Play! Framework Hackaton

Zauber team working

Zauber Software encourages employees to research new technologies in order to perform better and improve ourselves each day. So as to do this, we have Hackatons very often at Zauber in which we investigate different technologies .

In one of this Hackatons, we decided to test Play! Framework. The Play framework’s goal is to ease web applications development while sticking with Java. Its idea is pretty similar to Rails's idea.

We thought that the best way to test the framework would be creating an application that we'd use here at Zauber every day. In that moment, we started thinking about "A comerla!".

Everyday we call a lot of restaurants in order to have our meal delivered to the office. Right now, It's very complicated for us to know how much each meal costs, which is the total of the order, who's going to call the restaurant, who's going to collect the money to pay and when the order will be placed. "A Comerla" is the solution to this and the excuse to try Play!.

We also tried several Play! modules with this app. We used the recent developed Secure Social module for the Google Login. We also used Greenscript module minify the CSS and JS, to create dependencies between the JS files and to be able to use less files, among other things. In order to make the app more beautiful we used Twitter Bootstrap which makes it easy to style any web site. Furthermore, We heard that Heroku had native support for Play! Framework, so we decided to upload it there. You may see the app deployed at http://a-comerla.herokuapp.com/

We've open sourced the application so that anyone can access it. The url for the Github repository is https://github.com/zauberlabs/a-comerla. There, you'll find the instructions on how to deploy this in your own business. 

It was a really great experience and it's an awesome framework. We'll continue to test new technologies and post them here in the future.

2011 Tech Conferences Sum Up

In our eternal seek for knowledge, 2011 found us travelling to San Francisco, Portland and Sao Pablo to keep learning about technology. This is a late sum up of the conferences we attended.

JQueryCon (April - San Francisco)

A business trip turned into an educational one when we registered ourselves at the jquery conference. Two days of javascript, html5, jquery and all kind of frontend related stuff. Gabriel Baños and Mariano Cortesi went to this one. All the slides can be found here.
They are maybe a little old right now, but still, we recommend checking these talks:

• Mobile Performance by Steve Souders (slides)
• Progressive Enhancement 2.0: Because the Web isn't Print by Nicholas Sackas (slides)
• jQuery + Popcorn.js = Interactive, Immersive HTML5 Video Experiences by Rick Waldron (slides)
• Deferreds - Putting Laziness to Work by Dan Heberden (slides)
• Filling the HTML5 & CSS3 Gaps with Polyfills and Shims by Rey Bango (slides)

OSCon'11 (July - Portland)

Great technology conference organized by O'Reilly, with a focus on Open Source. Juan Codagnone, our open source advocate, attended. All decks & some presentation videos are already available here.

We recommend:

• What Would You Do With Your Own Google? by Steve Yegge (details and video)
• 4 Practical Uses for Domain Specific Languages by Neal Ford (details and slides)
• Java: The Good, Bad, and Ugly Parts by Josh Bloch. (details and video)
• The Expressiveness of Go by Rob Pike (details and slides)
• What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks by Ted Dziuba (details and slides)

QCon SP (September - Sao Pablo)

Second edition of qcon conference in Brazil. A Zauber crowd went to this event, our representatives were Juan Codagnone, Fernando Zunino, Christian Nardi and Marcelo Turrin. The conference was organized by our friends at Caelum. Most of the slides from the presentations are now available here.



We recommend:

• Performance Oriented Design by Rodrigo Albani de Campos (slides)
• Divida Tecnica by Alexandre Freire (slides)

LatAm Con on Agile Methodologies (October - Buenos Aires)

In our beloved city, an agile methodologies conference. Cecilia Hagge went there to represent Zauber. Lots of talks and workshops by local and international agile experts. Subjects as Story Writing, Estimation and Continuous Delivery where the stars. You can find a complete post on this conference on our blog.

RubyCon AR (November - Buenos Aires)

This one didn't require much travel, maybe a metro or bus ticket. Nevertheless, it was really interesting to make the first steps onto the ruby community in Argentina. Zauber has been for some time know mostly java centric, but this year we started learning new languages and platforms such as Scala, Groovy and, in this case Ruby. We hope to learn much more about it in 2012, we already have several ruby enthusiasts at the office. Juan Codagnone, Fernando Zunino and Juan Pablo Royo attended the conference.
We recommend:

• Optimizing for Happiness by Tom Preston-Werner (slides)
• Un Cuento de Tres Árboles by Scott Chacon (slides)
• Who Makes the Best Asado? by Aaron Patterson (slides)
• Monitoring with Syslog and Event Machine by Patrick Huesler (slides)
• Embrace NoSQL and Eventual Consistency with Ripple by Sean Cribbs (slides)

AnDevCon II (November - San Francisco)

Our first android conference. Mariano Cortesi and Andrés Moratti went to San Francisco to represent Argentina in this event. We really enjoyed getting to know the people in the android community. Some really interesting talks took place at the conference. The presentation decks are now available here.
Some talks we recommend:

• Deep Drive into Android Security by Aleksandar Gargenta (deck)
• Pragmatic Android Layouts by Kirill Grouchnikov (deck)
• RoboGuice by Michael Burton (deck1 , deck2)
• Tunning Android Applications (deck1, deck2)

QCon SF (November - San Franciso)

Final but not last, another big conference. Quite a classic in San Francisco, the QCon. A Conference organized by the guys at InfoQ, with a focus on architecture solutions, java, startups, and emerging technologies. Mariano Cortesi and Andrés Moratti represented Zauber at this conference. Videos for all the talks will appear an InfoQ along the next months, you can check the schedule here. If you can't wait, you can check the slides for all presentation at the qconsf site.




Some talks we recommend:

• Software Naturalism - Embracing the Real Behind the Ideal by Michael Feathers (deck)
• JVM Performance optimizations at Twitter's scale by Attila Szegedi (deck and video)
• Product Engineering by Mike Lee (deck)
• What the Heck is an API Platform Anyway? by Gregory Brail (deck)
• Building a Great Web API by Evan Cooke (deck)
• Dart in Depth by Gilad Bracha (deck)
• Objects, Anomalies, and Actors: The Next Revolution by Steve Vinosky (deck)
• Things I Wish I'd know by Rod Johnson (deck and video)
• Techniques for Scaling the Netflix API in the Cloud by Daniel Jacobson (deck)

That's all for 2011! We can add to the mix Barcamp, which we sponsored in BA, and then several people in Zauber went to Rosario and Parana to participate of the other Barcamps; also the Google Dev Day here en Buenos Aires.

Now 2012 has started and we are already planning which conferences we will attend! So if you have been to these conferences and want to add other talks that we missed, please comment!