Griffon: Swing just got fun again from RuPy 2009

Just a couple hours after interacting with our developers at our Spawn 2009 event, I was enroute to Poznan, Poland to lead a session at the RuPy conference. Roughly 36 hours from the end of Spawn, having traveled 24 hours straight through London and Warsaw, weary-eyed and hopped up on caffiene, I hit the stage to present.

RuPy, while originally a conference for Ruby and Python developers, has expanded to all dynamic languages in general. My session was titled: Griffon: Swing just got fun again.

Griffon is a RIA framework for the Java platform that brings web application paradigms such as Model-View-Controller, Convention over Configuration, and pluggable architecture to Java desktop applications. It is implemented using the Groovy language and has some limited support for other JVM languages and toolkits such as Rhino, JRuby, and SWT. Another feature of the framework is that you can write code with little regard for the destination platform. A Griffon app can be deployed as a desktop app, applet, or webstart with few changes in code.

It was created by myself and the other members of the Groovy Swing team, Andres Almiray and Danno Ferrin. The project just celebrated its first birthday. Since inception, we have expanded our core team members to five and there is a book in the works.

Inside Ribbit, Griffon has found its way into some internal proof of concept projects because of the ease to quickly scaffold a desktop application.

The following is the video from my presentation.