Tim Berglund

Presentations

Complexity Theory and Software Development

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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.

Getting Started with 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. 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

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.

Lightweight Web Apps with Ratpack

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Ratpack is a hyper-lightweight, Groovy-based web framework for developing and deploying simple apps in a hurry. Like its high-achieving cousin Gaelyk, it provides Groovy developers with a way to create web apps without days of iteration zero setup time.

In this talk, we'll look over Ratpack's very simple structure and live-code a small, practical example application. We'll look at how to evolve simple controller logic, how to manage templates, how to persist data, and how to deploy Ratpack applications to the web. The Java world needs ways to build small applications in a hurry, and Ratpack is the latest way to do it!

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.

Grails Workshop (bring a laptop)

If you've gotten your feet wet with Grails. You've talked to friends, you've done some reading, you've seen a presentation that sold you on the awesomness of the framework. What's next? Why, some hacking, of course!

Come to this 90-minute workshop ready to create a persistent domain model, build a scaffolded UI, modify page layouts, and maybe even build some Ajax into your new web app. See how quickly you can get started building robust, scalable web apps for the JVM.

Bring a laptop of be prepared to pair with a friend. Please have a current release of Grails (http://grails.org/Download) downloaded and unzipped.