First day of the Groovy and Grails exchange was fantastic as expected. Unfortunately, due to work constraints I could not get to the second day. That's a real shame because I really wanted to hear Graeme Rocher's two talks on Grails. However, what I did see on day one introduced me to a few new concepts and libraries. Things that got my attention most:
- Gpars; a groovy library for parallel processing;
- iWebKit plugin for Grails - which I hope to try soon.
- The talk about scalability and caching in Tomcat
- The talk about DSL's.
GPars or Groovy Parallel systems
I've been looking for something like this for a while and from my initial analysis this library looks to make performing tasks in parallel easier. However, In many cases when writing feed software, I have the opposite problem - lots of incoming threads that need to be converted safely to a single output stream. I'm going to play with the library a little more so I understand its use cases.
Scalability and tomcat
I've been working with tomcat for a while, and have used a similar means of deployment to Burt Beckwith's solution (separating out on CATALINA_BASE / CATALINA_HOME). Normally, as per the discussion - I deploy with EHcache enabled to improve performance. For some time I had been meaning to write this up but did not get around to it, and I am sure that Burt Beckwith's write up will cover this subject in great detail.
