Test-Driven JavaScript with ScrewUnit and BlueRidge

Regular March 2nd JavaSIG Meeting: Test-Driven JavaScript with ScrewUnit and BlueRidge

(for a follow-up Terracotta/Ehcache, see below)

Web applications increasingly rely on JavaScript to implement their business logic, but until recently creating this code was challenging and risky. Recent evolutions in JavaScript testing frameworks now allow creating test suites, test-driving development, and running tests on a continuous integration server. This allows us to support more complex JavaScript, have confidence in the implementation, and push more of the logic from the server into the browser, reducing the load on the server.

We now have a reliable JavaScript testing process in place, using BlueRidge, ScrewUnit and Rhino. We’ll walk through how we:

• test-drive Javascript development
• safely refactor JavaScript files when they get too big
• run tests on a continuous build server
• create more modular JavaScript

We’ve come up with guidelines that help us write more solid and ambitious JavaScript. We’d like to share what we’ve learned, and how it has impacted how we work and approach the design and implementation now.

This talk is targeting at developers familiar with unit testing and JavaScript, but not necessarily both together. No Ruby is necessary. (One of our developers blasted out a Java/Maven version as well).

Speakers’ Bios

Andrew Peterson has 20 years experience building and managing software systems for consumers, enterprises and non-profits. He brings expertise in the full life-cycle of software development, software methodologies, software architecture, software engineering, and usability. In the consumer space, he led the team in the creation of the top-selling SoundEdit 16. He served numerous roles for the leading enterprise supplier of software for container terminals, shipping ports and lines, and distribution centers. At Carbon Five he has focused on start-ups, including Aardvark and goBalto.com.

Jonah Williams is a developer at Carbon Five, a boutique software consulting firm. He builds web applications in Java and Ruby and is pursuing agile iPhone application development. He is a advocate of test driven development and interested in identifying sustainable and efficient development practices. Jonah’s previous experience includes enterprise Java applications, PC games, and hardware engineering. His work and opinions can be found at http://blog.carbonfive.com.

Date

March 2nd, 2010, the first Tuesday of the month.

Location

Cubberly Community Center
4000 Middlefield Road, Room H-1
Palo Alto, California 94105
map

Agenda

6:30-7:00 Doors open. Networking.
7:00-9:00 Presentations.

Links

http://sdforum.org/javasig

Price

$15 for non-members and free for SDForum members. $3 for pizza and soda.

Extraordinary Terracotta/Ehcache presentation, March 11 in San Francisco: Scaling from 1 node to 1000 with the absolute minimum changes

Scaling from 1 node to 1000 is traditionally a complex proposition. 1 node requires a bit of performance tuning but not much else. Getting to 2 nodes requires introduction of new technologies such as clustered caches, messaging frameworks, and transactions in order to keep data correct across the cluster. From there, lots of tuning work has to be done to get from 2 nodes to medium-sized 20 node clusters. And, 200 or more nodes usually requires partitioning / sharding and lots of custom tuning and logic; perhaps even a NoSQL solution. In this talk, we will spend time on how to use Ehcache, Hibernate, Quartz, Tomcat (or other containers) in conjunction with Terracotta to get to hundreds of nodes without all the separate stages of architecture and design such as messaging, partitioning, NoSQL, and more–this recipe for scaling from 1 node to 1000 provides a seamless continuum within which your applications can operate and scale. This scalability continuum has implications on EC2 and EC2 has implications on the continuum. In this talk, we will also cover the ramifications of cloud on large-scale data management and we will apply the scalability continuum to our cloud-based applications to lessen our dependence on the database and, thus, take full advantage of the cloud’s elasticity.

In this talk, you will learn about:

• Ehcache + Terracotta as a scalability solution that alleviates your need for complex database infrastructure
• Database offload best practices from Terracotta customers
• Terracotta’s cloud-capable runtime and how to actually deploy to hundreds of nodes in hours
• EC2 and VMWare best practices for scaling with Terracotta’s frameworks

Speakers’ Bios

Greg Luck founded Ehcache in 2003. He regularly speaks at conferences, writes and codes. He has also founded and maintains the JPam and Spnego open source projects, which are security focused. Prior to joining Terracotta in 2009, Greg was Chief Architect at Wotif.com where he provided technical leadership as the company went from a single product startup to a billion dollar public company with multiple product lines. Before that Greg was a consultant for ThoughtWorks with engagements in the US and Australia in the travel, health care, geospatial, banking and insurance industries. Before doing programming, Greg managed IT. He was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts. He is a Chartered Accountant, and spent 7 years with KPMG in small business and insolvency. Greg holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Masters in Information Technology.

Taylor Gautier is a Principal Client Architect for Grid Dynamics, specializing in delivering mission critical solutions in high performance, high scale computing environments. Previously Taylor ran Product Management for Terracotta, and has held senior engineering positions for Excite@Home, Intel and numerous startups. Taylor is a co-author of “The Definitive Guide to Terracotta” and has published several patents in the areas of building scalable systems for the Telecommunications, Search, and Storage industries.

Date

March 11, 2010, 6:30 PM.

Location

Terracotta HQ

650 Townsend St Suite 325
San Francisco, CA 94103
+1 415 738-4088

Links

http://www.meetup.com/TerracottaTech/calendar/12643349/

Price

Free, but the space is limited, so if you intend to participate, please RSVP here http://www.meetup.com/TerracottaTech/calendar/12643349/

Refreshments will be provided by Terracotta.

Cloud Tools saves the day !

If you had attended our Cloud Computing with EC2 presentation by Chris, you may recall how
easy it is to develop and deploy services on Amazon Web Services platform.

One of the challenges with the services though is the plumbing required to setup and deploy services dynamically when
your server load goes up. If you need to setup MySQL, Tomcat, Apache and Terracotta to handle
additional server load, Cloud Tools is the solution you are looking for.

Cloud Tools is the opensource management solutions for AWS built on the Groovy platform. Check
it out at CloudTools. If you have a commerical application being ported to AWS and need  expertise

to manage or migrate your application,  Cloud Foundry can do it for you. Cloud Foundtry is the

company building the  Cloud Tools product.

• Outsourced, automated data center management for Java/Grails applications running on EC2.
• Upload your web applications and deploy them on EC2 with just a few mouse clicks.
• Monitors and manages your applications with ease.
• Outsource your operations department

See some examples of Cloud Tools usage. If you are completely new to AWS and need a quick introduction

checkout the upcoming class, Running Java and Grails apps on Amazon EC2 on Feb 17.

GORM slides from Chris Richardson

Cool Web Apps with Grails, Groovy and Next-Gen Scripting Languages

Part1: Cool Web Apps with Grails, Groovy and Next-Gen Scripting Languages

Speaker : Bill Grosso
Abstract:
The rise of next-generation languages that run on top of the JVM is probably the most
interesting thing to happen in the Java universe since the combination of the Spring
framework and the EJB 2 specification signalled the complete implosion of the Enterprise
Sofware Stack

In this talk, I’ll cover, in sequence:

* A brief overview of the state of the art of web application development
* A brief overview of Groovy, one of the most interesting of the next-gen languages
available on the JVM.
* A brief overview of Grails, the best web-application framework currently available
(where “best” is, of course, highly idiosyncratic)
* The source code to an actual working web application written in Groovy/Grails.

Part2: GORM (Object Relational Framework with Groovy)
Speaker: Chris Richarson

Bill Grosso, CTO and VP Eng, Twofish
O’Reilly author and start-ups board member and engineering leader, Bill Grosso brings his technical and business executive leadership to Twofish, where he oversees all aspects of engineering and product development. Prior to Twofish, Bill was the CTO and VP of Engineering at Engage.com, working at the intersection of online dating and social networking, and the VP of Engineering at Echopass, a leader in hosted call center solutions. Bill has deep roots in Silicon Valley, where he has consulted for or served on the boards of over 11 successful start-up companies in 15 years. He currently sits on the board at SDForum and as a member of the ACM Committee on Local Organizations. Previously, Bill founded the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, as well as the SDForum Cloud Computing Conference. He is a noted speaker and author for Java.net and O’Reilly Media, under whose label he has authored two books: Java RMI and Java Enterprise Best Practices.

Chris Richardson
is a developer, architect and mentor with over 20 years of experience and is the author of the book “POJOs in Action.” He runs a consulting and training company that helps customers reduce the cost of development and increase the effectiveness of their development teams. His technical interests include domain-driven design, cloud computing and developer testing. Chris has been a technical leader at a variety of companies including Insignia Solutions and BEA Systems and recently became a Java Champion. Chris is the founder of Cloud Tools, which is an open-source project for quickly and easily deploying Java applications on Amazon EC2. He has spoken at various conferences including JavaOne 2006/2007/2008, No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposiums, Colorado Software Summit, SD West, The Spring Experience, SpringOne, and Javapolis as well as Java user groups. Chris holds a computer science degree from the Cambridge University in England and lives in Oakland, CA where he runs the local Java User Group.

Location
Cubberley Community Center
4000 Middlefield Road, Room H-1
Palo Alto, CA 94105

Directions
Agenda
6:45-7:00 Doors open. Networking. Pizza.
7:00-9:00 Presentations

Price
$15 at the door for non-SDForum members
No charge for SDForum members
No registration required
More on the: Java SIG….

Flex Clients with JBoss Seam and EJBs (July 1)

Felipe Albertao and Darius Zagrean

JBoss Seam is a next-generation open source Internet framework for Java, while Adobe Flex is a fantastic Rich Internet Application platform. In this session we will go through a step-by-step tutorial using JBoss Seam and EJBs, demonstrating how Seam makes it easy to do remote calls to EJBs using AJAX, and then how it leverages the same architecture for Flex clients.

Felipe and Darius work together at www.BoulevardR.com, a startup that has developed an online process to create actionable, unbiased financial plans prepared by experts. Their talk is directly drawn from their own experience at Boulevard R, where they use this same set of technologies.