At DevNexus 2013 I will be giving two talks:

Architecting Event-Driven Web, Mobile, and RESTful Apps

Non-blocking, asynchronous, and reactive are all the rage today. This session will explore why the patterns are important in modern apps and how to apply them to event-driven web, mobile, and RESTful apps. To illustrate the concepts, Java, Scala, Akka, and Play Framework will be used as examples.

Introduction to Play Framework

The Play Framework is a lightweight, stateless web framework for Java and Scala applications. With Play you can build traditional page-based web apps or modern web apps using REST, JavaScript, and HTML5. This session will give you an introduction to building web applications with the Play Framework.

Tomorrow (February 5, 2013) I will be presenting about Modern Web Apps With Scala and Play at DeveloperWeek in San Francisco. Here is the session description:

The web application architecture is rapidly evolving to accommodate mobile, more interactive experiences, integrated real-time, and service composition. This session will teach you how to build modern web applications using Play Framework and Scala. You will learn the end-to-end architecture including: non-blocking service composition, RESTful JSON endpoints, single page UIs, and real-time push.

The Play Framework community voted heavily to add support for Play Framework 2 in IntelliJ IDEA and JetBrains came through! Here is a short (3min) screencast that shows you how to create and run a Play 2 app in IntelliJ 12 (Ultimate Edition) with the Play Framework plugin:

If you’d like to learn more, check out the detailed tutorial from JetBrains.

Today I’ll be presenting at CodeMash 2013 about Client/Server Apps with HTML5, Play, CoffeeScript, and More. Here is the session description:

The web application landscape is rapidly shifting back to a Client/Server architecture. This time around the Client is JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in the browser. The tools and deployment techniques for these types of applications are abundant and fragmented. This session will teach you how to pull together jQuery, LESS, Twitter Bootstrap, and some CoffeeScript to build the Client. The Server could be anything that talks HTTP but this session will use the Play Framework. You will also learn how to deploy Client/Server web apps on the cloud using a Content Delivery Network (Amazon CloudFront) for the Client and a Cloud Application Provider (Heroku) for the Server.

Tomorrow (December 12, 2012) I will be presenting in Dallas at the JavaMUG about Client/Server Apps with Play Framework, HTML5 and Java. Here is the session abstract:

The web application landscape is rapidly shifting back to a Client/Server architecture. This time around, the Client is JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in the browser. The tools and deployment techniques for these types of applications are abundant and fragmented.

This session will teach you how to pull together jQuery, LESS, Twitter, Bootstrap, and some CoffeeScript to build the Client. The Server could be anything that talks HTTP, but this session will use the Play Framework.

Check it out: webjars.org

Back in April I started an experiment called “WebJars” to see if it would be useful to package web libraries (JavaScript, CSS, etc) as Jar files. WebJars allow you to declaratively set client-side application dependencies just like we do for the server-side. A nice side effect of this is transitive dependencies. For instance, if you specify Bootstrap 2.2.1 as a dependency, then you automatically also get jQuery 1.8.2 as well. WebJars also make it easy to know what versions of web libraries are being used since not all web libraries use versions in their naming conventions.

On November 6th I will be presenting Building & Deploying Graph-based Web Apps at the GraphConnect 2012 conference in San Francisco. Here is the session description:

This session will teach you how to build a Graph-based web application with Java, Play Framework, and Neo4j. You will also lean how to deploy the application on the cloud with Heroku. The session will primarily be code and live demos.

I hope to see you there!

Check out the recording of my Introduction to Play Framework at JavaOne 2012. If you want to try Play Framework on your own you might want to start with my Play2torial for Java. There you will walk through all the major parts of building a modern web app: Models, Controllers, Views, Tests, JavaScript/CoffeeScript, Twitter Bootstrap, and Cloud Deployment. Let me know how it goes!

The recording of my JavaOne 2012 presentation, “Client/Server Apps with HTML5 and Java”, has been posted! In this presentation I walk through the modern web application architecture and how to build Client/Server style web apps with HTML5 and Java. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Today I’m heading out on a new adventure at Typesafe, the company behind Play Framework, Scala, and Akka!

The past year and a half at Heroku have been really amazing. Not only have I enjoyed teaching others about Heroku, I’ve enjoyed my own frequent use of Heroku. It says something when a technology switch makes one never want to go back to the way it was done before. This is the experience that I (and many others) have had with Heroku. I can’t imagine going back to managing servers and painful deployments. I’m certainly a Heroku Evangelist for Life, but it’s time for a new adventure.