Session Descriptions

Easing into Agile

How do you get started with an Agile development methodology? Everyone has been talking about eXtreme Programming for years, but how do you get it introduced to your team? Many times, you're not simply transitioning from from one methodology to another -- you're introducing a methodology for the first time. Adding structure to a previously unstructured endeavor. Adding a touch of discipline where programmers once roamed free.

Guerrilla Web Techniques

Frameworks? We don't need no stinkin' web frameworks. OK, so maybe that's overstating the case. Web frameworks do plenty of good things, but sometimes they can also be golden handcuffs. Too many web developers fall into the trap of thinking, "If it can't be done by my web framework, then it simply can't be done."

Holistic Testing

Mark Twain once said, "Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Do you feel the same way about Unit Testing? Are you actively testing your code, or are you just thinking about testing your code... some day... once you get some more free time...

Real World Web Services

In this talk, we'll survey the web services exposed by leading websites (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay) and discuss how they are driving the AJAX revolution. You'll see examples of RESTful, SOAP, and JSON web services, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Clean Up Your Code: 10 Java Coding Tricks, Techniques, and Philosophies

This session delivers 10 techniques for improving your code, whether you are freshly graduated or a grizzled veteran.

Real-world Agile Development

Lots of developers want to use Agile development technique but don't know where to start. This session discusses how to get started with Agility, the key benefits you can expect, and the pitfalls to avoid.

SOA: Next Wave of Enterprise Development or Return of the Son of CORBA?

Is Service Oriented Architecture the next wave of distributed computing or just the same old crap in a shiny new package? This session provides an overview of what most people agree is the definition of SOA. I talk about SOA, ESB, CORBA, your MOM, and a bunch of other acronyms.

Testing with Selenium

This session describes the use and workings of Selenium, the open source web user interface testing tool.

The Productive Programmer

This session shows you how to become a more productive programmer every day by using tools that you didn't know you already had.

Ajaxian Faces

JavaServer Faces is a perfect platform for implementing Web 2.0 interfaces with Ajax. This session explores how you can use these two potent technologies--JSF and Ajax--together to create applications that look and behave like desktop applications but run in the browser.

JSF: State of the Art

In 2005, JSF hit its stride, as evidenced from overwhelming support from both vendors and the open-source community. JSF 1.0 had plenty of holes, but open-source projects have arisen to address those needs. This session takes a look at three of those projects: Tomahawk (MyFaces component library) FaceletsSeam

JavaServer Faces: A Whirlwind Tour

In April 2005, annual growth rates for jobs in JavaServer Faces, Struts, and Ruby on Rails were all at about 0%. Today, Struts' growth rate still hovers around 0%, but JSF and Rails have taken off. At the end of 2007, both JSF and Rails were growing at a rate of between 400-500% annually (according to indeed.com).

JSF has passed the adoption tipping point, and is now the Java-based framework of choice, as is evidenced by its ecosystem. From vendors such as MyEclipse and RedHat to open source projects such as Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4JSF, JSF is where the action is.

Come see why JSF is so popular. In this code- and demo-intensive session, I'll show you the fundamentals of JSF.

Prerequisite: Some knowledge of Java-based web applications, such as Struts, is a plus, but is not required. If you have a significant experience with JSF, you probably already know most of what's covered in this session.

Killer Web UIs

User interfaces are usually the most turbulent aspect of an application during development. Constant tinkering with the UI means constant changes to your code, so as a UI developer, you want to minimize the scope and effects of those code changes.

Open-source Java provides two powerful software packages that help you manage UI complexity: Tiles and Sitemesh. Tiles composes webpages from discrete regions of your user interface known as tiles. A tile contains a JSP page for layout and one or more JSP pages for content. Sitemesh decorates webpages with decorators that can be associated with URL patterns. Once you set up your decorators, you can decorate pages that match a decorator's URL pattern.

Shale: Turbo-charge your JSF Apps

JavaServer Faces is a well designed user interface framework, but it lacks a number of features you might otherwise expect out of the box; for example, JSF does not explicitly provide support for client-side validation.

So, from the folks that brought you Struts, comes Shale, a collection of useful enhancements to JSF. A top-level Apache Software Foundation project, Shale adds some really cool features to vanilla JSF, including:

Web flow: script dialog flow Remote Method Calls: easily call JavaBean methods from JavaScript Tapestry-like views: code views in pure HTML Use Apache Commons Validator validators on the client or server, or both JSF testing framework: mocks for easy JSF testing

There's a lot of cool stuff in Shale that makes JSF a much more compelling proposition. Come see what it's all about.

Introduction to Java threads

The Java language included support for threads and concurrency from day 1, but writing correct multithreaded programs is not easy. This session will cover the how and why of using threads in Java.

Java Performance Myths

Performance myths about the Java platform abound, from the general "Java is slow", to the more specific "reflection is slow", "allocation is slow", "synchronization is slow", "garbage collection is slow", etc. Many of these myths have their root in fact (in JDK 1.0, everything was slow); today, not only are many of these statements not true, but Java performance has surpassed that of C in many areas, such as memory management.

Squashing bugs with FindBugs

Does your program have bugs, despite unit tests, integration tests, and code reviews? You bet. Are you using static analysis as part of your QA process? If not, you're probably missing out on some bugs that can be caught before they bite your customers.

Structuring concurrent applications in JDK 5.0

JDK 5.0 is a huge step forward in developing concurrent Java classes and applications, providing a rich set of high-level concurrency building blocks.

The Java Memory Model

What's the worst thing that can happen when you fail to synchronize in a concurrent Java program? Its probably worse than you think -- modern shared-memory processors can do some pretty weird things when left to their own devices.

Advanced Hibernate

Hibernate is easy to get started with, but can sometimes be hard to make efficient or secure. In fact, the default settings for Hibernate createapplications that will run slowly, cause unwanted round trips to the database, and may be more restrictive and/or permissive from a security standpointthan you would otherwise want.

Ajax Architecture

Ajax applications have unique architectural challenges and opportunities. This presentation will show you how to take advantage of the Ajax's strengths, and work around its quirks.

JavaScript for Java Programmers

This presentation covers JavaScript from the perspective of a Java programmer. We assume that you may be using an Ajax toolkit, but still need to be able to read, modify, and test the JavaScript code in your application. You will learn the common idioms of JavaScript by looking at working code from Prototype and Scriptaculous.

Spring AOP

Learn to use Spring AOP, aspect injection. and AspectJ integration

Spring Dependency Injection

Dependency Injection (DI) is the cornerstone of Spring. The core concept is quite simple, but (surprise!) actual practice can become complex. To take full advantage of Spring DI, you need to understand not only the basics on configuration, but also the container lifecycle model and the various hooks provided by the framework.

Spring Fundamentals

The Spring framework is one of the fastest growing open source frameworks. New job postings are gaining rapidly, and many customers are adopting Spring instead of heavier alternatives. In this session, we’ll introduce Spring. You’ll see how Spring can give you much of the power of EJB, without the complexity or pain.

Spring Security with ACEGI

Spring offers developers a simpler, more robust method for configuring applications. These benefits extend to security through the ACEGI framework. ACEGI makes the otherwise daunting task of securing your application logical and straightforward. More importantly, through its support for single sign-on provision through Yale's CAS system and its ability to provide instance-level authorization, Spring extends the common security model of most J2EE apps beyond what they are traditionally capable of.

Creating, Telling, and Tracking User Stories

The participants of this session will become agile customers and product owners, using personas to create stories for a sample product development.

Losing Battles and Winning Wars: Adopting Agile

Adopting agile is different for each company, but most companies will go through some amount of change during the adoption of agile.

Ready, Set, Agile?

As with many methodologies, moving agile into an organizations poses larger challenges. Before jumping in, it helps to ask a few questions before "racing toward agility". This session will provide 3 tactical steps that can help your adoption of agile.

“Show Me the Numbers” - Agile Planning Tools and Techniques

This session will focus on tools and techniques for tracking an agile project plan from creation to project completion.

Domain Driven Design with AOP and DI

Domain Driven Design (DDD) suggests dealing with complex software system using a domain model and preserving the model in implementation. Since domain model entities have rich behavior, so should their software implementation artifacts. A direct mapping between domain model and software artifacts create simple-to- understand, inexpensive-to-implement, and easy-to-evolve systems.

While the idea behind DDD isn't new and the value is easily understood, many implementations do not adhere to its principles. This disconnection may be due to many obstacles in implementing it. Combining Dependency Injection (DI) with a full-fledged aspect-oriented programming (AOP) system such as AspectJ help overcome many obstacles.

Enterprise AOP with AspectJ

Enterprise application development is a gold mine for applications of AOP. There are many crosscutting concerns found in a typical enterprise application, ranging from well-known security and transaction management to application- and technology-specific concerns. Using AOP leads to implementations that are easy to understand and easy to change.

Performance Monitoring in J2EE Applications

J2EE has become the main new platform for enterprise application deployment. Good performance is an important business requirement. Supporting this requirement needs application profiling during the development phases and performance monitoring after application deployment. Come to this session to understand challenges and choices in monitoring J2EE applications.

The State of AOP

A lot is happening in the field of Aspect-oriented programming (AOP). AspectJ and AspectWerkz, the two leading AOP implementations, have merged, bringing in their respective strengths. The merged version, AspectJ 5, adds many new features aimed at simplifying writing and deploying aspects. The new features include an annotation-based and XML-based syntax to define aspects, support for new Java 5 concepts, and load-time weaving. The tools support for AOP continues to improve, as well. Further, the most popular IOC framework, Spring, enables integrating aspects written in AspectJ. There is also serious discussion and preliminary work going on to support AOP right into the VM itself. All in all, there is a lot to learn about the changes in the exciting field of AOP. This session is designed to help you get up to date with all these changes.

Java5: The Language, The Libraries, The VM

Java5 introduced a whole slew of new features, including annotations (JSR 175), new language features (the enhanced for loop, generics, static imports, and more), new library support (java.lang.instrument, among others), and some interesting enhancements to the virtual machine itself.

Effective Enterprise Java: State Management

Managing state--both transient state (like your shopping cart) and your durable state (like your order placements, your inventory management forms, and so on)--is tricky in an enteprrise application. In this talk, we'll examine some of the trickiness, both high-level and low-.

Pragmatic XML Services

There's a lot of talk about web services, and most of it falls into one of two categories: lots of low-level talk about vendor-specific tools and extensions, or lots of high-level talk that never shows you a line of code. XML services aren't that hard, and in this talk, we'll see how, why and when to do one.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to JVM Scripting

Ever wished you could just put parts of your program in end-users' hands and let them build the infinite little changes they want? Ever thought about how you might make your application more robust by writing less code, not more? Embed a scripting engine into your application--complete with the safeguards necessary to ensure that users can't do anything they shouldn't be able to--and release yourself from the Principle of Perpetual Enslavement.

Get Groovier with Grails

Inspired by the Ruby on Rails project, Grails brings the ease of web development and "convention over configuration" to the Java platform. We will learn how to create web applications using Grails, how to integrate it with Hibernate, and how to Ajax it, all using the built in features of Grails. This section assumes that you are familiar with Groovy or you have attended the “Groovy for Java Programmers” session. The session will be example driven with live coding where we will build a web application from scratch.

Groovy for Java Programmers

Object-oriented scripting languages, or agile dynamic languages, as some like to call those, are gaining programmers' attention. Groovy bring this excitement to the Java platform with its ability to generate byte code. You can use Groovy instead of Java for some parts of your application. By learning it, you can switch between the languages where you consider fit.

Open Source Tools for Agile Development

As a Java developer, you have taken the time to learn the basics of the language and relevant parts of its rich API. However, you need more than that to develop serious industrial strength applications. In this presentation, the speaker will introduce you to a number of open source tools which you can use to improve your application quality and your development process.

Practices of an Agile Developer

You have worked on software projects with varying degree of success. What were the reasons for the success of your last project? What were the reasons for those that failed? A number of issues contribute to project success - some non-technical in nature. In this presentation the speaker will share with you practices in a number of areas including coding, developer attitude, debugging, and feedback. The discussions are based on the book with the same title as the talk.

Working with Rules Engines

Rule based programming allows us to develop applications using declarative rules. These can simplify development in applications where such rules based knowledge is used for decision making.

Extreme Agility with jMatter

The jMatter framework is a modern implementation of the Naked Objects Architectural Pattern using Swing, Hibernate, and deployed with Java WebStart. This open-source framework produces 2-tier workgroup apps (Swing front-ends that talk to rdbms back-ends) intended to be used in a LAN or VPN environment.

Developers using a Naked Objects style framework focus on building a behaviourally complete domain model and leave everything else (UI, persistence, etc) to the framework. By focusing on the domain model only, jMatter claims to offer 10x productivity for building Swing workgroup apps.

Come discover jMatter in a hands-on presentation where we'll be developing a live application and hold discussions about this new empowering style of producing business applications.

Hibernate by Example

This talk covers the core of the Hibernate Object/Relational Mapping framework by example; that is: in a hands-on manner.

XML Data Binding with JiBX

JiBX is an open source XML data binding API for Java. JiBX is younger than most other APIs in this space (Castor XML, BEA XMLBeans, JAXB). JiBX's philosophy on data binding is that: [a] databinding should be fast, and [b] databinding frameworks should allow for the divergence and evolution of your codebase from its xml representation. JiBX excels on both counts and consequently is a practical tool for the purpose of data binding. In this session, Eitan will be covering all aspects of Dennis Sosnoski's JiBX framework.

Effective Teams

Most conferences will try to tell you that the secret to good software development lies with a process, or a technology, or an architecture. Here's a dirty little secret. You can build working software with an outdated two tier archtiecture, a waterfall process and COBOL. How? By building a great team. These techniques were used to build one of the most unique and complex up and coming Ruby on Rails sites.

Test First!

Test-first development should be a cornerstone techniques for all developers. Whether you use test-first development for all of the code you write (as suggested by Agile experts such as Bob Martin), or you just apply it to certain problems, every developer should know how. In this session, you'll see us develop a simple application using TDD, and you'll also learn why the technique is so effective.

Three Technologies to Watch

The state of the art is progressing rapidly, and dynamic languages are driving the revolution. Find out about these topics that will be central to programming. We'll discuss continuation servers, metaprogramming frameworks and functional langauges.

What's New in Spring 2

In this session, we'll review the new features of Spring 2.0. If you've been using Spring 1.x, you'll want to hear about the improvements.

Where Agile meets Argyle: New processes in established companies

Agile programming is a collection of core principles and techniques that allow software developers to create lighter, more responsive applications, and to have fun doing it. Many established organizations are either openly or sub-conciously hostile to many of the principles of Agile development.

Ruby for Java Programmers

Ruby recently enjoyed its tenth birthday. Instead of cake and candles, the community celebrated by releasing a wave of new libraries and frameworks that make Ruby programming even easier. This talk features some of the best of these, as we explore Ruby.

Ruby on Rails

The Ruby on Rails framework has exploded onto the scene over the last few months. Propelled by some genuine benefits, and fueled by a whole lot of controversy, Rails seems here to stay. So, is it a Java killer? (No.) Is it a great way to develop certain classes of web application? (Yes.) Does it really deliver the 10-fold increase in developer productivity that some have claimed? (It depends...)

Testing your Rails Application

The Ruby on Rails framework has unit and functional testing baked right in. In this talk we'll see how easy it is to get started with testing in Rails, and we'll explore jut how deep the testing support goes.

Using Ajax with Ruby on Rails

Ajax is becoming a requirement for new applications: it creates richer user experiences and more dynamic applications. However, doing Ajax by hand is difficult and error prone. The good news is that if you use Rails, you don't have to do Ajax the hard way.