This morning, I woke up early and attended Dion Almaer's talk on Google Gears.
Dion works at Google in the Developer API group and is a member of the Google Gears development team. This presentation is called How to take your Web Application offline with Google Gears.
Dion starts with a video that Google Developers made. It's a parody of Dick in a Box, but it's called API in a Box. This was by far my favorite part of the presentation and it all went downhill from there. 
Gears is a browser plugin that adds a database and a JavaScript API that allows applications to "go offline" and use these resources to store data. It does not do anything to handle synchronization of data back to the online database.
Gears has three modules as part of its API: LocalServer, Database and Workerpool.
The Database is embedded using SQLite. Google contributed Full Text Search to it and the entire database is 250K. Below is an example of how you might use the API:
var db = google.gears.factory.create("beta.database", "1.0");
db.open("database-demo");
db.execute("create table if not exists ...");
...
var rs = db.execute("select * from Demo order by Timestamp desc");
while (rs.isValidRolw()) {
var name = fs.field(|);
...
}
During the rest of the talk, I tuned in and out, but caught a number of interesting tidbits:
Dion ended by talking about how Adobe Air is great for desktop-like applications that you can easily build with Ajax technologies. Silverlight is impressive, but only for media applications - you have to draw components yourself. Java Applets may make a comeback. The browser plugin has been rewritten to be fast as well as have full support for Java Web Start. It's possible that Gears + the Java Plugin can make it possible to use Java technologies (i.e. Hibernate or JPA) to talk to the browser's database. Firefox and WebKit are adding database components to their next major releases - so offline applications should become even easier to develop in the future.
Overall, this was a great talk - largely because Dion is a great speaker and made it fun and interesting.
After Dion's talk, I delivered my Web Framework talk and had some lunch while trying to get Rockies tickets (no luck). After lunch, I attended Bill Dudney's Comparing Spring & Guice talk. I learned some things about Guice I didn't know and enjoyed his comparison of the two Dependency Injection frameworks.
One question that Bill couldn't answer is how Spring 2.5's annotation support stacks up against Guice. Is it as full-featured as Guice? Does it add additional features and keep up with Guice for performance? What about wiring up objects without annotations - does it allow you to autowire your classes based on naming patterns without annotations in your code? What I'm hoping for is a DI framework that allows me to autowire classes using rules/conventions rather than annotations. I'm fine with using annotations for edge-cases, but it seems like a lot of the DI I do these days could be configured up-front and used for the entire application (rather than having to wire up each class).
Overall, it was a great day at the Colorado Software Summit.
Earlier today, I delivered my talk on Apache Roller, Acegi Security and Single Sign-on. As part of this talk, I put together a couple of tutorials you might find useful:
NOTE: These tutorials are using Roller's trunk as we found some things to simplify LDAP integration tonight.
You can download a PDF version of my presentation from my publications page.
During the presentation I did a number of demos:
- Installing Roller on Tomcat
- Integrating Roller with Apache Directory Server
- Integration Roller with CAS
- Integrating CAS with LDAP
Rather than saving the demo for the end, I did it as the first part of my presentation. This worked extremely well - especially since I didn't have to worry about running out of time.
If you're using Roller, have you integrated it with LDAP or another SSO solution? If so, is it working well for you?
