.org/plugin/amazon-s3) plugins. Lee uses Grails daily on his client projects through his work with Refactor (who will also soon be launching a new site in December that is written completely in Grails–so watch this space).

Plugin authors

In addition to these three, we also have a myriad of plugin contributors; some of these (I am sure I have missed many) are covered below:

Luke Daley (Brisbane)

Bradley Beddoes (Brisbane)

Richard Vowles (Auckland)

Peter Delahunty (Sydney)

Daniel Bell (Sydney)

James Dumay (Sydney)

Al Philips (Sydney)

Others of Note

  • Bob Brown (Brisbane) - Oracle User Group presentations on Groovy/Grails, various Groovymag articles and conference speaker. http://www.transentia.com.au
  • Nick Carroll (Sydney) - Groovy Sydney, Groovy Thoughtworker.
  • John Smart (Wellington) - lots of Groovy/Grails talks and articles, notably EasyB & Hudson. See http://www.wakaleo.com/resources for a full list.

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