November 11th, 2009 Meeting

Location: Auraria Campus-Tivoli Bldg; Room: TIV 320 AB – Baerresen Ballroom

*** Free Pizza @ 5:30 ***

Main Session Speaker: Matt Raible

“Building SOFEA Applications with Grails and GWT”

7:15pm -8:30pm

BC Session Speaker: Panel, Q & A

“How to Become and Independent Consultant: Panel Discussion Q & A”

6:00pm – 7:00pm

Basic Concepts – Panel Discussion ‘How to Become and Independent Consultant: Panel Discussion Q & A’

How To Become an Independent Consultant: Panel discussion; Q & A This session explores the trials and tribulations of an independent consultant. How do you find contracts? Should you setup an LLC, an S-Corp or just be a sole proprietorship? What about health insurance and benefits? Are recruiters helpful or hurtful? Learn lots of tips and tricks to get your dream job and your ideal lifestyle. Ski season is coming up after all. 😉

Panel: Matt Raible, Tim Berglund, Matthew McCullough, James Goodwill

Featured Talk: Matt Raible ‘Building SOFEA Applications with Grails and GWT’

In early 2009, Matt participated in a major enhancement of a high-traffic well-known internet site. The company wanted to quickly re-architect their site and use a modern Ajax framework to do it with. An Ajax Framework evaluation was done to help the team choose the best framework for their skillset. The application was built with a SOFEA architecture using GWT on the frontend and Grails/REST on the backend. This talk will cover how Matt’s team came to choose GWT and Grails, as well as stumbling blocks they encountered along the way. In addition, we’ll explore many topics such as raw GWT vs. GXT and SmartGWT, the GWT-Plugin, modularizing your code, multiple EntryPoints, integration testing and JSON parsing with Overlay Types.

Speaker:

Matt Raible resides in Denver, Colorado, where he runs Raible Designs, a consultancy that specializes in open source Java frameworks and Ajax development. Matt has been surrounded by computers for most of his life, even though he grew up without electricity in the backwoods of Montana. Matt is an author (Spring Live, Pro JSP), active Java open-source contributor, and blogger on raibledesigns.com. He is the founder of AppFuse, a project which allows you to get started quickly with Java frameworks, as well as a committer on the Apache Roller project. Matt’s presentations can be downloaded from his website. Contact him if you can’t find one of his presentations.

October 15, 2009 Meeting

Tivoli 320 AB

BC – Tim Berglund TDD w/Grails

Abstract:

Not many of us question that TDD is the right way to write software, but not many of us really practice it either. Even fewer of us do it when writing a web app, and with good reason: web app code is usually coupled to a framework, and the framework is usually coupled to a web server on one end and a database on the other. All this coupling does not set us up for testing success.

Grails 1.1 introduces several features that make it easy and truly productive to create a web application while testing first. In this talk, you’ll learn how to use Domain and Controller mocking to write unit tests that can be run quickly and easily from the IDE or from the command line. TDD with 100% coverage had always been possible in Grails, but for the first time the tools make it the kind of thing you’ll want to do. Learn to use the new features of the framework to build your web app the right way the first time.

About the Speaker:

Tim Berglund runs a software consulting firm called the August Technology Group (www.augusttechgroup.com), which provides training, coaching, and development services to customers building web applications with open-source tools, especially with the Grails framework. His technology interests span web applications, business integration, data architecture, and software architecture, but his greatest passion is to help developers improve in their craft. He is a frequent speaker at local user groups, and helps lead IASA Denver (www.iasadenver.org) and the Denver Open Source User Group (www.denveropensource.org). He is currently writing the book, Deploying Grails (to be published by O’Reilly), due out in 2010. He lives in Littleton, CO with his wife and three children.

FEATURED TALK – Randy Kahle on NetKernel

Abstract:

NetKernel is a software platform that runs on the JVM. It is based on a very small pure REST kernel and includes tools and services in its stack (much like Unix). Like the Web, everything in NetKernel is identified by a URI.

NetKernel started as a research project in HP Labs in 1999. Since 2002, the technology has been advanced by 1060 Research. We are releasing NetKernel 4 on 10/9/2009 and this represents a major step forward in the refinement of the abstraction and platform.

NetKernel is used by large corporations (e.g. BlueShield of California) governments (e.g. US Army, Intelligence Agencies) and small companies. All report the same – applications built on NetKernel run faster, require less code, scale with cores and in general, simplify systems.

More information is at http://www.1060research.com (Note: while the company is located in the UK, I work remotely from Fort Collins).

In an hour presentation I will present the fundamentals of the abstraction, demonstrate example working applications and explain the architecture and answer questions.

About the Speaker:

BA  EE/CS Rice University
MBA Dartmouth

I have worked at GTE Sylvania, HP, Microsoft, MageLang Institute, with my own consulting company and lately with 1060 Research. I worked with Java since the early days and with MageLang institute was an early consultant, instructor and architectural advisor to investment banks, manufacturers and service companies.