After a silent 2015, JHUG made a strong comeback on Saturday, 2nd of April at the Orange Grove. We were happy to have new people coming in, in addition to the familiar faces of older members. All in all, around 50 people attended the meetup, and that was a very nice surprise. Also, this was the first ever recorded JHUG meetup, so people who couldn’t attend can still watch the presentations.

The first presentation was by Kostas Saidis (twitter, linkedin), who talked about Gradle. The presentation is entry level, so it is a good starting point for someone looking into what build systems exist today for Java projects. Kostas showed how Gradle builds upon lessons learned by pre-existing build systems (conversion-over-configuration, dependency management) and combines them with customizability, to enable custom and maintainable builds. Gradle takes full advantage of Groovy and its syntactic sugar, and offers a concise DSL, which makes build files less verbose and easy on the eye. You can find the slides here and watch the video below.

The second presentation was by my friend Kostis Kapelonis (web, twitter, linkedin), who talked about Spock. Kostis is very knowlegeable about Spock, he has (literally) written a book on the subject. The presentation showed how Spock can be used to test Java programs, and how it can deal with cases where Java traditional testing tools (JUnit, TestNG, Mockito) produce non-elegant test cases. Spock helps the developer write structured test cases with clearly separated steps (given, when, then), and avoid common pitfalls of assertions intermingled with setup method calls. Also, the use of plain English in Spock allows the generation of readable reports, and facilitates communication with non-developer members of the team. You can find the slides here and watch the video below:

The meetup was followed by pizzas, which were kindly offered by Playventure.