What I've Learned at UberConf - Part 2

So it was another great day at ÜberConf on Thursday (though I must admit that I skipped supper and the party to go watch the Rockies pound the Brewers). Here's some of the highlights for me:

Solr: Erik Hatcher gave a great talk on this search engine today. I've worked with some search engines in my distant past, and I don't really know what to say except that this one shows some great promise. I'm hoping to have the opportunity to use Solr (or even Solandra) to prototype some business functionality at the place I work. They've done some exciting stuff, for sure.

DSLs: I'll admit that I went into Neal Ford's talk on practical uses for Domain Specific Languages as a bit of a skeptic. I think I still am, but I'm a bit more open minded about them, and understand they do have their place. One perfect example is Cucumber, which seems to use a plain English DSL to determine how it should operate. It is also intriguing that there are some cool tools starting to become available that will actually help you generate DSL's, including syntax checking editors. It's a bit mind-blowing, really.

JUnit Kung-Fu: I always love going to talks on unit testing, as they inevitably highlight some of the smells in my own practices. John Smart didn't fail. He provided some great insights that will really help improve my tests so they make sense to people other than myself. Some of his key points were around naming (ex. name your test cases using "should" instead of "test") and making good use of the Hamcrest matching libraries. Great stuff.

Gradle: I'm in. I've piddled around with Gradle a few times in the past, but have felt it was still a bit immature for me to try to introduce to my company. That time has passed. I firmly believe Gradle is ready for prime time, especially with the tooling now available in Eclipse via STS. Hans Dockler has converted me, and I almost can't bear the thought of going back to work and using Maven.

Honestly, Gradle gives us all the out of the box power we get with Maven, plus it provides us with a rich declarative Groovy based DSL that gives us the power to actually make stuff happen. Forget the fact that it's Groovy instead of XML, even if that weren't true it still blows away both Maven and Ant by far. Gradle is ready for prime time.

Just one more day left, I can't wait to see what Friday holds.