Recording of Grails / Terracotta webinar

In case you missed it and in case you're interested, Terracotta has posted a recording of the webinar that Mike Allen and I held a couple weeks ago. You can catch it in all of its glory (or lack thereof :) at http://bit.ly/scaling_grails.

During the demo I mentioned a blog post coming to the GQuick blog where we would add Quartz scheduling to TekDays (the sample app from GQuick), well that post ended up here instead.

Once again I'd like to thank the folks at Terracotta for their cool technology and for their support of the Grails community.

Like speaking at a conference in my bath robe

On April 27th at 11:00am Pacific time, Mike Allen and I will be holding a free webinar on clustering and scaling grails applications the easy way. A webinar is a cool thing. It's like a tech conference session where you can't see anybody. So, while you're sitting at your desk at work or at home or in a coffee shop, Mike will be in California somewhere and I'll be sitting in my basement office in St. Louis, quite possibly still in my pajamas.

But that's not the important part. The important part is that we'll be talking about how easy it is to make a Grails application scalable. To demonstrate that we'll be using one of my favorite sample apps, TekDays from Grails: A Quick-Start Guide.

If you haven't already, go ahead and sign up at http://bit.ly/aeDQ3I. The whole thing will be recorded and posted later. So, if you can't make it on the 27th or if 11am Pacific is the middle of the night for you, register anyway so you can be notified when the recording is available.

If you can make it though, it would be great to have you.

See you there (in a figurative sense),
Dave

NFJS Chicago Day Two was packed!

Today the schedule was packed with good sessions.  It was very difficult to choose which session to go to.  Though I found out something- if you wait too long to decide the decision gets easier as some of the rooms fill up! 

After a great breakfast and discussion with Mark Richards and a preview of the material for the 10th anniversary meeting of NEJUG (if you live near Boston don't miss the January meeting), I went to Jared Richardson's Distributed Agile talk.  Jared' s high energy and upbeat outlook are great for getting you going in the morning.  Since I am currently working on a distributed team, this was a very timely session.  

Next I caught Alex Miller's tour of Terracotta.  That's an impressive piece of software!  I am going to have to look into it more.  It seems like something you should have to pay a huge amount of money for but it's free and open source.  Wow!  

After lunch where I unsuccessfully attempted to get a CapJug table together (sorry guys!),  I went to hear Neal Ford's talk all about Regular Expressions, which I told him look to me like cartoon swearing.   As part of the talk he had a quiz where he showed different regex samples and we were supposed to guess what they were.  One of them turned out to not be a regular expression at all but real cartoon swearing!  It was a very good discussion though and I think I'm starting to figure those things out.  Maybe between this talk and Ted Naleid's blog post, I'll finally be able to understand the next time a cartoon character cusses me out.

Next was Jeff Brown's Agile Test Driven Development with Groovy.  This is another that I had been to before but it's still got some good reminders in it and besides it was one of only two talks Jeff was giving and I had to go to one of them.  I was kind of bummed that Jeff didn't do any of his Grails talks this weekend.  In fact the whole show was a bit light on Grails goodness.  I'll have to note that on the conference eval :)  

Finally there was the JVM languages BOF with Scott Davis, Stu Halloway and Jeff Brown.  There was some very good discussion on various languages such as JRuby, Clojure, Scala and, of course, Groovy.  Groovy appeared to be the favorite of the audience here, but Clojure does sound pretty interesting.  Or should I say, Stu Halloway makes Clojure sound pretty interesting. Stu is working on a book on the topic which is in beta now.  I'll have to check it out.

All in all, a great day.  My head is swimming with ideas and starting to get a bit stuffed, but there's still one more day of the last No Fluff of the year.