Scott Davis

Groovy, the Blue Pill: Writing Next Generation Java Code in Groovy

There are wild-eyed radicals out there telling you that Java is dead, statically-typed languages are passe, and your skills are hopelessly out-of-date. Those extremists are the same ones who don't bat an eye at throwing out years of experience to learn a new language from scratch, pushing aside a familiar IDE for a new one, and deploying to a whole new set of production servers with little regard to legacy integration.

While this “burn the boats” approach to software development might sound exciting to some folks, it's giving your manager the cold shakes right now. What if I told you that there was a way that you could integrate seamlessly with your legacy Java code, continue to use your trusty IDE and stable production servers, and yet take advantage of many of the exciting new dynamic language features that those fanatics keep prattling on about? You'd probably say, “Groovy!” I would, too…

Groovy, The Red Pill: Metaprogramming, the Groovy Way to Blow a Buttoned-Down Java Developer's Mind

This talk focuses on the ways that Groovy can turn a traditional Java developer's world-view upside down. We'll start by talking about how you can thumb your nose at The Man by leaving out many of the main syntactic hallmarks of Java: semicolons, parentheses, return statements, type declarations (aka Duck-typing), and the ever-present try/catch block. Then we'll look at features like operator overloading and method pointers that Groovy welcomes back into the language with open arms.

Rapid Web Development with Grails and Ajax

Grails is a Java- and Groovy-based web framework that is built for speed. First-time developers are amazed at how quickly you can get a page-centric MVC web site up and running thanks to the scaffolding and convention over configuration that Grails provides. Advanced web developers are often pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to break out of that coarse-grained navigation model using the native Ajax support baked into the framework.

YSlow: Building Your Website for Speed

How optimized is your website? YSlow, a FireFox/FireBug plugin, doesn't pull any punches. It gives any website an A, B, C, D, or F rating based on 14 individual analysis points. You'll be amazed (or depressed) at what YSlow thinks of your site. In this talk, we'll walk through these points step by step, learning what Yahoo! (the creator of this utility) does to keep its web properties running as quickly as possible.

Real World JSON

JavaScript Object Notation is becoming a familiar delivery platform for Web 2.0 content. JSON gives you all of the flexibility of a RESTful web service without the hassle of trying to deal with deeply nested, complex XML in a language that is conspicuously lacking in native XML support. In this talk, we look at popular websites (like Yahoo!) that offer JSON output. We look at client-side JavaScript code that effortlessly consumes JSON in the browser. We even look at ways to easily generate JSON from Java Servlets (using JSON.org libraries) and the native support for JSON that Grails offers out of the box.