The power of multicore machines and cloud computing is all dependent on an application's ability to successfully leverage concurrency. Although concurrency has traditionally been considered fatally difficult in Java, a few simple architecture principles can make all the difference. This session will review some of those principles in both theory and practice.

This session will review the theory of concurrency and the different levels that concurrency will act on. With that basis, it explores the theoretical reasons behind the difficulties in writing concurrent code, and then some practical application architecture techniques to cope with those difficulties.

JConch is a library that provides a few high-level tools for high-concurrency environments on the JVM. The java.util.concurrent package in the Java standard library provides low-level structures for managing concurrent communication. Learn here how to use both of them in order to produce clean, highly-concurrent, and highly-tunable code.

Programming in a concurrent fashion is quickly becoming mandatory for applications. This session will explore the best ways to do that on the JVM.

For years, the venerable Hibernate object-relational mapping framework has dominated the persistence scene in Java. The Grails web application framework extended Hibernate and Spring with their impressive GORM persistence framework, providing convention-over-configuration development to the O/RM and DAO layers. This session will introduce GORM and work up to some of its intermediate features.

Before too long, every data access layer starts to look the same. Spring recognized this and provided some common functionality. The Grails web framework went one step further and provided conventional access to their ORM objects. Now GORM is available to non-Grails applications as well, so this session should have universal appeal.

The Grails web application is an innovative hybrid of best-of-breed Java technologies and dynamic/convention-based development. The result is a powerful, flexible, exciting framework that still fits comfortably into enterprise stacks. This session introduces Grails, but approaches it from the perspective of an enterprise web development stack, in order to see how Grails works well in mid-size and mature development shops.

Some technologies seem to think that running on the JVM is all that it takes to be enterprise-ready, but the reality is that there is a large context of standard Java technologies like Spring, Hibernate, Log4J, JNDI, and app servers that make up the backbone of enterprise Java shops. This presentation will show how Grails naturally fits into that context because it is built off of those existing technologies.