Lone Star Software Symposium: Austin

Jun. 29 - Jul. 01, 2007



Event Details

Location

Marriott Austin Airport Hotel
4415 South IH-35
Austin, TX 78744
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NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in Austin Jun. 29 - Jul. 01, 2007. You may view the event details here ».

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

Featured Sessions

By Brian Goetz

The Java programming language has turned a generation of applications programmers into concurrent programmers through its direct support of multithreading. However, the Java concurrency primitives are just that: primitive. From them you can build many concurrency utilities, but doing so takes great care as concurrent programming poses many traps for the unwary.

By Brian Sletten

Ever since we started doing relational joins, we've looked for ways to tie data together. The web has given us no end of new data sources to integrate but it seems like the best we can come up with is locating Starbucks on Google Maps. The problem with browser-based mashups is that they don't survive the session, we have no way of referring to the results in future queries and ultimately we don't maintain ownership or control of the process.

We want control of our data and our mashup results. We want ever more ways to view, explore and requery them in multi-faceted ways. Do you know what your data integration strategy is for the next few years? Are you sure? You owe it to yourself to come find out.

By Brian Sletten

As developers, we sometimes get to make choices about the technologies we use, sometimes not. We base these decisions on personal experiences, recommendations from others and a general sense of where the industry is going.

Web Services have been all the rage for several years now. We have been told time and again that we should be building systems around them; as an industry, we've never been more confused. Perhaps it is time to Give it a REST.

By Brian Sletten

Imagine the simplicity of REST married to the power of Unix pipes with the benefits of a loosely-coupled, logically-layered architecture. If that is hard to imagine, it may because the architectures available to you today are convoluted accretions of mismatched technologies, languages, abstractions and data models.

NetKernel is a disruptive technology that changes the game. It has been quietly gaining mind share in the past several years; people who are exposed to it don't want to go back to the tired and blue conventions of J2EE and .NET. Not only does it make building the kinds of systems you are building today easier, it does it more efficiently, with less code and a far more scalable runway to allow you to take advantage of the emerging multi-core, multi-CPU hardware that is coming our way.

Come see how this open source / commercial product can change the way you think about building software.

By Bruce Tate

The productivity of Ruby on Rails cannot be denied, but the explosion of Ruby on Rails left many developers, with hard commitments to Java deployment platforms, out in the cold. The continued evolution of JRuby can change that. JRuby is a Ruby implementation on the Java virtual machine. And yes, it runs Rails. In this session, you will learn Rails as it was meant to be learned, within the context of building a live site, from scratch.

By David Geary

In this session, see how you can get Ruby On Rails-like productivity on the Java side of the house with this compelling combination of technologies.

By David Geary

Developing highly interactive web applications, for the most part requires knowledge of a wide array of technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest, JSP, JSF, etc.

With the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Google turns that notion of development on its head. Instead, you implement Ajax applications by writing almost entirely in Java. You use an AWT-like API, which the Google compiler compiles to JavaScript that runs on the client.

By Jason Hunter

The Java 6 (Mustang) release should make your life easier, for a change. It doesn't alter the core language like Java 5 did. It doesn't pack in so many sub-JSRs that you'll be overwhelmed by the amount you have to learn. Instead Java 6 adds several handy things that honestly should have been added before. Among the improvements we'll cover in this fast-paced class:

* A new Console class
* A real Compiler API
* A GIF writer
* Pluggable Locale data
* Access to disk partition size data
* Array reallocation
* Low-level floating point functions
* Reflective access to parameter names
* Access to network interface details
* Pluggable annotation processing
* Improved class file format
* Streaming XML with StAX
* A new Scripting interface

By Jeff Brown

Grails represents technology that offers great flexibility and power without the complexity introduced by other Java web application frameworks. Custom tag libraries are a snap. GSP Templates provide a simple mechanism for reusing UI elements. Sitemesh is integrated to help provide a consistent presentation across the entire application. Grails provides simple mechanisms for leveraging the power of Ajax.

By Neal Ford

This talk avoids SOA hype and gets to the meat of the matter: how do you implement a Service-Oriented Architecture, what are the technological pitfalls, how do you test it, and what traps should you avoid. No marketecture: just implementation details.

By Neal Ford

No one writes perfect code: even the best developers fall into bad habits and traps. This talk illustrates blind spots and helps you write better code.

By Neal Ford

What does code + methodology have to do with one another? Everything! Agile projects focus on delivering working code, and tools exist to allow you to verify some quality metrics for your code. This session is a survey of tools and metrics that allow you to determine the quality of your code and strategies to "wire it" into your agile project.

By Pete Behrens

Business leaders and stakeholders require accountability and accuracy in our software release projections and yet, as an industry, we have failed. However, many of these same leaders are not convinced that agile is any more than an excuse to avoid projections at all. While it is true that agility provides the framework to support change, it doesn't mean you can't provide accurate projections. In fact, a well-executed agile process actually provides more accurate results with less time investment than traditional methods. This session will demonstrate these agile project management techniques to manage 6-12 month projects.

This session focuses on the release level, followed by Part II which focuses on the sprint level.

By Pete Behrens

Are you overrunning your architectural runway? Many companies struggle with their ability to retain their architectural integrity when they transition to agile methods. Emergent Architecture (the other EA) can lead to cowboy coding and ad-hoc design decisions that emerge into a poor overall architecture.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been a tried and true approach to address these architectural needs throughout the organization, yet this approach often leads to a heavy-handed, document-rich, control-oriented culture lacking ability to keep pace with today's dynamic business environment.

Attempting to integrate an agile process with an Enterprise Architecture approach can be like mixing oil and water - they just don't work together. This session evaluates alternatives in balancing Agility and EA and proposes an architectural approach to build an Agile Enterprise Architecture into your organization.

By Ramnivas Laddad

Domain-Driven Design (DDD) recommends dealing with complex software system using a domain model and preserving the model through implementation. A direct mapping between domain model and software artifacts creates simple to understand, inexpensive to implement, and easy to evolve systems. The DDD approach suggests ways to distill domain knowledge into a model and offers patterns to design and implement that model.

By Ramnivas Laddad

This session (part 1 of the two-part session) shows the core concepts in the Spring Framework -- the most popular lightweight container that recently crossed 1 million downloads.

By Ryan Breidenbach

In 2006, Spring 2.0 was released and Spring became ubiquitous in the enterprise Java space. So if you haven't taken a peek at Spring yet, what are you waiting for?!? If the answer is "This session," you have come to the right place. This session will familiarize you with the benefits Spring provides and why they have made the framework so successful. In addition, we will focus on the efforts that went into Spring 2.0 to make these benefits much more developer friendly. By the end of this session, you should have a grasp of how Spring 2.0 simplifies the utilization of Spring's core features such as bean wiring, AOP, and the simplification of using enterprise Java. If your head is not spinning too much.

By Ryan Breidenbach

2006 appeared to be the year that Maven achieved the momentum it needed to overtake Ant as the build tool of choice for Java developers. A lot of that has to do with the vastly improved Maven 2. But it lot of it has to do with the simplicity, organization and power that Maven brings to projects. The session will bring developers new to Maven with everything it has to offer. This includes creating your very first Maven project, learning the significance of the POM file, how to let Maven and its repositories manage your dependencies, and how to let Maven report of the health of your own projects. And for the Ant users in the audience, you will get to see a side-by-side comparison of the two build tools' build philosophies.

By Scott Davis

This is the year of the dynamic scripting language. Ruby (and Rails) has won the hearts and minds of many independent software developers. JavaScript is experiencing a renaissance thanks to the wild success of AJAX and websites like Google Maps. And Groovy (JSR-241) brings the same level of excitement and "scripting goodness" to the Java platform.


By Scott Davis

I'm attracted to Groovy because of its spirit of inclusiveness. Because it extends my platform of choice, not replaces it -- include a single JAR in your classpath and you are Groovy-enabled. Because it offers full bidirectional integration with Java. Because it offers a nearly flat learning curve for experienced Java developers. Come see how you can use Groovy to augment your existing Java codebase.

By Scott Davis

Scott Davis is the Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com. The website, in addition to being, umm, about Groovy, is implemented in Grails. This talk shows you how to get started with Grails, but also talks about the experience of using it in a live, production web site.

By Scott Davis

In this talk, we'll survey the web services exposed by leading websites (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay) and discuss how they can be easily mocked up for testing purposes and to aid offline development. You'll see working examples of RESTful, SOAP, and JSON web services, as well as strategies for unit and functional testing your asynchronous, service-oriented architecture.

By Scott Leberknight

Hibernate seems simple on the surface yet when you go beyond very simple use cases it can become much more complex. Intended for beginner to intermediate-level Hibernate developers, come see how to put Hibernate to effective use on your projects.

By Scott Leberknight

This session covers advanced Hibernate topics beyond simple object persistence including session management, object locking, detachment and versioning, lazy loading performance issues and query tuning, advanced O/R mapping support, legacy database considerations, and the Hibernate cache architecture.

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.

By Ted Neward

Bugs? We all know your code has no bugs, but someday, you're going to find yourself tracking down a bug in somebody else's code, and that's when it's going to be helpful to have some basic ideas about bug-tracking in your toolbox. Learn to make use of the wealth of tools that the Java Standard Platform makes available to you--tools that your IDE may not know exist, tools that you can make use of even within a production environment.

By Ted Neward

Permissions, policy, SecurityExceptions, oh my! The Java platform is a rich and powerful platform, complete with a rich and powerful security mechanism, but sometimes understanding it and how it works can be daunting and intimidating, and leave developers with the basic impression that it's mysterious and dark and incomprehensible. Nothing could be further from the truth, and in this presentation, we'll take a pragmatic, code-first look at the Java security platform, including Permissions, the SecurityManager and its successor, AccessController, the Policy class and policy file syntax, JAAS, and more.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Annotation is an interesting feature in Java.
However, like any features, there are good uses and bad uses.
When should you use Annotation? This presentation will answer that question for you.

By Venkat Subramaniam

In this presentation we will introduce OSGi and
discuss how it can help modularize and version
your enterprise Java applications.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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.