QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

David Dawson, Principal Consultant at Simplicity Itself

David Dawson

Biography: David Dawson

David Dawson is Principal Consultant at Simplicity Itself and works with their clients to continuously and sustainably delivering valuable software. He has worked in software development for 10 years, crossing banking, utilities, retail, virtualisation, from low latency messaging to rich web clients and has improved and automated himself out of several roles in that time.

He has a particular interest in seeing software development as a discipline, that a development process should be both happy, and 'safe', and a passionate belief that the best solution is almost always the simplest (but no more simple than that!)

If you want to discuss multi layered testing strategies, Groovy, CI or the flaws inherent in stateless services...buy him a beer and he'll happily debate till morning.

Twitter: @davidthecoder

Presentation: Play & Grails, a fireside chat between two leading web server-side frameworks

Track: The Modern Web Stack / Time: Friday 10:20 - 11:10 / Location: Churchill Auditorium

Where this talk is coming from: It's a fresh spring evening, Play and Grails, the top two rapid development frameworks on the JVM are having a chat by the fireside ...

Grails: «Hey Play, is scala's compiler still slower than a tortoise?»

Play: «it's not that bad, my dynamic friend, and it's a one time hit. How much performance does your runtime cost you these days? 20%, 30%?»

Grails: «You know it's less than 10%, but you get a lot for that 10%!»

Grails: «Why don't you try some Spring integration? It's the standard.»

Play: «This again? I don't need your standards, it's not my Type, safe?»

Grails: «Is that product placement? you know thats not allowed!»

Play: «I just like things to be safe.»

Grails: «So ... Monads?»

Play: «well, maybe we could've chosen a better name, but it is the correct logical name... Seriously, though, Gorm? Do you know what that sounds like?»

...and so we leave our intrepid, contending, cantankerous and downright competing frameworks arguing long into the night. Russ Miles will be convening them to meet again, with developers who know each framework, warts and all, to carry on the discussion. There will be no agendas, no sponsorship, and no holds barred (although maybe the odd pun).