Tim Berglund

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.

Gaelyk Workshop Part I

Once you've been introduced to Gaelyk and the Groovy way it wraps the services the Google App Engine, it's time to write some code. Bring your laptop for a hands-on Gaelyk hack session in which we build a working Gaelyk app utilizing as many of the GAE services as we can pack into a 180 minutes of coding!

Workshop attendees should have a laptop with the following: JDK 5+, an IDE or editor capable of editing Groovy code and HTML, the Google App Engine SDK already downloaded and installed (http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html#GoogleAppEngineSDKfor_Java), and the current version of the Gaelyk project template (https://github.com/glaforge/gaelyk/downloads).

Gaelyk Workshop Part II

Once you've been introduced to Gaelyk and the Groovy way it wraps the services the Google App Engine, it's time to write some code. Bring your laptop for a hands-on Gaelyk hack session in which we build a working Gaelyk app utilizing as many of the GAE services as we can pack into a 180 minutes of coding!

Workshop attendees should have a laptop with the following: JDK 5+, an IDE or editor capable of editing Groovy code and HTML, the Google App Engine SDK already downloaded and installed (http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html#GoogleAppEngineSDKfor_Java), and the current version of the Gaelyk project template (https://github.com/glaforge/gaelyk/downloads).

Getting Started with Grails

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. Programming in Groovy
2. Creating an app
3. Interacting with the database
4. Building your UI
5. Processing web requests
6. Tapping the huge plugin community
7. Deploying to production

Complexity Theory and Software Development

Some systems are too large to be understood entirely by any one human mind. They are composed of a diverse array of individual components capable of interacting with each other and adapting to a changing environment. As systems, they produce behavior that differs in kind from the behavior of their components. Complexity Theory is an emerging discipline that seeks to describe such phenomena previously encountered in biology, sociology, economics, and other disciplines.

Beyond new ways of looking at ant colonies, fashion trends, and national economies, complexity theory promises powerful insights to software development. The Internet—perhaps the most valuable piece of computing infrastructure of the present day—may fit the description of a complex system. Large corporate organizations in which developers are employed have complex characteristics. In this session, we'll explore what makes a complex system, what advantages complexity has to offer us, and how to harness these in the systems we build.