Battle of the Geeks: Groovy!
Published by peter August 11th, 2007 in fun, groovy.
At the end of September Finalist will organize an event called: Battle of the Geeks.
Main concept of the battle is to convince the audience of the usefulness coolness of the tool/framework which you are presenting.
Initially I was asked to pitch Spring. I like Spring… but is it cool enough to convince Ruby/Rails zealots that Java is keeping up? Can Spring MVC blow away the Wicket, CMSc or Radiant/Rails crowd? No, it wont. Mainly due to the large amounts of XML plumbing (yes, I know about the annotations and java configuration) and lack of high level web components.
Therefor I decided to use the opportunity to dive into Grails. After seeing Graeme Rocher presenting his baby at Javapolis 2006 I was blown away by the elegance of Grails. Grails uses the elegant groovy scripting language to build webapplications and comes with rails-like scripts to generate models/views/controllers/tags/scaffold. Under the hood you’ll find Grails using proven frameworks like Spring and Hibernate.
To start of learning Grails watched the availlable podcasts on the Grails website, browsed through the tutorials and various getting started articles and ordered a book. The next couple of weeks I’ll be building various grails apps to get myself ready… The results I’ll probably post here.
Now I’ll just have to come up with an awesome application to demonstrate the power of Grails; and which I can build (preferably without using huge copy-and-paste templates) in just 15 minutes. Ideas? Anyone?
Don’t think you can do this in 15 seconds, but it would be cool to have a program that makes special effects look more fake again!
Like add some strings to Megatron’s arms and head, in Transformers. And put some awkward shadows between Harry Potter and the scenery when he’s flying on his broom. Haha.
But since you have a background in music, I would exploit that and make something that makes cool sounds. Like the guy does in Douglas Adams’ book about Dirk Gently, you know. He turns the flow of graphs and charts into music.
Or something about either penguins or ducks, since the coolness factor of penguins is unmatched in the universe and ducks are plain delicious.
Hope these ideas help at all.
Those ideas are strange and unexpected… but nonetheless useful. Since it is a battle of the geeks my presentation *must* at least include Douglas Adams and penguins…. thanks for pointing that out
Indeed! I really need an application in which I can advertise which penguin and duck memorabilia I still want to sell and buy!
Haha, strange and unexpected ideas: my specialty! ;D