[dundee] Flash Talk suggestions

[Rick Moynihan]

Hi all,

Well, I've been thinking about doing a flash talk, but I thought it
best to ask and see what people would like to hear me drone on about
:-)

I've assembled a list of 4 possible talks I could do.  They reflect
current interests and stuff I've been working on/with recently;
primarily because it's easier for me to justify preparing a
presentation if it's something I'm already using or researching.

I realise they might not be entirely suited to the audience, as
they're all quite tightly developer focused...  If this is a problem,
then perhaps Gary & Barry might consider them for flash talks at their
user group :-)

Let me know which (if any) you'd rather hear:

* Erlang

Erlang is an open source functional programming language developed by
Ericsson for telecoms applications.  Despite hiding in obscurity for
20 years, Erlang has become a hot topic as it promises to make
developing robust applications for multi-core, and distributed systems
easy.

This talk aims to introduce people to the problems with traditional
methods for concurrent programming (threads with mutable shared state)
and provide a brief introduction to Erlang and it's use in developing
fault tollerant distributed systems.

http://www.erlang.org/

* Building on the bleeding edge with Hudson

Continuous Integration is a technique designed to improve the way in
which teams develop software.  This talk looks at how you can use
Hudson to provide an environment for automating software builds and
tests allowing software developers to work more effectively together.

The talk also looks at how you can use Hudson to assist in building
quality software on bleeding edge open source API's; allowing you to
ride the rocky waves of a fast moving project's source control system
with confidence.

https://hudson.dev.java.net/

* Subvert your language -  an introduction to internal Domain Specific Languages

General purpose programming languages allow you to solve a wide
variety of problems.  But they often lack the expressivity, elegance
or conciseness of programming languages designed for tackling niche
problems.

Traditionally developers either put up with the shortcomings of their
language, or develop a new language for expressing their problem (e.g.
make, Graphviz, sed etc...), in doing so however they lose tools
support.  There is however another option; subvert your existing
language and turn it into a language for solving your problems!

Internal DSL's allow developers to write clearer, more expressive
code, whilst maintaining full tools and IDE support.  Here I plan to
show how both

* JRuby

JRuby is an open source 100% pure Java implementation of the Ruby
programming language.  JRuby has experienced rapid growth since it's
inception in June 2006 and in 2007 reached v1.0 claiming full Ruby
compatability.  Since then it has received improvements in
performance, and if recent benchmarks are to be believed it may soon
rival the MRI (C Ruby interpreter) for being the fastest Ruby
implementation available.

But JRuby isn't just about speed, as it allows seamless
interoperability between Ruby and Java allowing Ruby developers to
benefit from the wealth of high quality Java libraries available,
whilst Java programmers can benefit from Ruby's concise and flexible
syntax.

http://jruby.codehaus.org/

R.