Scott Davis

Presentations

Tomorrow's Tech Today: HTML 5

In this talk, you won't be subjected to discussions about the features that will appear in some distant future release of a web browser. Instead, you'll see the HTML 5 features that are already being used by Google, Apple, and others. You'll see the features that are supported by today's browsers, ready for you to use right now.

HTML 5 offers dramatic new improvements for page organization, offering out-of-the-box support for elements like header, footer, nav, section, and article. HTML 5 adds native support for form features such as placeholder text, autocomplete, autofocus, and validation. Additionally, there are a host of new form elements available (email, url, number, range, date, and search) that gracefully degrade in "classic" web browsers -- IE, I'm looking at you!

Grails + CouchDB

Apache CouchDB is a schema-free document store that uses HTTP GETs, PUTs, and DELETEs instead of SQL SELECTs, INSERTs, and DELETEs. It speaks JSON fluently instead of tables, columns, and rows. It uses JavaScript Map/Reduce functions instead of SQL for the query language. It offers effortless replication among distributed CouchDB instances.

"CouchDB is built of the Web. I’ve never seen software that so completely embraces the philosophies behind HTTP." Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Django Developer

If you want to get a room full of programmers all riled up, just casually drop the word, "NoSQL." To some, NoSQL means, "death to all antiquated, 1970s-era persistence solutions!" Others take a more pragmatic approach -- "Not Only SQL" means that while relational databases are suitable for some applications, there is an emerging crop of equally viable (and interesting) persistence strategies out there.

And how does Grails -- a web framework that is tightly coupled to relational databases via GORM (the Grails Object-Relational Mapping API) and Hibernate -- deal with a non-relational document store behind the scenes? I guess that you'll just have to show up to find out, won't you? If you're new to Grails, new to CouchDB, or both, this talk offers an exploration into each technology and how they can be teased into working together.

Compile Time and Runtime Metaprogramming With Groovy

Groovy should feel instantly familiar to Java developers -- after all, Groovy is an extension to the Java language. Many of Groovy's enhancements come in the form of metaprogramming, or new methods added to existing classes. In this talk, we'll take a look at how Groovy adds these methods to Java classes, and how you can do the same. Despite the somewhat frightening nomenclature, it's much easier than you might think.

The dynamic nature of Groovy makes it a fantastic language for building dynamic applications for the Java Platform. The metaprogramming capabilities offered by the language provide everything that an application development team needs to build systems that are far more capable than their all Java counterparts. Taking advantage of Groovy's metaprogramming capabilities brings great new possibilities that would be very difficult or just plain impossible to write with Java alone. Building Domain Specific Languages in Groovy is easy to do once a team has a good understanding of the Metaobject-Protocol (MOP) and the method dispatch mechanisms used by the Groovy runtime environment.

This session will cover in detail a number of advanced metaprogramming concepts in Groovy. The discussion will cover using dynamic method interception, meta-class manipulation, AST transformations and Groovy's Metaobject-Protocol (MP) to build flexible applications in Groovy including implementing a Domain Specific Language (DSL).