Meeting Schedule
5:00-5:15	Pizza and Networking
5:15-6:45	Presentation
6:45-7:00	Q&A

Abstract

In early April, Google announced that their cloud-computing platform, Google App Engine, was at long last going to support a language other than Python. Speculation up to that time was rampant that Java would be the likeliest candidate, and sure enough Java was the new winner. The fascinating part, however, is that it's not just Java that is supported, but the JVM. That means that other languages that compile to the JVM, like Groovy, Scala, JRuby, and more, also suddenly work in Google App Engine.

This talk will discuss the new capabilities and demonstrate them by building an interesting application in Groovy and Java and deploying it to the platform. Though the Java support is still in beta form, much can be done with the available functionality. As an additional feature, we'll talk about the potential costs and benefits of using a cloud computing platform in the first place.

Speaker

Ken Kousen is President of Kousen IT, Inc. (http://www.kousenit.com ), through which he does consulting, development, and technical training in all areas of Java and XML. He has been a technical editor for several books related to Java and Groovy, including _Groovy Recipes_ and _Programming Groovy_. Along with Scott Davis, he is the co-author of the upcoming book from O'Reilly entitled _Making Java Groovy_, which is all about integrating Java and Groovy together to make development easier.