Groovy on the way to success

The European Patent Office (EPO) is the official patent granting authority of Europe, founded on the European Patent Convention, an agreement between 36 countries. EPO’s main responsibility is to examine patent applications and grant European patents, processing more than 140,000 patent applications per year.

EPO’s Data Resources Department is responsible for collecting patent-related data, which involves interfacing with about 100 patent offices all over the world. In order to replace its Cobol/Mainframe-based data flows EPO Data Resources has developed the Data Flow Platform, an enterprise application to streamline operations for all the data collection processes. In addition, EPO has developed a Data Flow Language (DFL, a Groovy domain specific language) to leverage similarities in the processes for communicating with each individual country’s patent office, and transform them into a single, universal process.
 
In this session you will learn:

• why Groovy was chosen as the preferred technology to write processes
• how Groovy makes it easier for business and IT to communicate
• why a Domain Specific Language is a key feature
• how the DSL interacts with a Business Rules Engine
• how the combination of Groovy and Agile methodology helps answer business needs in a timely manner and with higher quality