GIDS is a four-day conference

GIDS is a four-day conference by Saltmarch aimed at India's software professionals who want to make their projects, career and companies truly remarkable.

Scott's talks...

Tomorrow's Tech Today: HTML 5
As software engineers, we take comfort in the idea of concrete specifications. As web developers, our hearts are either broken (frequently!), or we recognize the W3C's role is a delicate balance of leading the browser developers in new and exciting directions while, in their own words, "paving over the cow paths" of existing, de facto standards.
HTML 5 offers dramatic new improvements for page organization, offering out-of-the-box support for elements like header, footer, nav, section, and article. HTML 5 adds native support for form features such as placeholder text, autocomplete, autofocus, and validation. Additionally, there are a host of new form elements available (email, url, number, range, date, and search) that gracefully degrade in "classic" web browsers -- IE, I'm looking at you!
In this talk, you won't be subjected to discussions about the features that will appear in some distant future release of a web browser. Instead, you'll see the HTML 5 features that are already being used by Google, Apple, and others. You'll see the features that are supported by today's browsers, ready for you to use right now.

Hidden Web Services: Microformats and the Semantic Web
The hard line between web pages (pure presentation) and web services (pure data) is finally beginning to blur. Companies as varied as Best Buy, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, TripIt, O'Reilly, and even People magazine have decorated their web pages with hidden, semantic metadata. The results are impressive: a 30% increase in traffic for Best Buy, a 15% increase in click-through rate reported by Yahoo!, and dramatic Google PageRank improvements.
In this talk, we'll explore popular microformats such as hCard (the HTML equivalent of vCard) for contact information, hCalendar (the equivalent of iCalendar) for events, hAtom for syndication, and much more. We'll use Java and Groovy to tease out the hidden data in plain old HTML pages for use in everyday applications. You'll also see how Firefox and Safari plug-ins integrate the browser with your address book and your calendar in unprecedented ways.
This is not yet another staid, academic discussion of the future of the semantic web -- this is a pragmatic discussion of how the technology is being used right now to deliver real web services AND web pages at the same time.

Teasing Grails and CouchDB Into Working Together
If you want to get a room full of programmers all riled up, just casually drop the word, "NoSQL." To some, NoSQL means, "death to all antiquated, 1970s-era persistence solutions!" Others take a more pragmatic approach -- "Not Only SQL" means that while relational databases are suitable for some applications, there is an emerging crop of equally viable (and interesting) persistence strategies out there.
Apache CouchDB is a schema-free document store that uses HTTP GETs, PUTs, and DELETEs instead of SQL SELECTs, INSERTs, and DELETEs. It speaks JSON fluently instead of tables, columns, and rows. It uses JavaScript Map/Reduce functions instead of SQL for the query language. It offers effortless replication among distributed CouchDB instances.
And how does Grails -- a web framework that is tightly coupled to relational databases via GORM (the Grails Object-Relational Mapping API) and Hibernate -- deal with a non-relational document store behind the scenes? I guess that you'll just have to show up to find out, won't you? If you're new to Grails, new to CouchDB, or both, this talk offers an exploration into each technology and how they can be teased into working together.
DSLs in Groovy: Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say
The history of computer programming has been bridging the gap between what the user says ("We need to add sales tax to each item in the order") and what the programming language requires you to say ("for Iterator i = orderList.iterator()"). Building Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) allow you to express the solution in the language of the domain user instead of the language of the programmer.
DSLs can be written in any programming language, but the more flexible the programming language used, the closer to plain English the DSL can be. Groovy is a dynamic language for the Java platform that is ideally suited for creating DSLs. Come see how Groovy can leverage the power of Java in a way that your users might actually be able to read and understand.

The 180-min Struts to Grails Spike Class
This workshop's objective is to teach you how to migrate existing Struts applications to Groovy and Grails, reusing as much as the legacy software as possible. This class is targeted at developers who have successful Struts applications already in production. We'll start by using Groovy to strategically ease the pain points of an existing Struts application. Your organization might decide to stop there. However, we'll begin migrating one portion of the Struts application at a time into Grails until we eventually have something that is ready for the 21st century. Who knew that Struts development could be exciting again?