Burt Beckwith

By Burt Beckwith

The Spring Security (Acegi) plugin for Grails has gotten a bad rap. Earlier versions of the plugin and the Acegi framework were somewhat cumbersome to use but new features in Spring Security 2.0 and lots of enhancements and features in the Grails plugin have made securing your Grails apps easy.

This talk will demonstrate getting started with the Spring Security plugin and also show how easy it is to add Basic Authentication, LDAP, and even OpenID and Facebook authentication to an application. We'll also look at the various configuration options and extension points for when you need to customize beyond the standard configuration.

By Burt Beckwith

How is your lone web server going to handle all the traffic you'll get when it lands on Slashdot or the front page of Digg? Probably not well. To prepare for all of this popularity you're going to need multiple servers, but there's more to it than buying hardware.

In this talk we'll look at implementing Tomcat's HTTP Session clustering, distributed second-level Hibernate caching using EhCache, and using the JDBC store feature of Quartz so your servers can handle the load while maintaining consistent data.

By Burt Beckwith

The Yahoo Performance Team has made a ton of great UI performance tuning information available, both online and in two books, "High Performance Web Sites" and the recently released followup "Even Faster Web Sites".

The Grails UI-Performance plugin implements many of these best practices, including compressing and minifying static and dynamic content, aggressive caching, bundling files, creating image sprites and more. We'll look at the wrong way to send content to your users' browsers and the right way, and use YSlow to measure the improvements along the way. Your users will appreciate the zippier response times, and you'll appreciate the decreased server load.

By Burt Beckwith

You've used GORM in Grails apps, you've written custom criteria and HQL queries, and now you're ready to take database access in Grails to the next level.

In this talk we'll look at improving performance of Grails apps by avoiding mapped collections, strategies for second-level caching using EhCache, runtime monitoring and graphing, and using a custom Configuration subclass to customize your Hibernate config beyond what GORM mappings provide.

By Burt Beckwith

In this talk we'll look at the new Spring Security Core plugin and its dependent plugins. The core plugin provides all of the standard functionality you expect from a security plugin (URL security, users, roles, form-based authentication, etc.) and extension plugins add extra functionality such as OpenID support, LDAP authentication, object and method security with ACLs, and more.

We'll look at the various plugins and create some sample applications to see how easy it is to secure a Grails application with Spring Security.

By Burt Beckwith

Hibernate's create-drop mode is great when you're prototyping your Grails applications but once you get past the initial stages of your project you'll need to manage database changes (adding, removing, and renaming tables, columns, and indexes, refactoring data, etc.)

You can do this by hand but there are excellent tools and plugins available and in this talk we'll compare the various approaches available.

By Burt Beckwith

You've used GORM in Grails apps, you've written custom criteria and HQL queries, and now you're ready to take database access in Grails to the next level.

In this talk we'll look at improving performance of Grails apps by avoiding mapped collections, strategies for second-level caching using EhCache, runtime monitoring and graphing, and using a custom Configuration subclass to customize your Hibernate config beyond what GORM mappings provide.