Presentations

The Amazing Groovy Weight-loss Program

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Quick and Dirty and Oh So Cool

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RESTful Grails

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Groovy XML Ninja Skills by Scott Davis

XML is everywhere. Whether you are dealing with local configuration files (web.xml, struts-config.xml) or remote web services (SOAP, REST, RSS, Atom), the modern software developer needs to be able to request, slice, and dice XML with ease. That requires a set of razor-sharp tools that reduce the inherent complexity of the problem, not multiply it. Once you see XML tremble in fear at the awesome power of Groovy, you'll wonder what you ever did without it.

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n this talk, we look at various Groovy tools to create, parse, and export XML. To read in XML, we'll explore the XmlSlurper and the XmlParser. To write out XML, we'll use the MarkupBuilder, StreamingMarkupBuilder, and the XmlNodePrinter. We'll go beyond simple Plain Old XML (POX) and demonstrate using namespaces, CDATA blocks, and more.

Flex for Grails Developers

Grails is a powerful server-side web framework based on the Model/View/Controller (MVC) design principle. Flex is a popular Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework for building client-side applications.

Come see how these two best-of-breed frameworks work together.

Tomorrow's Tech Today: HTML 5 + Grails

As software engineers, we take comfort in the idea of concrete specifications. As web developers, our hearts are either broken (frequently!), or we recognize the W3C's role is a delicate balance of leading the browser developers in new and exciting directions while, in their own words, "paving over the cow paths" of existing, de facto standards.

HTML 5 offers dramatic new improvements for page organization, offering out-of-the-box support for elements like header, footer, nav, section, and article. HTML 5 adds native support for form features such as placeholder text, autocomplete, autofocus, and validation. Additionally, there are a host of new form elements available (email, url, number, range, date, and search) that gracefully degrade in "classic" web browsers -- IE, I'm looking at you!

In this talk, you won't be subjected to discussions about the features that will appear in some distant future release of a web browser. Instead, you'll see the HTML 5 features that are already being used by Google, Apple, and others. You'll see the features that are supported by today's browsers, ready for you to use right now.

Grails + CouchDB

"CouchDB is built of the Web. I’ve never seen software that so completely embraces the philosophies behind HTTP." Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Django Developer

If you want to get a room full of programmers all riled up, just casually drop the word, "NoSQL." To some, NoSQL means, "death to all antiquated, 1970s-era persistence solutions!" Others take a more pragmatic approach -- "Not Only SQL" means that while relational databases are suitable for some applications, there is an emerging crop of equally viable (and interesting) persistence strategies out there.

Apache CouchDB is a schema-free document store that uses HTTP GETs, PUTs, and DELETEs instead of SQL SELECTs, INSERTs, and DELETEs. It speaks JSON fluently instead of tables, columns, and rows. It uses JavaScript Map/Reduce functions instead of SQL for the query language. It offers effortless replication among distributed CouchDB instances.

And how does Grails -- a web framework that is tightly coupled to relational databases via GORM (the Grails Object-Relational Mapping API) and Hibernate -- deal with a non-relational document store behind the scenes? I guess that you'll just have to show up to find out, won't you? If you've been around the block once or twice with Grails but are new to CouchDB, this talk offers an exploration into each technology and how they can be teased into working together.

CoffeeScript for Groovy Developers

It always amazes me when Groovy developers say, "I don't like JavaScript." Both are dynamic languages that make metaprogramming seamless, but Groovy edges out JavaScript in the race for conciseness and syntactic sugar. That is, until CoffeeScript came onto the scene.

CoffeeScript is to JavaScript as Groovy is to Java -- both give their respective base languages a thoroughly modern makeover. CoffeeScript brings string interpolation (think GStrings), null-safe property access (person?.middleName and our beloved Elvis operator), and much more to JavaScript development. Perhaps CoffeeScript founder Jeremy Ashkenas says it best: "Underneath all of those embarrassing braces and semicolons, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous object model at its heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way."

CoffeeScript is more than an intellectual curiosity. It is the #1 most followed project on GitHub. It ships as a standard library in Rails 3.1. But most importantly, Brendan Eich openly acknowledges that CoffeeScript is influencing the future direction JavaScript (formally, ECMAScript "Harmony"). Much of what you see in CoffeeScript today will become native to JavaScript tomorrow.

Why don't you join me and see what the fuss is all about? You'll never look at JavaScript the same way again.

HTML 5 for Grails Developers

Now that HTML5 is the standard output format for Grails 2.0, shouldn't you really dig in and see what all of the excitement is about?

HTML 5 offers dramatic new improvements for page organization, offering out-of-the-box support for elements like header, footer, nav, section, and article. HTML 5 adds native support for form features such as placeholder text, autocomplete, autofocus, and validation. Additionally, there are a host of new form elements available (email, url, number, range, date, and search) that gracefully degrade in "classic" web browsers - IE, I'm looking at you!

In this talk, you won't be subjected to discussions about the features that will appear in some distant future release of a web browser. Instead, you'll see the HTML 5 features that are already being used by Google, Apple, and others. You'll see the features that are supported by today's browsers, ready for you to use right now.