This evening, I had the distinct privilege of presenting my experiences with the Ratpack web framework to the talented men and women who attended the Groovy MN meetup. For the past few months, I’ve followed very closely the framework’s progress, and have even offered my own insights into the direction of its development effort. I was thrilled to have the audience that I did this evening, who offered insightful questions and comments, and who remained polite and interested during the nearly two hours for which I presented.

I hope that my presentation was mostly adequate in providing some guidance for how to build, package, and deploy applications with Ratpack. The conversation this evening covered everything from the simplest of web applications in Ratpack, to much more complex, web-scale applications that leveraged MongoDB. It even covered dependency injection, building modules, and how to write a custom handler. Properly, Jeff Beck made note that the evening’s coverage of Ratpack’s Handler chain was just the tip of the iceberg; indeed, an entire evening could be dedicated to leveraging the flexibility inherent in this construct of the framework. Jeff also promised to give the community an evening in the not-too-distant future, wherein he will cover the intricacies of unit, integration, and functional testing of Ratpack apps.

More than anything, I’m constantly reminded of what a bright, thoughtful, and involved community we have surrounding the “GR8” technologies; I couldn’t be more honored than to consider myself a part of it. Leading up to my presentation, I had the opportunity to sit with some of the attendees and discuss the challenges that we collectively face with enterprise development. These people are real-world, feet-on-the-ground developers, building solutions to the problem domains that confront multi-million-dollar businesses — and what’s even better is how collaborative they all are, sharing their experiences and sorting through problems together.

I digress. I’ve posted the code samples for my presentation this evening on my GitHub account. I hope this repository will serve to guide you on your path to rapidly developing web applications with Ratpack. Please don’t hesitate to contact me via email or Twitter if you run into a roadblock and need some help.

As promised, here is the link to the slides for this presentation. Please feel free to leave comments below, or to contact me directly. Thanks again to everybody who has been a part of this journey.