Grails 2.0 is here and full of a bunch of exciting, fun stuff. Check out Sr. Consultant Zan Thrash talk about what you’ll see in Grails 2.0.

Senior Consultant Steve McCoole will present an introduction to developing applications for the iPad. Steve will cover the three main approaches to creating applications for the iPad: native, web applications and hybrid, what you need to develop each type of application, tips and tricks to make enhance your development environment, simple example programs with and without Interface Builder and ways to demonstrate your applications to interested clients.

Senior Architect David Reines presents the simple yet powerful clustering capabilities of Terracotta. David includes a brief overview of the product, an in-depth discussion of Terracotta Distributed Shared Objects, and a live load test demonstrating the importance of a well designed clustered application.

This Tech Talk is an introduction to user interface development on the Android platform. Android is gaining a lot of ground as a mobile operating system. This talk will cover the basics of building a user interface using the Android concepts of Activities, Layouts and Views. The concepts will be demonstrated using working code, including a fully functioning game to demonstrate processing complex user input and canvas drawing.

This tech talk will introduce Flex — Adobe’s open source framework for building rich web applications. The presenter will build a Flex application to demonstrate the use of Adobe’s FlexBuilder tool, touching on some highlight features of the Flex framework. Components of that Flex application will then be used to create a desktop AIR application through the use of a Shared Library. To wrap things up, presenter will show how to get started with FlexMonkey — Gorilla Logic’s tool for automating testing of Flex and AIR applications.

Batch processing is sometimes viewed as the “old” approach which is no longer relevant. Most new technologies today focus on real-time functionality. But there are many jobs that work well as a batch job. Long running tasks, repetitive tasks, and tasks reliant upon heavily shared resources all benefit from a batch architecture. Given the large pool of resources familiar with Java, it is natural to look for a solution within this domain. Chad Moller will talk about Spring’s solution to this need: Spring Batch. You will learn when to apply batch processing to your current environment, and you will learn how to leverage Spring Batch to create solutions for these common tasks. Spring Batch provides many batch features out-of-the-box, and you will learn how to best utilize these features to enhance the scalability and reliability of your applications. This talked is geared toward developers interested in learning how Spring Batch can be used in their jobs.

The idea of a tester-developer isn’t new, although they are often hidden in teams as the “automation guru”, the “(testing) tool smith”, or “Senior Test Engineer”. These are testers who have a solid background in QA tools and techniques, but also have a development background and can write automated scripts or even (gasp) help with coding. While agile teams in particular look for people with these skills, this kind of tester can provide great value for groups using any methodology if you know how to take advantage of them. This talk covers what it takes to be a tester-developer and how to foster those talents to take advantage of this kind of person on your team. Based on personal experience and insights from leaders in the QA community, she will show you examples of the value you can derive from embedding your technical testers in the development team and what works to incorporate them most effectively.

The demand for increased interactivity with today’s web applications has resulted in a need to bring the familiar UI features of the desktop to the Web. With the availability of mature 3rd party JavaScript libraries, AJAX technology (DOM, CSS, JavaScript) provides a feasible way to fill this need. The presenter will walk through building rich web apps using Yahoo! UI (YUI) and Ext JS JavaScript libraries on the Grails platform. The presenter will also demonstrate ways of implementing basic and advanced features using these libraries.

Making the move from sprinkling simple interactive Ajax controls into basic web applications to building feature rich clients with large JavaScript libraries brings with it some unique challenges. Among them is the need for better testing tools. The presenter will discuss some pros and cons of a few of the more popular web application testing tools: JSUnit, HtmlUnit, and Selenium. In addition presenter will present Envjs as a headless option to JSUnit. An example app written in Ext JS and Grails will provide a demo.

A senior consultant Steve Close presents JQuery for better Java script.