Graeme Rocher

Graeme Rocher is a software architect and Chief Technology Officer at SkillsMatter. He started his career in the e-learning sector as part of a team developing scalable enterprise learning management systems based on J2EE technology. He later branched into the digital TV arena where he was faced with increasingly complex requirements that required an agile approach as the ever-changing and young iDTV platforms evolved. This is where Graeme was first exposed to Groovy and he began combining Groovy with Cocoon to deliver dynamic multi-channel content management systems targeted at digital TV platforms.

Benefiting from this taster of what Groovy had to offer, Graeme utilized his skills in his next role at a company called KnowledgePool to produce a rapid e-learning development toolkit, called Originate, that incorporated Groovy as the glue language to bring together a diverse range of technologies required to make the product work (from VB and Microsoft Word to XSLT, the JavaScriptTM language, and XSL-FO). Soon 80% of all e-Learnig work produced by KnowledgePool was using the Groovy-based technology to deliver bespoke e-learning projects.

Seeing an increasing trend for web delivery of services and the complexity this brought, Graeme embarked on another project to simplify this and founded Grails, a framework with the essence of Ruby on Rails, but targeted at tight Java integration. Graeme is the current project lead of Grails and is a member of the Groovy JSR-241 executive committee.

In his current role as CTO at SkillsMatter, a company specializing in Open Source training, Graeme is in charge of the companies courseware development strategy and general technical direction. As part of this role he actively works with a wide range of professionals from the Open Source community and speaks at industry conferences whenever possible on subjects related to Groovy, Grails and dynamic languages in Java.