Speakers

Tim Berglund

Developer, Consultant, Author

Tim Berglund runs a consulting firm called the August Technology Group, which provides training and development services to customers building web applications with open-source tools running on the JVM. He likes it best when these include Groovy and Grails.

His technology interests span web applications, business integration, data architecture, and software architecture, but his greatest passion is to help developers improve in their craft. He is a speaker internationally and at conferences and user groups in the United States, and helps lead the Denver Open Source User Group.

He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.

Presentations

Gaelyk: Lightweight Groovy on the Google App Engine

You love Groovy and you're a believer in cloud computing. For a larger project you might choose Grails and hosting on Amazon EC2, but what if you want to take advantage of the nearly massless deployments of a cloud provider like the Google App Engine? You could make Grails work, but it's not always the best fit. Enter Gaelyk.

Gaelyk is a lightweight Groovy web application framework built specifically for the Google App Engine. In this session, we'll talk through the simple abstractions it offers, then show how easy it is to code and deploy a useful application to the cloud.

Grails Without SQL

Out of the box, Grails famously relies on Hibernate for database persistence through the agency of GORM, the Grails Object-Relational Mapping API. But are Grails apps permanently beholden to relational datastores, even when the relational model is not an appropriate solution for the problem at hand? No!

Grails provides popular plugins for such NoSQL standbys as Lucene, Voldemort, Cassandra, and MongoDB. In this session, we'll take a quick look at each of those four NoSQL database technologies, how the products function on their own, and how their Grails plugins work. Come prepared to see lots of code and lots of data—in ways you may not have seen it before.

Grails in the Real World

Grails has enabled your team to achieve productivity levels you never knew possible for web applications on the JVM. Now you’ve carefully crafted a piece of enterprise software to be deployed in a complex environment including a legacy database, monitoring and logging standards, and pushbutton deployment requirements. You’re moving faster than ever, but it still seems harder than the blog-in-15-minutes demo you saw at that user group a couple of months ago. For a framework that sometimes seems biased towards the greenfield installation, this can be a challenge.

In this session, we'll learn the right internal framework details, deployment patterns, and Grails plugins to make your Grails deployment a success for both greenfield and brownfield apps. We'll cover responsible database schema migration, management with JMX, logging, secure remote deployments, and more. Come prepared to have your Grails toolbox loaded up.