Greater Atlanta Software Symposium

October 24 - 26, 2008



Event Details

Location

Atlanta Marriott Perimeter Center
246 Perimeter Center Parkway NE
Atlanta, GA 30346
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Fees

Regular Registration
10/7/08 - 10/24/08 $900
Group Registration
5 - 9 attendees $800
10 - 14 attendees $775
15 - 24 attendees $750
25+ attendees $725
At the Door
10/24/08 $975
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Registration Includes

  • 1). Three Day All Access Pass
  • 2). 1-Year IntelliJ License
        - compliments of JetBrains
  • 3). All Meals/Snacks
        - duration of the symposium
  • 4). Custom Laptop Bag
       - Best in the Industry ($150 Value)
  • 5). One Gig USB Drive
       - All Symposium Content included
  • 6). Custom NFJS Binder

Registration Options

Session Highlights

Don't miss your chance to attend more than forty education and solutions sessions:

  • Seating is Limited
  • In-depth Discussions
  • Peer Exchange
  • Access to Speakers
  • Expert Panel Discussions
  • Hands-on Code Examples
  • Best Practices
  • Birds of a Feather Session
  • Insight on Cutting-Edge Tools
Download Session Listing

Featured Sessions

Filthy Rich Clients with the Google Web Toolkit, P..
By David Geary

The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is truly a revolutionary framework that lets you develop Ajaxified web applications without knowing anything about Ajax or JavaScript. But the GWT goes way beyond basic Ajax by letting you implement desktop-like applications that run in the ubiquitous browser.

Agile Management & Managing Agility
By David Hussman

Management and agility are not mutually exclusive. Many managers are already working in an agile manner as a means to improve, produce, or simply survive. Other managers hear about projects using agile methods and struggle to find a place in the project community.

This session provides a new way to think about managing projects. Some managers will find that their existing practices and skills are supported and enhanced by the forums and metrics provided within an agile project while others will be challenged by some of the principles and practices.

10 Tips for Getting Your Project Back on Track
By Jared Richardson

Software projects fail over and over for many of the same reasons. We'll look at some of the more avoidable problems and some solid ways to fix them, or avoid them in the first place.

Techniques 2008
By Jared Richardson

There are a number of great techniques you can use across technologies and projects. Come hear some of my favorites and contribute a few of your own. We'll discuss topics from DRY to creating a zone defense for your product.

A Thorough Introduction To Groovy
By Jeff Brown

Groovy is an agile dynamic language for the Java platform. The language and its libraries bring many things to the table to ease the process of building applications for the Java platform. This session provides a detailed run through Groovy with lots of code samples to drive home the power of the language.

SOA Unplugged
By Mark Richards

Awareness about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has grown significantly in the past several years. Unfortunately, along with that growth has come a significant amount of confusion about what SOA really is. SOA has become such a ubiquitous buzzword that it now has many faces and means different things to different people. CIO's, managers, vendors, business users, architects, and developers all see SOA differently which creates a sea of confusion about what is and isn't SOA. In this highly interactive and thought provoking session we will look beyond the hype and marketure of SOA and explore SOA from an architecture and development point of view - in other words, SOA as an architecture pattern. During this session we will look at SOA use cases, services, integration, implementation, guiding architecture principles of SOA, and attempt to answer the following question: What is and isn't SOA?

Enterprise Messaging Using JMS (Part 1)
By Mark Richards

The chances are good that at some point in your career you will need to use messaging to pass information between applications, subsystems, or external systems, particularly with service-oriented architecture on the rise. The Java Messaging Service (JMS) allows Java applications to implement messaging using a standard API, thereby removing the dependency on any particular messaging provider. In Part 1 of this session we will take a look at some of the basics of messaging, including sending and receiving messages, message types, and request/reply messaging. I will begin the session by going over the basics of messaging and the JMS API. Then, through interactive coding using OpenJMS I will demonstrate how to connect to JMS providers, send messages, receive messages, and use message properties. Please note that this is a two part session.

Clouds, Grids, and Fog
By Michael Nygard

Servers, storage, networking, backups... they're all vanishing into the "clouds". Cloud Computing is the emerging architecture for massive, scalable infrastructure that your company doesn't have to own or operate.

From the "zero servers" web startup to the corporate IT department battling server-sprawl, cloud computing has many manifestations. This session will differentiate among the various types of cloud computing and describe applicable use cases.

The Productive Programmer: Mechanics
By Neal Ford

Developers from the 1980s would be shocked at how inefficiently developers use their computers because of the advent of graphical operating systems. This talk describes how to reclaim productivity afforded by intelligent use of command lines and other ways of accelerating your interaction with the computer and bending computers to do your bidding. Stop working so hard for your computer!

Test Driven Design
By Neal Ford

Most developers think that "TDD" stands for Test-driven Development. But it really should stand for "Test-driven Design". Rigorously using TDD makes your code much better in multiple ways.

Enterprise JPA - Tips and Tricks for JEE5 Persiste..
By Pratik Patel

As with many technologies, the basics are easy. The hard part comes when the developer needs to do sophisticated integration, development, and testing as part of an enterprise application. A large enterprise application requires the developer to think of issues that affect the development, scalability and robustness of the application. This presentation will cover the advanced topics described below.

A large enterprise application often will have several sub-projects that each contain their own JPA persistence unit. This opens up a number of questions around how to organize the persistence units and how the code between sub-projects should interoperate. Developers will gain insight into these issues and will see a couple of solutions using live code examples.



Groovy, the Blue Pill: Writing Next Generation Jav..
By Scott Davis

There are wild-eyed radicals out there telling you that Java is dead, statically-typed languages are passe, and your skills are hopelessly out-of-date. Those extremists are the same ones who don't bat an eye at throwing out years of experience to learn a new language from scratch, pushing aside a familiar IDE for a new one, and deploying to a whole new set of production servers with little regard to legacy integration.

While this "burn the boats" approach to software development might sound exciting to some folks, it's giving your manager the cold shakes right now. What if I told you that there was a way that you could integrate seamlessly with your legacy Java code, continue to use your trusty IDE and stable production servers, and yet take advantage of many of the exciting new dynamic language features that those fanatics keep prattling on about? You'd probably say, "Groovy!" I would, too...



Rapid Web Development with Grails and Ajax
By Scott Davis

Grails is a Java- and Groovy-based web framework that is built for speed. First-time developers are amazed at how quickly you can get a page-centric MVC web site up and running thanks to the scaffolding and convention over configuration that Grails provides. Advanced web developers are often pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to break out of that coarse-grained navigation model using the native Ajax support baked into the framework.

YSlow: Building Your Website for Speed
By Scott Davis

How optimized is your website? YSlow, a FireFox/FireBug plugin, doesn't pull any punches. It gives any website an A, B, C, D, or F rating based on 14 individual analysis points. You'll be amazed (or depressed) at what YSlow thinks of your site. In this talk, we'll walk through these points step by step, learning what Yahoo! (the creator of this utility) does to keep its web properties running as quickly as possible.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to ClassLoaders
By Ted Neward

If you've ever gotten a ClassCastException and just knew the runtime was wrong about it, or found yourself copying .jar files all over your production server just to get your code to run, then you probably find the Java ClassLoader mechanism to be deep, dark, mysterious, and incomprehensible. Take a deep breath, and relax--ClassLoaders aren't as bad as they seem at first, once you understand a few basic rules regarding their operation, and have a bit more tools in your belt to diagnose ClassLoader problems. And once you've got that, and hear about ClassLoaders' ability to run multiple versions of the same code at the same time, and to provide isolation barriers inside your application, or even compile code on the fly from source form, you might just find that you like ClassLoaders after all... maybe.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Annotations
By Ted Neward

Want to get the soup-to-nuts story on Java annotations? In this presentation, we'll first talk about what annotations provide to the Java language. After setting ourselves a conceptual basis to operate from, we'll look at the language definition for Java annotations, from how to use them to how to define them. Finally, we'll take a look at the other side of annotations, consuming them at source-level (using "apt", the annotation processing tool), class-level (using a bytecode toolkit such as BCEL), and at runtime (using enhancements to the Reflection API made in Java5).

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