Tim Berglund

Presentations

NoSQL Smackdown 2012

Alternative databases continue to establish their role in the technology stack of the future—and for many, the technology stack of the present. Making mature engineering decisions about when to adopt new products is not easy, and requires that we learn about them both from an abstract perspective and from a very concrete one as well. If you are going to recommend a NoSQL database for a new project, you're going to have to look at code.

In this talk, we'll examine three important contenders in the NoSQL space: Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4J. We'll review their data models, scaling paradigms, and query idioms. Most importantly, we'll work through the exercise of modeling a real-world problem with each database, and look at the code and queries we'd use to implement real product features. Come to this session for a thorough and thoroughly practical smackdown between three important NoSQL products.

Ratpack Workshop (bring a laptop)

The only thing better than talking about Ratpack is hacking with Ratpack. Come to this workshop for 90 minutes of directed web development using the latest un-framework for Groovy-based web apps.

The instructor will lead you in coding features in a simple web app, but you are free to hack on your own ideas as well. You will leave the session having become famliar with Ratpack and ready to start building your own small apps with it.

Gradle Workshop (Bring a Laptop)

Gradle. Another build tool? Come on! But before you say that, take a look at the one you are already using.

Whether your current tool is Make, Rake, Ant, or Maven, Gradle has a lot to offer. It leverages a strong object model like Maven, but a mutable, not predetermined one. Gradle relies on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) lifecycle like Maven, but one that can be customized. Gradle offers imperative build scripting when you need it (like Ant), but declarative build approaches by default (like Maven). In short, Gradle believes that conventions are great -- as long as they are headed in the same direction you need to go. When you need to customize something in your build, your build tool should facilitate that with a smile, not a slap in the face. And customizations should be in a low-ceremony language like Groovy. Is all this too much to ask?

Gradle has received the attention of major open source efforts and has chalked up significant conversions by the Spring Integration, Hibernate, and Grails projects. What do these technology leaders see in this bold new build tool? They see not only a better way to build Java applications, but an extensive ecosystem of connecting to existing Ant and Maven build files while expanding the horizon of test, CI, and deployment automation in an easy manner. Join us for 90 minutes and let us take you on this same walk of discovery of the most innovative build tool you've ever seen.

ClojureScript

Clojure has recently been gaining attention as one of the most innovative languages of the JVM in current use, and it has mostly found a home on the server. In parallel, JavaScript has ascended to the position of the most important language of the web, and until recently it has lived only on the client. Few observers looked at the world of web development and predicted that these two would get together. Happily for us, they have!

ClojureScript is a dialect of Clojure that compiles to JavaScript, and targets the JavaScript runtimes of the web as a deployment environment. It offers the unparalleled expressiveness of Lisp, the performance and space efficiency of the Google Closure Compiler, interoperability with the in-browser object model, natural integration with server-side Clojure applications, and an insanely productive in-browser REPL. In a time of proliferating JavaScript extensions and client-side development frameworks, you owe it to yourself to take a look at this compelling vision of how client-side web development should be done.