GPars For Beginners Presentation

I'll be giving a presentation titled GPars For Beginners to the Boston Grails Users' Group on Wednesday, May 25 at 7 P.M.  Here's my description of the talk:

The GPars (Groovy Parallel Systems) project provides multiple abstractions for concurrent, parallel programming in Groovy and Java. Rather than dealing directly with threads, synchronization, and locks, or even the java.util.concurrent classes added in Java 5, the project allows you to think in terms of actors, data flows, or composable asynchronous functions (to name a few).
In this talk, I'm planning to cover the basics of GPars, including what it's like to learn to use it. Although I've done a fair amount of concurrent programming, I've just started using GPars. As such, this talk should be suitable for Groovy beginners.

If you're a fan of Groovy and will be in the Boston-area, I hope you'll attend.  If you can't, I'll be posting a link to the slides here when they're ready.

In the presentation, I'll be referring to several resources I found helpful.  Here are links to each of them:

• Groovy in Action 2nd Edition (aka ReGinA) Chapter 17 - http://manning.com/koenig2/
• GPars User Guide - http://gpars.org/guide/
• GPars User Mailing List - http://xircles.codehaus.org/lists/user@gpars.codehaus.org
• Dierk König's presentation (Concurrent programming for you and me) - http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/groovy-grails/concurrent-programming-for-you-and-me
• Alex Miller's DevWorks article - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-gpars/index.html
• Václav Pech's blog - http://www.jroller.com/vaclav/

(Sorry if this shows up as an entirely new post.  Blogger seems once again to be acting funky.)

Update: Here are the slides from my talk.  Sadly, I forgot to record the audio to go along with it.

GPars For Beginners

View more presentations from Matt Passell

AWS Elastic MapReduce Webinar @Noon ET on May 28

Amazon's new Elastic MapReduce service makes it easier to run Map/Reduce jobs within EC2. If that sounds interesting, you can find out more about it by registering and "attending" the webinar they're holding on Thursday, May 28 at Noon ET. I'll be there, in a virtual sense. :)

Grails Demo Webinar

I just found out yesterday that Graeme Rocher, SpringSource's Head of Grails Development, will be giving a Grails demo webinar on Thursday, March 19. It will consist of building a Twitter clone using Grails. I've seen similar demos at SpringOne 2008 and JavaOne and I'd highly recommend "attending" if you're interested in seeing what Grails can do.