Consulting, SOFEA, Grails and GWT at next week's Denver JUG
Next Wednesday, I'll be at Denver's JUG meeting to talk about Independent Consulting and Building SOFEA Applications with Grails and GWT. The first talk will be a a panel discussion among local independent consultants, including James Goodwill, Matthew McCullough, Tim Berglund and myself.
This session explores the trials and tribulations of an independent consultant. How do you find contracts? Should you setup an LLC, an S-Corp or just be a sole proprietorship? What about health insurance and benefits? Are recruiters helpful or hurtful? Learn lots of tips and tricks to get your dream job and your ideal lifestyle.
The Grails and GWT talk is a preview of a talk I'll be doing at the Rich Web Experience in December. Below is a rewrite of the abstract in first-person.
Earlier this year, I participated in a major enhancement of a high-traffic well-known internet site. The company wanted us to quickly re-architect their site and use a modern Ajax framework to do it with. An Ajax Framework evaluation was done to help the team choose the best framework for their skillset. The application was built with a SOFEA architecture using GWT on the frontend and Grails/REST on the backend.
This talk will cover how Bryan Noll, Scott Nicholls, James Goodwill and I came to choose GWT and Grails, as well as stumbling blocks we encountered along the way. In addition, we'll explore many topics such as raw GWT vs. GXT/SmartGWT, the Maven GWT Plugin, modularizing your code, multiple EntryPoints, MVP, integration testing and JSON parsing with Overlay Types.
If you're in Denver next Wednesday night (November 11th), you should stop by the Denver JUG meeting. It'll be a fun night and there's sure to be a few beers afterward. 
Looking forward to the presentations.
I am independent consultant myself , relative new to the area (~2 years) and working remotely for customers back in LA where I moved from.
No GWT gig for me yet , I did however try it out building a prototype , fun to work with - getting tired of <tags>
See you Wednesday
Posted by Stephane on November 07, 2009 at 05:14 AM MST #
Hey, Matt.
Any chance of getting someone to record it and stream it to qik or post it to youtube? Working on a site now and wrestling with front-end: gwt /spring 3 (grails) or spring mvc 3, sitemesh, jquery, Aptana plugin for eclipse, etc.
I'm working on a post about the decision, but may not finish it before Wed.
Have you seen: http://twurl.nl/nbks2q. Make sure you read Joel's response.
My concerns with technology are SEO, styling (although flowpanel and firebug should address this), embedding other site content, giving site a web feel, vs. gmailish feel. The pros are easier: cross browser, small, no plugins, html5, Google backing (adWords, and Wave).
I'd like to hear how you wrestled with it. Good luck with the talk.
Brian
p.s. You buying a Tesla to go with your bus, since you guys get a $50k tax credit?
Posted by Brian Bonner on November 07, 2009 at 12:56 PM MST #
Posted by Brian Bonner on November 07, 2009 at 12:59 PM MST #
@Brian - I doubt there will be any recording and publishing of the video. I've never seen that at DJUG before. However, I will be doing the same talk at The Rich Web Experience if you're looking for a good excuse to go to Orlando. ;-)
I have seen the URL you mention and I disagree with the statement that "GWT treats Javascript as a bug that needs to be solved". I believe the biggest strengths of GWT is it allows you to develop optimized, cross-browser JS very easily and it allows you to organize your code. As a Java developer, GWT makes it easy to develop Ajax applications. If you're *not* a Java developer, using something like jQuery might make more sense, but have fun organizing your code.
If it were up to me, I'd probably use raw JS on a lot of projects, but there seems to be a very good market for GWT development. The funny thing is the amount of time I typically spend doing GWT is minimal. I spend much more time doing architecture documentation, setting up Selenium, Maven and working with JSON services. Also, I'm rarely waiting for GWT to compile b/c I use hosted mode almost all the the time. The statement that "GWT compiles are brutal" is true (it consumes 100% of my CPU on my laptop), but I rarely do it as part of my development activities.
As far as SEO and developing a "web feel" vs. a "gmail feel" - if you want that, don't use GWT. Use a server-side web framework and dress it up with something like jQuery.
RE: Tesla - I don't think my kids' car seats will fit in one of those. ;-)
RE: Formatting - happens to a lot of folks since I require HTML tags for line breaks. I've fixed the formatting for your comment.
Posted by Matt Raible on November 07, 2009 at 03:48 PM MST #
I attended this and found it really useful. The session on health insurance and benefits was very useful and informative.
However, I get my health insurance benefits with Denver Health Insurance Co, http://www.bizymoms.com/denver/health-insurance/index.html. I highly recommend them and you can even get an online quote, like I did.
Posted by Trevor on December 10, 2009 at 01:08 AM MST #