Denver Open Source Users Group September 2, 2008

Basic Concepts: Frederic Jean, Selenium Test Cases and Groovy

Frederic is the User Experience technical lead for the xVM Server and xVM Ops Center projects at Sun Microsystems. He is focussed on applying Ajax technologies to the problem of managing large scale data centers.

Frederic first learned about Groovy in 2005 when he was looking for a way to simplify writing unit tests for Sun's update delivery infrastructure code. He has been an advocate for it's use within Sun since.

Topic Summary:

Groovy's syntax and metaprogramming abilities provides powerful means to simplify writing UI tests using Selenium RC. Frederic will discuss how metaprogramming techniques can remove noise from Selenium test scripts and implements methods that are otherwise not implemented by the Selenium RC Java driver. He will then introduce GroovierSelenium which uses these very techniques to simplify UI tests written for xVM Server and xVM Ops Center at Sun Microsystems



Main Topic: Orion Letizi, Terracotta Scalability Framework

Orion Letizi is a co-founder and software engineer at Terracotta. He has worked in enterprise Java for nearly ten years. Before Terracotta, he was a software architect at Walmart.com.

Stateful Applications that Scale Like Stateless Ones

Within every innocent web application lies a sleeping monster. There comes a time when every successful web application outgrows its single-machine architecture. Whether for high-availability, scalability, or both, the adult web application must grow to live on more than one application server. That’s when the latent beast strikes: the State Monster.

The most recent accepted wisdom about solving application state problems in a scaled-out production architecture is to make your web application “stateless”—i.e., externalize all application state out of the application tier so that any application server can serve any user request. Unfortunately for the owners of such applications, making it “stateless” is hard to do, corrupts the programming and data model of the application, and pushes the problem out to other pieces of infrastructure that are ill-equipped to handle it.

Stateless programming is hard on the application developer, hard on the application infrastructure, and hard on the application. There must be a better way to write business applications. In this talk, we will discuss the current “stateless” application paradigm, its shortcomings, and a new alternative using Terracotta’s open-source availability and scalability technology for the Java Virtual Machine.

Official Website: http://www.denveropensource.org