Presentations

Seven Steps to Learning Grails

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Grails is emerging as a standard JVM web framework in environments ranging from startups to the enterprise. It's a full-stack solution build on rock-solid components, fully relying on convention over configuration, and using the best application language the JVM has yet seen: Groovy. This is the place to be for web apps on the JVM.

In this introductory talk, we'll get a whirlwind introduction to Grails, visiting seven things you need to know about the framework to get started.

1. Creating an app
2. Development using the Tomcat server
3. Interacting with the database
4. Building your UI
5. Processing web requests
6. Tapping the huge plugin community
7. Deploying to production

Grails in Front, Cassandra In Back

Cassandra is a scalable, highly available, column-oriented data store in use at Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, Rackspace, and a growing list of other deployments. It offers a compelling combination of a rich data model, a robust deployment track record, and a sound architecture—and it isn't just for web-scale operations. It might be a good fit for your Grails app!

In this session, we'll learn the basics of Cassandra, then look at how to use it for storing data in a simple Grails application. We'll work through a simple data modeling exercise and look at the code required for interfacing with this leading NoSQL solution.

Plugging Into Gradle Plugins

Gradle is being adopted by enterprises and open-source projects alike for its ease of use, flexibility, and compatibility with existing standards. However, Gradle's true strength shines not when it is viewed as a wrapper around standards, but as a toolkit for creating your own standards to reflect your build patterns and practices. It is extensible at every level, but most powerfully at the level of Gradle plugins.

In this session, you'll learn the Gradle APIs you need to know to develop a plugin, the different ways to organize and distribute plugins, and the way you should use plugins as a means of extending the Gradle DSL to describe your build domain in a concise and idiomatic way. Examples will use real code for a plugin written by Tim and Matthew that can be used in development and automated deployment settings.

Groovy, Gradle, Grails and Git: Why, When, Where, What and How

The open source, and specifically, the Groovy, Grails, and Gradle communities are abuzz with the use of Git. But why? We'll take a anthropological look at the projects that have converted from Subversion to Git and why they decided to do so.

We'll examine the challenges and eventual successes of several Groovy and Spring project leads and their project migrations to Git. With projects such as Grails having two and a half years on the Git DVCS and Groovy recently converted, we'll dissect the more effective and social development techniques available to the core team and external contributors via Git. As a finale, we'll look at how these same Git benefits can be achieved on internal projects, or reflected back via contributions to open source Spring projects.