Build-related Presentations
Russel Winder is the originator
of Gant, an Ant task scripting system that uses Groovy as the
scripting language. Some people use Gant instead of Ant as a build framework so as to avoid using XML as
the build specification language in favour of using Groovy. Russel is also a committer to
the Gradle project which is a fully-fledged build framework that uses
Groovy as the specification language: Gradle is a flexible replacement for Ant and Maven.
During the No Fluff, Just Stuff eXchange event held in London 2007-08-29/2007-08-31, the Groovy and Grails User Group asked Russel to do a presentation on Gant. A PDF of the slides can be found by clicking here
Grails eXchange 2007 was the first conference dedicated to the dynamic programming language Groovy and the Web applications development framework Grails. Russel Winder gave a talk at Grails eXchange 2007 entitled Understanding Gant.
At the PyCon UK 2007 conference, Russel Winder gave a presentation about SCons: Python is the Future of Build Systems which concluded that internal domain specific languages (DSLs) are the future for build systems, that dynamic languages are needed for DSLs, that Python is a great dynamic language, and that SCons is a great build system. Gant (which is based on Groovy and Ant) got a mention as well – but then Russel Winder wrote Gant so that is not really surprising.
Thoughtworks regularly host the London Geek Night. The session on 2008-08-18 was a collection of short talks with a discussion. Russel Winder presented a short talk on Gant. The slides can be found by clicking here.