A few weeks ago on a Friday evening, Canoo opened its doors to the public and hosted a new programming user group called Hackergarten. The goal of the group is different from other user groups: instead of learning from listening to a presentation they want to learn by writing code. In their own words:

Our goal is to create something that others can use; whether it be working software, improved documentation, or better educational materials. Our intent is to end each meeting with a patch or similar contribution submitted to an open and public project.

We’re excited to say that their contribution to the Gradle build system was accepted last week! The next release of Gradle 0.9 contains an “Announce” plugin that can notify you and your customers of build events using Twitter, Snarl, or the Ubuntu notification system. You can notify yourself of local build failures or notify your customers of successful formal build releases. It was a long Friday night, but the group of over 10 developers are all happy to see their work accepted. As the group sponsor, Canoo is happy to have kept them caffeinated and well fed.

The next Hackergarten is this Friday, 30 April 2010. The group plans to write some Griffon plugins, a desktop application framework written in Java and Groovy. The Griffon Project Lead (and Canoo employee)Andres Almiray will be present to help guide the group. If you are anywhere near the Basel area this Friday, then please stop by Canoo and come join the fun. Don’t worry if you’ve never seen Groovy or Griffon before, the point is to learn new skills and meet new people.

You can find out more information on the Hackergarten mailing list or follow @Hackergarten to stay up to date.

Come join the fun. Here’s what people are saying about the last event:

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The first Hackergarten was a great event, not only because there was free pizza, but primarily because it was a true team event with everyone actively contributing. Submitting a patch for a new Gradle plugin at the end of the night was our goal which we reached successfully. I look forward to learning more about Griffon at the next Hackergarten.

Etienne Stuber

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I learned how easy and powerful Gradle is. The fact: with a little group and in a little time, we wrote a worth-making contribution to an open source project. Did I have fun? Definitely, it was like meeting with friends but for a beer but enjoying coding at the same time. In the future I am interested in writing Grails or Griffon plugins.

Alberto Mijares

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At Hackergarten I learned about the Pomodoro technique and how to use groovy closures to do exception handling in a smart way. And yes, I had a lot of fun! For future events I am interested in anything with new technologies but especially with testing different approaches on how to program in teams.

Christoph Sperle

March 31th, Canoo Engineering AG celebrated it’s 10th anniversary. After some informative and actual presentations around business applications by Greg Hutchinson, Etienne Studer, Alexandra Teynor et al., we evidently had a lot of fun and some interesting chats with our customers. Here are some impressions of Canoo Day 2010:

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Canoo Software Engineer Hamlet D’Arcy was interviewed for the GR8 conference about his professional background and his conference contribution as well as Groovy and the Canoo Hackergarten.

Here’s the link to the interview! And here are some pictures of Hamlet during Canoo Day 2010:

4/29/2010, Technopark Zurich. By Michael Schneider, IBM Rational Research GmbH.

This talk presents a JavaScript execution engine that allows seamless integration of Dojo-flavored JavaScript code in an OSGi based Java runtime. Doing so allows sharing JavaScript code between Web and Eclipse applications, while still providing distinctive user interfaces using HTML and SWT, respectively. As this technology is already deployed in the latest releases of Rational Team Concert, experiences using this approach are shared.

Additionally, a novel approach to develop and evolve large Dojo-based Web 2.0 applications, called JDojo, is introduced. It brings the Eclipse JDT tooling to the JavaScript language to provide typed API, compile time error checking, refactorings and much more, by using the Java syntax. However, in contrast to other approaches, its design is built around the JavaScript language rather than the JDK. It comes with built-in support for interacting with existing JavaScript code. JDojo works perfectly with the JavaScript engine, thus simplifying the development of Web and Eclipse Applications even more.

Read more and register here!

Enjoy a new video of Canoo Fellow Dierk König in action:

"Scala, Groovy, JRuby, Clojure - Which JVM language is for you?"

In this discussion, panel members Dierk König, Guillaume Laforge (Groovy), Charles Nutter (JRuby), Stefan Tilkov (Clojure) and Ted Neward (Scala) discuss with the audience the pros and cons of the popular JVM-based lanauges Scala, Groovy, JRuby and Clojure in order to attempt to reach a verdict of rank. The panellists try to logically wade through arguments based on the key concepts of each language along with their primary applications and try to resolve clichéd comparisons such as performance.

We are happy to announce the second RIA forum which will take place in Darmstadt (close to Frankfurt), 23rd of April 2010! This time, with Canoo Engineering AG as premium sponsor, four well known speakers will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of four different ways to create effective user interfaces (especially in business contexts).

Instead of giving details here I recommend to visit the forum page directly: http://www.riaforum.com (in German). Please be aware that we can only provide entrance to a limited audience, so if you want to join, make sure you sign up quickly.

Watch an interesting interview (in German) with Dierk König about the actual language diversity in the Java community — Groovy, Scala, Clojure, JRuby and all the rest of them! If you are interested in this topic, we also recommend to take a look on the schedule of the Java Language Days 2010 (moderated by Dierk König and Markus Völter (itemis).

While preparing the second edition of “Groovy in Action”, Canoo Fellow Dierk König once again worked systematically through the language and came across a number of new features that slipped by his attention when they were added. His talk (from Groovy & Grails eXchange 2009, London) presents those features in a workshop-like manner with demos, live coding and lots of interaction with the audience. Watch the video on Skills Matter!

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Dierk with James Gosling during Jazoon 2009

At the Jazoon, the international conference on Java technology (Zurich, June 23-25), James Gosling, the father of the Java programming language, will deliver the opening Keynote. So if you missed JavaOne this year, just attend Jazoon’09 and benefit from inside information and updates, but also get latest news about the future of Java. 

Besides James Gosling, Jazoon’09 features many other interesting speakers from the Java world including Neal Ford, Ivar Jacobson, Adrian Colyer and Danny Coward. As a special guest we are pleased to announce Linda Cureton, CIO of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center in the USA. She will deliver the Jazoon’09 closing Keynote.

Moreover, as the first developer conference in Europe, Jazoon’09 launched a competition for young speakers aged 26 and under. Out of the several dozen submissions, an expert jury has selected the three most promising. The finalists of the Canoo sponsored “Jazoon Rookie 2009” are:

João Arthur Brunet Monteiro - Brazil
Bettina Polasek - Hungary
Deni Lukmanul Hakim - Indonesia

On 24 June 2009, the conference audience and the jury will vote on the winner. Canoo is very exited to be involved in such an event, as the contest is an opportunity for creative minds under the age of 26 to present their ideas to a broad public of experts. Facing the present shortage of skilled IT specialists, it was an obvious decision for Canoo to actively support the advancement of young professionals and new ideas. 

Scott Davis interviewed Dierk König, Canoo Fellow and Grails/Groovy-Evangelist for Thirsty Head at blip.tv. In the interview, Dierk gives an inside-view about new Grails improvements, about his JavaOne talk, JavaFX and the impact of Canoo Webtest. Enjoy this interesting chat about “beauty and code”!