Greater Atlanta Software Symposium

September 21 - 23, 2012 - Atlanta, GA


Atlanta Marriott Perimeter Center
246 Perimeter Center Parkway NE
Atlanta, GA   30346
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NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in AtlantaSeptember 20 - 22, 2013.
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Session Schedule

We are committed to hype-free technical training for developers, architects, and technical managers. We offer over 55 sessions in the span of one weekend. Featuring leading industry experts, who share their practical and real-world experiences; we offer intensive speaker interaction time during sessions and breaks.

About Sessions

Our sessions are designed to cover the latest in trends, best practices, and latest developments in Java application development. Each session lasts 90 minutes unless otherwise noted.

Friday - September 21


  Salon A-D Salon E Roosevelt Washington/Jefferson Monroe/jackson
12:00 - 1:00 PM REGISTRATION
1:00 - 1:15 PM WELCOME
1:15 - 2:45 PM

Practical Lean for the Practicing Developer

Matt Stine

Practicing Continuous Delivery on the Cloud

James Ward
2:45 - 3:15 PM BREAK
3:15 - 4:45 PM

The Mobile App Smackdown: Native Apps vs. The Mobile Web

Nathaniel Schutta
4:45 - 5:00 PM BREAK
5:00 - 6:30 PM

Emergent Design

Neal Ford

Rediscovering JavaScript

Venkat Subramaniam
6:30 - 7:15 PM DINNER
7:15 - 8:00 PM Keynote: Tim Berglund

Saturday - September 22


  Salon A-D Salon E Roosevelt Washington/Jefferson Monroe/jackson
8:00 - 9:00 AM BREAKFAST
9:00 - 10:30 AM

Building Web Applications with Spring MVC

Craig Walls
10:30 - 11:00 AM BREAK
11:00 - 12:30 PM

Continuous Delivery Pt 2: Infrastructure

Neal Ford

JavaScript Libraries You Aren't Using...Yet

Nathaniel Schutta

Securing Spring

Craig Walls

Effective Java Reloaded, Part II: Hello, Project Coin!

Matt Stine
12:30 - 1:30 PM LUNCH
1:30 - 3:00 PM

Programming with HTML 5

Venkat Subramaniam

Groovy Workshop

Kenneth Kousen

Complexity Theory and Software Development

Tim Berglund
3:00 - 3:15 PM BREAK
3:15 - 4:45 PM

Virtual Machines and Interpreters II: Inside the Java Virtual Machine

Douglas Hawkins

Groovy Workshop

(continued)
Kenneth Kousen

Git Workshop (Bring A Laptop)

Tim Berglund
4:45 - 5:30 PM BOFs

Sunday - September 23


  Salon A-D Salon E Roosevelt Washington/Jefferson Monroe/jackson
8:00 - 9:00 AM BREAKFAST
9:00 - 10:30 AM

Managing Complexity (The Project Integrity Series)

David Bock

Applying Groovy Closures for fun and productivity

Venkat Subramaniam

Inside Android's Dalvik VM

Douglas Hawkins
10:30 - 11:00 AM MORNING BREAK
11:00 - 12:30 PM

Personal Agility with the Pomodoro Technique

Daniel Hinojosa

Maintaining Source Code Quality (The Project Integrity Series)

David Bock

Spock: Logical Testing for Enterprise Applications

Kenneth Kousen

Understanding Garbage Collection

Douglas Hawkins
12:30 - 1:15 PM LUNCH
1:15 - 2:15 PM EXPERT PANEL DISCUSSION
2:15 - 3:45 PM

Making Java Bearable with Guava (2013 Edition)

Daniel Hinojosa

Metrics for steering your projects to success

David Bock

Grails Workshop

Kenneth Kousen
3:45 - 4:00 PM BREAK
4:00 - 5:30 PM

Resource-Oriented Concurrent Processing

Jeremy Deane

Joda Time and a Brief History of the World

Daniel Hinojosa

Surviving Middle Management

David Bock

Grails Workshop

(continued)
Kenneth Kousen

NoSQL Smackdown 2012

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Tim Berglund

By Tim Berglund

Alternative databases continue to establish their role in the technology stack of the future—and for many, the technology stack of the present. Making mature engineering decisions about when to adopt new products is not easy, and requires that we learn about them both from an abstract perspective and from a very concrete one as well. If you are going to recommend a NoSQL database for a new project, you're going to have to look at code.

In this talk, we'll examine three important contenders in the NoSQL space: Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4J. We'll review their data models, scaling paradigms, and query idioms. Most importantly, we'll work through the exercise of modeling a real-world problem with each database, and look at the code and queries we'd use to implement real product features. Come to this session for a thorough and thoroughly practical smackdown between three important NoSQL products.



Connected Data with Neo4j

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Tim Berglund

By Tim Berglund

Neo4j is an open-source, enterprise-class database with a conventional feature set and a very unconventional data model. Like the databases we're already used to, it offers support for Java, ACID transactions, and a feature-rich query language. But before you get too comfortable, you have to wrap your mind around its most important feature: Neo4j is a graph database, built precisely to store graphs efficiently and traverse them more performantly than relational, document, or key/value databases ever could.

Neo4j is an obvious fit to anyone who thinks they have a graph problem to solve, but this is not many people. It turns out that the most interesting property of Neo4j is its architectural agenda. It wants you to think of the entire world as a graph—as a set of connected information resources. Steeped in the thinking of resource oriented architecture, this NoSQL database wants to change the way you look at your world, and unlock new value in your data as a result.



Tim Berglund

By Tim Berglund



Hadoop

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Tim Berglund

By Tim Berglund

When you want to measure fractions of a millimeter, you get a micrometer. When you want to measure centimeters, you get a ruler. When you want to measure kilometers, you might use a laser beam. The abstract task is the same in all cases, but the tools differ significantly based on the size of the measurement.

Likewise, there are some computations that can be done quickly on data structures that fit into memory. Some can't fit into memory, but will fit on the direct-attached disk of a single computer. But when you've got many terabytes or even petabytes of data, you need tooling adapted to the scale of the task. Enter Hadoop.

Hadoop is a widely-used open source framework for storing massive data sets in distributed clusters of computers and efficiently distributing computational tasks around the cluster. Come learn about the Hadoop File System (HDFS), the MapReduce pattern and its implementation, and the broad ecosystem of tools, products, and companies that have grown up around this ground-breaking project.



Gradle Jumpstart (Bring a Laptop)

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Tim Berglund

By Tim Berglund

Gradle is a compelling new build tool that incorporates the lessons learned from a decade of Ant and Maven. More than just a compromise between declarative and imperative build formats, or between convention and configuration, Gradle is a sophisticated software development platform that simple builds easy and complex, highly automated continuous software delivery pipelines possible to build. Using its extensible APIs and expressive DSL, you're equipped to build your next build.

Bring your laptop to this session for the following:

  • Build a Java project
  • Resolve transitive dependencies
  • Run unit tests
  • Build a Groovy project
  • Create multi-project, polyglot builds
  • Wrap your build with a repeatable version of Gradle
  • Extend Gradle with custom tasks
  • See the plugin architecture


Complexity Theory and Software Development

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Tim Berglund

By Tim Berglund

Some systems are too large to be understood entirely by any one human mind. They are composed of a diverse array of individual components capable of interacting with each other and adapting to a changing environment. As systems, they produce behavior that differs in kind from the behavior of their components. Complexity Theory is an emerging discipline that seeks to describe such phenomena previously encountered in biology, sociology, economics, and other disciplines.

Beyond new ways of looking at ant colonies, fashion trends, and national economies, complexity theory promises powerful insights to software development. The Internet—perhaps the most valuable piece of computing infrastructure of the present day—may fit the description of a complex system. Large corporate organizations in which developers are employed have complex characteristics. In this session, we'll explore what makes a complex system, what advantages complexity has to offer us, and how to harness these in the systems we build.



Git Workshop (Bring A Laptop)

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Tim Berglund

By Tim Berglund

Git is a version control system you may have been hearing a bit about lately. But simply hearing more about it may not be enough to convince you of its value. Getting hands on experience is what really counts. In this workshop, you'll bring your Windows, Mac or Linux laptop and walk through downloading, installing, and using Git in a collaborative fashion.

The workshop style of this class will allow you to observe and discover the value of this new version control tool first hand. You'll be cloning, creating, commiting, and pushing repositories by the conclusion of this session.

PreReq: Basic knowledge of a version control system. Subversion knowledge is a plus, but not imperative.



Emergent Design

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Neal Ford

By Neal Ford

Emergent design is a big topic in the agile architecture and design community. This session covers the theory behind emergent design and shows examples of how you can implement this important concept.

This session describes the current thinking about emergent design, discovering design in code. The hazard of Big Design Up Front in software is that you don't yet know what you don't know, and design decisions made too early are just speculations without facts. Emergent design techniques allow you to wait until the last responsible moment to make design decisions. This talk covers four areas: emergent design enablers, battling things that make emergent design hard, finding idiomatic patterns, and how to leverage the patterns you find. It includes both proactive (test-driven development) and reactive (refactoring, metrics, visualizations, tests) approaches to discovering design, and discusses the use of custom attributes, DSLs, and other techniques for utilizing them. The goal of this talk is to provide nomenclature, strategies, and techniques for allowing design to emerge from projects as they proceed, keeping you code in sync with the problem domain. This talk shows lots of examples of how to make this concept work in your environment.

Prerequisite: understanding of architectural and design concepts



Continuous Delivery Pt 1: Deployment Pipelines

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Neal Ford

By Neal Ford

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. This workshop focuses on the Deployment Pipeline concept from Continuous Delivery.

In this workshop I move from release back through testing to development practices, analyzing at each stage how to improve collaboration and increase feedback so as to make the delivery process as fast and efficient as possible. At the heart of the workshop is a pattern called the deployment pipeline, which involves the creation of a living system that models your organization's value stream for delivering software. I spend the first half of the workshop introducing this pattern, and discussing how to incrementally automate the build, test and deployment process, culminating in continuous deployment.



Continuous Delivery Pt 2: Infrastructure

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Neal Ford

By Neal Ford

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. This workshop focuses on the agile infrastructure required to implement a deployment pipeline and continuous delivery.

In this workshop, I introduce agile infrastructure, including the use of Puppet to automate the management of testing and production environments. We discuss automating data management, including migrations. Development practices that enable incremental development and delivery will be covered at length, including a discussion of why branching is inimical to continuous delivery, and how practices such as branch by abstraction and componentization provide superior alternatives that enable large and distributed teams to deliver incrementally.



Advanced JavaScript for Java Devs

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Pratik Patel

By Pratik Patel

So you think you've picked up enough JavaScript to be dangerous, but feel like the whole prototypical language thing is still a mystery. In this session, we'll go from basic JavaScript to advanced JavaScript. We'll discuss and code modular JavaScript with CommonJS. We'll look into the details of a prototype language and discuss things like parasitic inheritance. We'll also look at JavaScript libraries that will help you get the most out of JavaScript - not jQuery, but a library like UnderscoreJS and SugarJS.

This is a fast paced session meant to bring you up to speed with the latest and greatest JavaScript techniques and tools. Whether you're building client side JavaScript with HTML5 or Appcelerator Titanium, or server-side JavaScript with node.js, you'll come away with knowledge and patterns for how the pro's use JavaScript for building real apps.



Put some Backbone.js or Ember.js into your app

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Pratik Patel

By Pratik Patel

We've come a long way down the JavaScript road. Gone are the days of 'just hack it' for the web - architecting even a small project in JavaScript can be a challenge. Thankfully, there are several frameworks to help you; the most popular currently is Backbone.js. In this session, we'll assume you know nothing of Backbone.js, and we'll build a small application using Backbone.js as the foundation. We'll also build the same app using Ember.js, another popular JavaScript framework.

Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface. Ember.js is another popular framework that provides client-side code structure. It takes a different approach than Backbone.js, but provides more features. Ember.js came out of the SproutCore project and emphasizes bindings.

Prerequisite: Advanced JavaScript of JavaScript knowledge



Mobile Development Options 2013

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Pratik Patel

By Pratik Patel

There's a bevy of options for developing mobile apps. If you're looking at cross-platform solutions, there's a multitude of options to choose from. In this session we'll explore the three basic categories for developing mobile apps: native, cross-platform-to-native, and mobile web. We'll discuss the sweet spot for each of these three approaches and the benefits and drawbacks of each. Technologies discussed include Android, iOS, HTML5/CSS3, Phonegap, Titanium, and jQuery Mobile.

There's a bevy of options for developing mobile apps. If you're looking at cross-platform solutions, there's a multitude of options to choose from. In this session we'll explore the three basic categories for developing mobile apps: native, cross-platform-to-native, and mobile web. We'll discuss the sweet spot for each of these three approaches and the benefits and drawbacks of each. Technologies discussed include Android, iOS, HTML5/CSS3, Phonegap, Titanium, and jQuery Mobile.



Mobile Performance Tips n' Tricks

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Pratik Patel

By Pratik Patel

Creating a web site, web app, or native app for mobile use presents a special set of challenges. Specifically, developers and designers should be zoned into the techniques for usability - and usability can be enhanced greatly by taking performance elements into consideration up-front. In this session, we explore the many performance tips and tricks you can employ to make your website or web app or native app shine on mobile devices. This is an advanced course that discusses issues such as image loading, JavaScript performance, and wireless latency.

Creating a web site, web app, or native app for mobile use presents a special set of challenges. Specifically, developers and designers should be zoned into the techniques for usability - and usability can be enhanced greatly by taking performance elements into consideration up-front. In this session, we explore the many performance tips and tricks you can employ to make your website or web app or native app shine on mobile devices. This is an advanced course that discusses issues such as image loading, JavaScript performance, and wireless latency.



Designing for Mobile

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Nathaniel Schutta

By Nathaniel Schutta

The word just came down from the VP - you need a mobile app and you need it yesterday. Wait, you've never built a mobile app...it's pretty much the same thing as you've built before just smaller right? Wrong. The mobile experience is different and far less forgiving. How do you design an application for touch? How does that differ from a mouse? Should you build a mobile app or a mobile web site? This talk will get you started on designing for a new, and exciting, platform. Whether that means iPhone, Android, Windows Phone or something else, you need a plan, this talk will help.

The word just came down from the VP - you need a mobile app and you need it yesterday. Wait, you've never built a mobile app...it's pretty much the same thing as you've built before just smaller right? Wrong. The mobile experience is different and far less forgiving. How do you design an application for touch? How does that differ from a mouse? Should you build a mobile app or a mobile web site? This talk will get you started on designing for a new, and exciting, platform. Whether that means iPhone, Android, Windows Phone or something else, you need a plan, this talk will help.



The Mobile App Smackdown: Native Apps vs. The Mobile Web

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Nathaniel Schutta

By Nathaniel Schutta

Mobile is the next big thing and your company needs to there. But what does there actually entail? Should you build a native app? On which platforms? Do you have the skills for that? What about the web? Can you deliver an awesome experience using nothing but a mobile web browser? This talk will help you navigate these treacherous waters. We'll discuss the pros and cons of the various approaches and give you a framework for choosing.

Mobile is the next big thing and your company needs to there. But what does there actually entail? Should you build a native app? On which platforms? Do you have the skills for that? What about the web? Can you deliver an awesome experience using nothing but a mobile web browser? This talk will help you navigate these treacherous waters. We'll discuss the pros and cons of the various approaches and give you a framework for choosing.



Leading Technical Change

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Nathaniel Schutta

By Nathaniel Schutta

Technology changes, it's a fact of life. And while many developers are attracted to the challenge of change, many organizations do a particularly poor job of adapting. We've all worked on projects with, ahem, less than new technologies even though newer approaches would better serve the business. But how do we convince those holding the purse strings to pony up the cash when things are "working" today? At a personal, how do we keep up with the change in our industry?

This talk will explore ways to stay sharp as a software professional. We'll talk about how a technology radar can help you stay marketable (and enjoying your career) and how we can use the same technique to help our companies keep abreast of important changes in the technology landscape. Of course it isn't enough to just be aware, we have to drive change - but how? This talk will consider ways we can influence others and lead change in our organizations.



JavaScript Libraries You Aren't Using...Yet

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Nathaniel Schutta

By Nathaniel Schutta

You're all over jQuery - you write plugins in your sleep - and before that, you were a Prototype ninja. Your team treats JavaScript like a first class citizen, you've even written more tests than Kent Beck. Is that all there is in the land of the JavaScript developer? Believe it or not, the JavaScript party hasn't stopped. What other libraries are out there? What do they offer? This talk will survey the field of modern JavaScript libraries getting you up to speed on what's new. We'll dive in just deep enough to whet your appetite on a wide variety of libraries such as Backbone, Underscore, Zepto and more.

You're all over jQuery - you write plugins in your sleep - and before that, you were a Prototype ninja. Your team treats JavaScript like a first class citizen, you've even written more tests than Kent Beck. Is that all there is in the land of the JavaScript developer? Believe it or not, the JavaScript party hasn't stopped. What other libraries are out there? What do they offer? This talk will survey the field of modern JavaScript libraries getting you up to speed on what's new. We'll dive in just deep enough to whet your appetite on a wide variety of libraries such as Backbone, Underscore, Zepto and more.



Hacking Your Brain for Fun and Profit

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Nathaniel Schutta

By Nathaniel Schutta

The single most important tool in any developers toolbox isn't a fancy IDE or some spiffy new language - it's our brain. Despite ever faster processors with multiple cores and expanding amounts of RAM, we haven't yet created a computer to rival the ultra lightweight one we carry around in our skulls - in this session we'll learn how to make the most of it. We'll talk about why multitasking is a myth, the difference between the left and the right side of your brain, the importance of flow and why exercise is good for more than just your waist line.

The single most important tool in any developers toolbox isn't a fancy IDE or some spiffy new language - it's our brain. Despite ever faster processors with multiple cores and expanding amounts of RAM, we haven't yet created a computer to rival the ultra lightweight one we carry around in our skulls - in this session we'll learn how to make the most of it. We'll talk about why multitasking is a myth, the difference between the left and the right side of your brain, the importance of flow and why exercise is good for more than just your waist line.



Practical Lean for the Practicing Developer

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Matt Stine

By Matt Stine

Much is said today by the software methodology "talking heads" about the need for organizations to "go lean." The question is, what does it mean to go lean? Is this the job of IT management? Or is it the job of the practicing software developer? And furthermore, does this simply mean the adoption of of another set of processes and procedures? Or is it something entirely different?

Ultimately, going lean simply means removing all of the impediments that prevent our organizations from achieving more of "the goal." While that goal may differ from context to context, for the vast majority of us that means "making more money," by improving our efficiency at moving from, as the Poppendieck's have so aptly said, from "concept to cash."

While a great many of us do not have the role power necessary to spur top-down organizational change, there are many practical things each of us can do to bring the power of "going lean" to our teams. As we apply these principles and practices to our day-to-day work, we can build the credibility necessary to become change agents.

In their books, the Poppendieck's have helpfully summarized lean software development into seven principles:

  1. Eliminating Waste
  2. Building Quality In
  3. Creating Knowledge
  4. Deferring Commitment
  5. Delivering Fast
  6. Respecting People
  7. Optimizing the Whole

In this talk we'll walk through each of these principles and examine how we as individual contributors and software teams can make practical, actionable changes within our own spheres of influence that will ultimately help us to deliver more value to our organizations.



Code Archaeology

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Matt Stine

By Matt Stine

Feature requests are steadily pouring in, but the team cannot respond to them. They are paralyzed. The codebase on which the company has "bet the business" is simply too hard to change. It's your job to clean up the mess and get things rolling again. Where do you begin? Your first task is to get the lay of the land by applying a family of techniques we'll call "Code Archaeology."

In this session we will learn how to systematically explore a codebase. We'll look at what tools are available to help us out, slinging some wicked shell-fu along the way. We'll look at "code islands" and "code bridges," and how to construct a "map of the code." We'll also examine the wisdom that thought leaders like Michael Feathers and Dave Thomas have leant to this subject.

Once we've gained a thorough understanding of what we have in front of us, we'll learn approaches for getting the system under test and refactoring so that we can start to pick up the pace and respond to user requirements without making a bigger mess. You'll leave this session well prepared to tackle the next "big ball of mud" that gets dumped on your desk.



Functional SOLID

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Matt Stine

By Matt Stine

Robert Martin assembled the SOLID family of principles to provide a useful guide to help us create object-oriented software designs that were resilient in the face of change. In recent years, the need to write highly-concurrent software in order to leverage increasingly ubiquitous multicore architectures, as well as general interest in more effectively controlling complexity in large software designs, has driven a renewed interest in the functional programming paradigm. Given the apparent similarity in their goals, "What is the intersection of SOLID with functional programming?" is a natural question to ask.

In this talk, we'll explore this intersection. We'll begin with a brief overview of Martin's catalog of software design smells, which describe properties of software designs that have not addressed change effectively, and thereby become increasingly hard to evolve. We'll then take a tour through the SOLID principles, addressing the following topics:

  • What is the principle?
  • What design smells does it combat?
  • How does it work?
  • Does it still apply within the functional paradigm?
  • How can multiparadigmatic (combining concepts from OO, functional and other paradigms) programming better align with the principle?
  • Examples from Java
  • Where a particular language feature greatly enhances alignment with the principle, examples from Groovy, Scala and Clojure


Effective Java Reloaded

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Matt Stine

By Matt Stine

Even with the recent explosion in alternative languages for the JVM, the vast majority of us are still writing code in "Java the language" in order to put bread on the table. Proper craftsmanship demands that we write the best Java code that we can possibly write. Fortunately we have a guide in Joshua Bloch's Effective Java.

In his foreward to the first edition, Guy Steele writes about the importance of learning three aspects of any language: grammar, vocabulary, and idioms. Unfortunately many programmers stop learning after mastering the first two. Effective Java is your guide to understanding idiomatic Java programming.

Effective Java is organized into 78 standalone "items," all of which will be impossible to cover in one session. Instead I've chosen a subset of the most important techniques and practices that are commonly missed by today's Java programmers. You'll pick from a menu and decide where we'll head. Regardless of the path we take, you'll leave this session thoroughly equipped to write better Java code tomorrow!



Effective Java Reloaded, Part II: Hello, Project Coin!

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Matt Stine

By Matt Stine

Even with the recent explosion in alternative languages for the JVM, the vast majority of us are still writing code in "Java the language" in order to put bread on the table. Proper craftsmanship demands that we write the best Java code that we can possibly write. Fortunately we have a guide in Joshua Bloch's Effective Java.

Effective Java is organized into 78 standalone "items," all of which will be impossible to cover in one session. Instead I've chosen a subset of the most important techniques and practices that are commonly missed by today's Java programmers.

*In Part II of this session, we'll cover those items we were unable to reach during Part I. We'll follow that up with a dive into the new features available in Java 7, describing new idioms for effective Java programming in the following areas:

  • Strings in switch statements
  • Enhanced syntax for numeric literals
  • Improved exception handling
  • ARM (automatic resource management) blocks
  • Type inference for construction of parameterized types (the "diamond" operator)

Prerequisite: Incredibly useful to attend Part I, but not strictly required.



Thinking in Functional Style

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Venkat Subramaniam

By Venkat Subramaniam

Functional Programming has been around for a while, but it is gaining popularity, especially due to direct support in languages on the JVM. Writing code in functional style is not about syntax, it is a paradigm shift. In this presentation, using examples from Java, Groovy, and Scala, you will learn how to write code in functional style. We will start out discussing the elements of functional programming and then look at examples of some common operations and how you can implement those in functional style.

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Rediscovering JavaScript

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Venkat Subramaniam

By Venkat Subramaniam

JavaScript is one of those very powerful languages that is often misunderstood and underutilized. It's quite popular, yet there's so much more we can do with it.

In this presentation we'll deep dive into the capabilities and strengths of this prominent language of the web.



Programming Concurrency with Akka

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Venkat Subramaniam

By Venkat Subramaniam

I call the JDK concurrency API as the synchronize and suffer model. Fortunately, you don't have to endure that today. You have some nice options, brought to prominence on the JVM by Scala and Clojure.

In this workshop, learn how to program with Actors and STM using Akka, a powerful and popular library created using Scala but usable from any language on the JVM. You have a choice to pick the language you like in this workshop, and learn how to use these powerful concurrency models.



Programming with HTML 5

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Venkat Subramaniam

By Venkat Subramaniam

Developing a rich user interface for web applications is both exciting and challenging. HTML 5 has closed the gaps and once again brought new vibe into programming the web tier. Come to this session to learn how you can make use of HTML 5 to create stellar applications.

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Scala Koans - A new and fun way to learn a Scala programming language (Bring a Laptop)

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Venkat Subramaniam

By Venkat Subramaniam and Daniel Hinojosa

Have you looked into Scala? Scala is a new object-functional JVM language. It is statically typed and type inferred. It is multi-paradigm and supports both object oriented and functional programming. And it happens to be my favorite programming language.

If you are interested in Scala, how you are planning to learn Scala? You probably are going to pick up a book or two and follow through some examples. And hopefully some point down the line you will learn the language, its syntax and if you get excited enough maybe build large applications using it. But what if I tell you that there is a better path to enlightenment in order to learn Scala?

Scala Koans, a set of test cases that will teach you Scala language. The Scala koans will help the audience learn the language, syntax and the structure of the language through test cases. It will also teach the functional programming and object oriented features of the language. Since learning is guided by failing tests it allows developers to think and play with the language while they are learning.



Applying Groovy Closures for fun and productivity

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Venkat Subramaniam

By Venkat Subramaniam

You can program higher order functions in Groovy quite easily using closures. But the benefits of closures go far beyond that. Groovy has a variety of capabilities hidden in closures.

In this presentation, we will unlock that treasure and explore ways in which we can design applications using Groovy closures, to apply different design patterns, to create fluent interfaces, and even program asynchrony.



Effective Spring

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Craig Walls

By Craig Walls

After almost a decade and several significant releases, Spring has gone a long way from challenging the then-current Java standards to becoming the de facto enterprise standard itself. Although the Spring programming model continues to evolve, it still maintains backward compatibility with many of its earlier features and paradigms. Consequently, there's often more than one way to do anything in Spring. How do you know which way is the right way?

In this session, we'll explore several ways that Spring has changed over the years and look at the best approaches when working with the latest versions of Spring.



Developing Next-Generation Applications

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Craig Walls

By Craig Walls

For a long while, we've built applications pretty much the same way. Regardless of the frameworks (or even languages and platforms) employed, we've packaged up our web application, deployed it to a server somewhere, and asked our users to point their web browser at it.

But now we're seeing a shift in not only how applications are deployed, but also in how they're consumed. The cost and hassle of setting up dedicated servers is driving more applications into the cloud. Meanwhile, our users are on-the-go more than ever, consuming applications from their mobile devices more often than a traditional desktop browser. And even the desktop user is expecting a more interactive experience than is offered by simple page-based HTML sites.

With this shift comes new programming models and frameworks. It also involves a shift in how we think about our application design. Standing up a simple HTML-based application is no longer good enough.

In this session, we'll discuss what the next generation of applications looks like, exploring such things as the mobile web and cloud computing. We'll also dig into some of the technologies and practices such as REST, OAuth, and JavaScript microframeworks that enable us to move forward.



Spring Data

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Craig Walls

By Craig Walls

This session starts with a high-level look at all that the Spring Data project has to offer. Then we'll dive deeper into a few select Spring Data modules, including Spring Data Neo4j, Spring Data MongoDB, Spring Data Redis, Spring Data JPA, and Spring Data JDBC Extensions

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in how data is stored. Although RDBMS has long been treated as a one-size-fits-all solution for data storage, a new breed of datastores has arrived to offer a best-fit solution. Key-value stores, column stores, document stores, graph databases, as well as the traditional relational database are options to consider.

With these new data storage options come new and different ways of interacting with data. Even though all of these data storage options offer Java APIs, they are widely different from each other and the learning curve can be quite steep. Even if you understand the concepts and benefits of each database type, there's still the huge barrier of understanding how to work with each database's individual API.

Spring Data is a project that makes it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data, offering a reasonably consistent programming model regardless of which type of database you choose. In addition to supporting the new "NoSQL" databases such as document and graph databases, Spring Data also greatly simplifies working with RDBMS-oriented datastores using JPA.



Building Web Applications with Spring MVC

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Craig Walls

By Craig Walls

In this session, we'll start with the basics of Spring MVC development, focusing on how to leverage the new annotation-driven model. With that foundation set, we'll continue by exploring the new features in Spring 3.0 and 3.1 to build RESTful web applications that can serve both human-facing content as well as resources that are consumed by machine clients.

From the very beginning, Spring has included Spring MVC, a web framework built around the Spring Framework. Originally based on a rich hierarchy of controller classes, Spring MVC served developers well, but began to look a little long in the tooth compared to other web frameworks.

Starting with Spring 2.5, Spring MVC took a major evolutionary step, breaking away from the rigid controller class hierarchy model to embrace a more flexible annotation-driven model. Often referred to as Spring @MVC, this new model has continued to improve with Spring 3.0 and Spring 3.1.



Securing Spring

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Craig Walls

By Craig Walls

In this session, I'll show you how to secure your Spring application with Spring Security 3.0. You'll see hot to declare both request-oriented and method-oriented security constraints. And you'll see how SpEL can make simple work of expressing complex security rules.

Although we may invite guests into our homes and give someone a ride in our car, we locks and alarms on our homes and our cars to keep uninvited and malicious visitors out. Similarly, we allow people to use the applications that we develop, but we probably want to control the access that they have.

Security is an important aspect of any application. And while we could program security rules into the web controllers and methods in our application, we'd find ourselves cluttering our business logic with repetitive security code. Security is a cross-cutting concern--begging to be handled with aspect-oriented techniques.

Spring Security is an authentication and access-control framework based on Spring that provides security aspects. With Spring Security, you can declare who is allowed to access your application and what they're allowed to see, keeping your application logic focused and uncluttered with security details.



Securing the Modern Web with OAuth

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Craig Walls

By Craig Walls

In this session, we'll look at OAuth, focusing on OAuth 2, from the perspective of an application that consumes an OAuth-secured API as well as see how to use OAuth to secure your own APIs.

Web security is nothing new. As users of the web, we're all accustomed to entering our usernames and fumbling to recall our passwords when trying to access private data on one of the many online services we use. But while traditionally web security could be described as a two-party process between a web application and a user, the modern web involves applications that seek to access other applications on behalf of their users. This presents some new challenges in keeping a user's sensitive data secure while still allowing a the third party application to access it.

OAuth is an open standard for authorization, supported by many online services, that allows one application to access a user's data in another application, all while giving the user control of what information is shared.



Managing Complexity (The Project Integrity Series)

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David Bock

By David Bock

How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a build process that mysteriously fails, a bunch of 'TODO' and 'FIXME' comments in the source, and problems that come and go because "it works on my machine"? Does your project have a little bit of 'folk wisdom' that isn't well-known, but is necessary to get things done? How easily could you recreate your development environment if you got a new machine today?

In this session we will talk about some tried and true favorites like Ant, Maven, Subversion, and Eclipse, cover tools like diff, patch, difftools, and diffj for teasing apart changesets, and talk about measuring and managing complexity with tools like cobertura, JavaNCSS, XRadar, CodeStriker, and Jupiter. We will cover each tool in enough depth for you to know what it does and how it can help you and your team, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and see how it would fit in your team's development processes.



Maintaining Source Code Quality (The Project Integrity Series)

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David Bock

By David Bock

How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a big ball of code you have to plod through to try to get anything done? Have you ever been the 'new guy' on a project where it seems like the code grew more like weeds and brambles than a well-tended garden? With a few good tools to help analyze the code, we can keep our project from turning into that big ball of mud, and we can salvage a project that is already headed down that path.

In this talk we will look at PMD, FindBugs, Macker, JDepend, and several other tools that can help us analyze source code and find problems we need to fix. We will cover each tool in enough depth for you to know what it does and how it can help you, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and see how it would fit in your personal development processes.



Metrics for steering your projects to success

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David Bock

By David Bock

There are a lot of things we can measure about our source code, but what about the "project as a whole" and its overall health? Are there ways of measuring the effectiveness of our processes? Are there things we can measure that would point to project automation wins? Is there a way to measure team 'morale'?

While we can gather a lot of metrics from automated source inspection tools, those can make us focus on the wrong "problems to solve"... There are a lot of personal, team, and project-level things we can measure and tune that can lead to big wins. Using advice from an obsessive-compulsive numbers collector, the Personal Software Process, Scrum, the Pomodoro Time Management Technique, and Personal Kanban, we will discuss ways of effectively measuring aspects of our team and our productivity, and actions we might take based on what we learn.



Surviving Middle Management

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David Bock

By David Bock

Most good developers eventually have the opportunity to be managers. Whether they call you the "project manager", "Technical Lead", "Lead Developer", or some other classic middle-management title, you become the 'goto' guy between management and developers. You're the guy who is expected to keep the project in-line, track a schedule, and occasionally answer the question "How's it going?", and perhaps still contribute at a technical level. So how do you do that?

So what do you do next? How do you plan what needs to be developed? How do you know if you are 'on schedule' or heading off-track? Using good ideas from a bunch of successful projects (but no methodology in particular), you will learn the basics of good project planning, execution, and tracking.

While this talk as management methodology agnostic, many of the ideas are tracable directly back to concepts from XP, SCRUM, and even RUP and CMMi. Whether you are following a management methodology or not, the ideas in this talk will be applicable to technical managers.



Enterprise Integration Agility

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Jeremy Deane

By Jeremy Deane

Today’s interconnected world requires that organizations rapidly deliver flexible-integrated solutions. The conventional approach is to integrate heterogeneous applications using web services but unfortunately that tends to tightly couple those applications. In this session we will explore several alternatives for achieving Enterprise Integration Agility.

Public Web APIs are increasing at an exponential rate resulting in an ever more connected web. This connected contagion is not just relegated to the domain of Web 2.0 but has infected the corporate world. In fact, companies are becoming more reliant on Software as a Service (SAAS) to provide key business functions.

Combating this contagion requires an approach that provides a type of insurance against constant change and lays the foundation for evergreen enterprise solutions. In this session we will explore three popular architectural styles including Message Oriented, Service Oriented, and Resource Oriented Architecture that are used to achieve Enterprise Integration Agility. In addition, I will provide examples of each architectural style using ActiveMQ/Camel, Mule ESB, and NetKernel.



RESTful Imaginarium

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Jeremy Deane

By Jeremy Deane

In this RESTful Imaginarium you will learn about about the core concepts of REST demonstrated through three leading RESTful web service frameworks: Jersey (JAX-RS), Spring MVC and NetKernel. During this daydream you will learn about the fallacies of URL parameters, the debate of PUT vs. POST and the power of HATEOAS.

RESTful web services have become the preferred approach to synchronously integrate heterogeneous systems. The REST Architectural Style’s success is due in large part to its simplicity and the fact that it is based based on a small set of widely accepted standards, such as HTTP. Furthermore REST requires far fewer development steps, toolkits and execution engines than conventional SOAP web services.

This session covers the core concepts of REST and then walks through how to design and implement RESTful web services using three leading RESTful web service frameworks, Jersey (JAX-RS), Spring MVC and NetKernel.



Resource-Oriented Concurrent Processing

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Jeremy Deane

By Jeremy Deane

Traditional concurrent development on the Java Platform requires in depth knowledge of threads, locks, and queues (oh, my!). Fortunately, new functional languages that run on the Java Platform, such as Scala, have made concurrent programming easier.

An alternate approach is to implement concurrent processes using a resource oriented computing (ROC) platform. At the heart of this ROC platform is a microkernel that allows processing to scale linearly as more CPUs are added. Consequently, developers are freed from the complexity of Java concurrency and functional programming.

In this session, I will provide an overview of resource-oriented concurrent programming using 1060 Research’s NetKernel. I will then present examples that compare and contrast this approach against concurrent programming using Java and Scala.



Introduction to Virtual Machines and Interpreters

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Douglas Hawkins

By Douglas Hawkins

Have you ever wondered what goes on inside the virtual machines and interpreters that we use every day?

In this session, you'll see some of the inner workings of Python, PHP, Java, and JavaScript and learn that at the lowest level these languages really are not as different as they may seem.

An overview of the basic parts of a virtual machine and interpreter that compares and contrasts the different approaches taken by different modern languages.



Virtual Machines and Interpreters II: Inside the Java Virtual Machine

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Douglas Hawkins

By Douglas Hawkins

In part II of VMs and Interpreters, you'll dive into the inner workings of the Java Virtual Machines. You'll learn how your Java code is translated from Java source code to byte code and ultimately machine code.

You'll also see tools for viewing Java byte code and measuring performance changes caused by VM optimizations.

This session will cover the... - Java class file format - Java byte code - JVM Compiler & Runtime Optimizations



Inside Android's Dalvik VM

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Douglas Hawkins

By Douglas Hawkins

Android is gaining popularity rapidly, but why does Android use its own implementation of Java?

In this presentation, we'll dig into the details behind Android's Dalvik VM. Along the way, you'll learn about Android' s service architecture, Dalvik's byte code format, and the surprising details of how Android installs, launches, and executes your applications.



Understanding Garbage Collection

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Douglas Hawkins

By Douglas Hawkins

Most of us don't want to go back to the days of malloc and free, but the garbage collector isn't always our friend.

In this presentation, you'll learn about the different garbage collection strategies used in JVMs, how to monitor garbage collection, analyze memory dumps, and why you might want to use one collection strategy instead of another.



Personal Agility with the Pomodoro Technique

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Daniel Hinojosa

By Daniel Hinojosa

Time is very precious and is often threatened by phone calls, emails, co-workers, bosses, and most of all, yourself. The Pomodoro Technique reigns in unfocused time and gives your work the urgency and the attention it needs, and it's done with a kitchen timer.

In this presentation we discuss how to set up, estimate time, log time, deal with interruptions, and integrate with Agile as a team. We discuss timer software and even some of the great health benefits of the Pomodoro Technique.



Making Java Bearable with Guava (2013 Edition)

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Daniel Hinojosa

By Daniel Hinojosa

This presentation covers the Guava library developed by Google (http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/). Guava provides collection extensions to the Java Collection API and, along with this, a cornucopia of time-saving utilities that bring Java as close as possible to some of the more functional and dynamic language competitors like Scala, Ruby, and Clojure.

This presentation focuses on the following topics: how to make Predicates and Functions; how to use new collection constructs that make life easier, including MultiMap, BiMaps, and MultiSets; how to set up and use Guava preconditions; and how to create truly immutable collections, and more. All of this is done with Java. All code is stored on github. Laptops are optional but bring them over if you want to play along.



Joda Time and a Brief History of the World

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Daniel Hinojosa

By Daniel Hinojosa

JodaTime is Java Date/Time and Calendering done right. There are many problems with the original Date/Time API that came prepackaged in the early Java days. There are even One of the obvious issues is that Calendar is mutable and can unintentionally be changed. Another issue is that constructing Calendars in Java involves setting certain fields at certain times during coding, but not always getting the expected result. Joda Time repairs those issues and offers a robust and immutable date, time, and duration API.

In Joda Time and a Brief History of the World, I provide a quick rundown of calendaring throughout the centuries, describe UTC, compare UTC to GMT, discuss how time is calculated, and then dive into Joda Time in every popular JVM language. The end result provides the audience with compelling proof that Joda Time should always be their Date Time API of choice.



Groovy Workshop

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Kenneth Kousen

By Kenneth Kousen

This half-day workshop will bring you up to speed on the specifics of the Groovy programming language. We'll touch on most of the major features of the language, from collections and closures to builders, AST transformations, and metaprogramming. Specific examples will cover topics from Groovy itself and will be supported by unit and integration tests and built using Gradle.

Featured topics will include: collections, closures, operator overloading, scripts and classes, unit and integration testing, AST transformations, parsing and building both XML and JSON, and working with SQL. If time is available, other projects from the Groovy ecosystem, like Gradle, Spock, and GPars, will be included.

A minimum comfort level with Java is assumed. Some exposure to Groovy would be helpful but not required.



Groovy Workshop

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Kenneth Kousen

By Kenneth Kousen

This half-day workshop will bring you up to speed on the specifics of the Groovy programming language. We'll touch on most of the major features of the language, from collections and closures to builders, AST transformations, and metaprogramming. Specific examples will cover topics from Groovy itself and will be supported by unit and integration tests and built using Gradle.

Featured topics will include: collections, closures, operator overloading, scripts and classes, unit and integration testing, AST transformations, parsing and building both XML and JSON, and working with SQL. If time is available, other projects from the Groovy ecosystem, like Gradle, Spock, and GPars, will be included.

A minimum comfort level with Java is assumed. Some exposure to Groovy would be helpful but not required.



Spock: Logical Testing for Enterprise Applications

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Kenneth Kousen

By Kenneth Kousen

The Spock framework brings simple, elegant testing to Java and Groovy projects. It integrates cleanly with JUnit, so Spock tests can be integrated as part of an existing test suite. Spock also includes an embedded mocking framework that can be used right away.

In this presentation, we'll look at several examples of Spock tests and review most of its capabilities, including mock objects and integration with Spring.



Grails Workshop

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Kenneth Kousen

By Kenneth Kousen

Build a Grails application from start to finish in this half-day workshop. We'll start with domain classes, apply constraints, add controllers and services, apply both unit and integration tests, and then add additional functionality through plugins.

This rapid introduction to Grails will take advantage of the newest features of Grails 2.0 using the interactive scripts and db console. In addition to building an application, existing samples will be reviewed as a source of good practices and plugins.

Some knowledge of Groovy is assumed but not required.



Grails Workshop

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Kenneth Kousen

By Kenneth Kousen

Build a Grails application from start to finish in this half-day workshop. We'll start with domain classes, apply constraints, add controllers and services, apply both unit and integration tests, and then add additional functionality through plugins.

This rapid introduction to Grails will take advantage of the newest features of Grails 2.0 using the interactive scripts and db console. In addition to building an application, existing samples will be reviewed as a source of good practices and plugins.

Some knowledge of Groovy is assumed but not required.



Practicing Continuous Delivery on the Cloud

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James Ward

By James Ward

This session will teach you best practices and patterns for doing Continuous Delivery / Continuous Deployment in Cloud environments. You will learn how to handle schema migrations, maintain dev/prod parity, manage configuration and scaling.

This session will use Heroku as an example platform but the patterns could be implemented anywhere.