By Neal Ford

This session demonstrates that "Agility" and "SOA" complement each other quite well. Just because SOA is buzz-word compliant doesn't mean that you should throw good practices out the window. This session demonstrates how you can apply the principles of agility to building highly complex distributed enterprises.

Managers and ivory tower architects seem to think that all the rules that apply to "normal" software don't apply to SOA. Ironically, they matter even more. Agility and SOA are closely aligned because SOA is about building complex distributed systems and Agility is about effectively building complex software. This session unveils the pillars of successful SOA and how to achieve them in a testable, iterative fashion. It discussing testing strategies, how to make your architecture more robust and maintainable, and how to design an evolutionary architecture.

By Neal Ford

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

In The Productive Programmer, I identify 4 principles of productivity: this talk goes into great detail on 2 of those principles. It defines the principles and describes their use, but the primary focus of this talk is on real-world examples of how you can use these principles to make yourself a more productive programmer. Acceleration covers ways to speed up development by taking command of your computer. This includes keyboard shortcuts (including ways to learn them and make better use of them) in both IntelliJ and Eclipse. Automation refers to making the computer do more work for you. This talk includes tons of examples, all culled from real-world projects. Note: This is a companion talk to my other talk, Productive Programmer: Canonicality and Focus, but each talk is completely independent of the other -- they are not "Part 1" and "Part 2".

By Neal Ford

Getting work done in modern office environments is a daunting task. This session tackles 2 of the things that drag down developer productivity: lack of focus and creeping repetition.

In The Productive Programmer, I identify 4 principles of productivity: this talk goes into great detail on 2 of those principles. This session defines the principles of Canonicality and Focus, and describes their use. But the primary focus of this talk is on real-world examples of how you can use these principles to make yourself a more productive programmer. Canonicality (the DRY principle from The Pragmatic Programmer) discourages repeating artifacts in projects. This talk shows effective ways to avoid this repetition. I show examples of creating DRY documentation, O/R mapping, database schemas, and development environments. Focus describes how you can utilize your environment (both physical and computer) to greatly enhance your productivity. This talk includes tons of examples, all culled from real-world projects. Note: This is a companion talk to my other talk, Productive Programmer: Acceleration and Automation, but each talk is completely independent of the other -- they are not "Part 1" and "Part 2".

By Neal Ford

It turns out that ancient philosophers knew a lot about software -- did you know that Plato defined object-oriented programming? This keynote applies old lessons to new problems and old problems to new lessons. It describes why SOA is so hard, and why people in your company make bone-headed decisions. What other keynote includes Rube Goldberg, Aristotle, Dave Thomas, and Chindia?

Plato, Aristotle, Occam, Rube Goldberg, Dave Thomas, and Demeter...with pictures!

By Neal Ford

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

This session demonstrates how stringent TDD improves the structure of your code. I discuss TDD as a technique for vetting consumer calls, using mock objects to understand complex interactions between collaborators, and some discussions of improved code metrics yielded by TDD. This session shows that TDD is much more than testing: it fundamentally makes your code better at multiple levels.

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.

Agile projects focus on delivering code. The responsibility for the quality of that code lies with developers. Yet most developers have a poor sense of how to gauge the quality of code, both during development and forensically. This talk lives on the boundary between what is important in agile projects and ways to verify code quality. It is both a survey of tools and metrics and strategies for proactively applying these techniques to ongoing projects. I talk about the Hawthorne effect, analysis tools (both byte and source code), useful metrics, tools for generating metrics, and how to analyze raw data into actionable tasks.

Session Topics:

• The Hawthorne Effect
• How Agility and Metrics Feed Each Other
• Analysis Tools
• FindBugs
• PMD/CPD
• Testing Metrics
• Cyclomatic Complexity
• Chidamber and Kemerer Object-oriented Metrics
• JDepend
• Code Change Risk Analyzer and Predictor for Java
• Panopticode
• Tools

By Neal Ford

The Gang of Four book should have been entitled "Palliatives for Statically Typed Languages", because the recipes it provides are cumbersome solutions to the problems it poses. Using powerful languages makes the solutions in the GoF book look hopelessly complicated. This session shows how to solve the same problems concisely, elegantly, and with far fewer lines of code using the facilities of dynamic languages.

The Gang of Four book was actually 2 books: a nomenclature describing common software problems and a recipe book for solutions. The vocabulary they defined is still useful. The recipes are a disaster! Dynamic languages (like Groovy and Ruby) have powerful meta-programming facilities far beyond statically typed languages. It turns out that many of the structural design patterns in the Gang of Four book and beyond are much easier to solve with meta-programming. This session compares and contrasts the "traditional" approach of design patterns with a more nuanced meta-programming approach. Using language features creates cleaner abstractions with fewer lines of code and little or no additional structure. This session shows one of the many reasons that dynamic languages are such a hot topic.

By Neal Ford

You can read books about Agile projects, but you must consult real-world experience to really understand the dynamics of agile project management. This session discusses agile management topics including estimation, project tracking, and useful metrics (and how to obtain them). And just a little about Mingle, the agile project tracking tool from ThoughtWorks.

OK, sure, you can read the XP Explained book. Now what? Agile project management in the real world requires understanding of not just the practices but why they work. This talk delves into several topics relevant to agile project management, including estimation, project tracking, accurate project metrics (and the practices that make them possible). This talk is designed to describe some of the nuances required to handle real agile projects, along with a demonstration of some of the artifacts ThoughtWorks uses to track projects (the most elaborate spreadsheet you've ever seen!). And, towards the end, I show how our experience has culminated into Mingle, the agile project tracking tool from ThoughtWorks with skinnable religion.

By Neal Ford

This session describes JRuby, the 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. It covers the basics of programming with JRuby and examples of how to integrate it into existing Java projects.

Like hamburger & fries and turkey & dressing, JRuby allows you to harness the awesome power of Ruby in your Java projects. This session describes the origins, capabilities, and limitations of JRuby, the 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. This session also demonstrates some areas where it makes sense to mixin Ruby and Java code: Rails on Java, testing, and dynamic programming. JRuby is a powerful implementation of Polyglot Programming, and this session shows you how to leverage this cutting-edge concept.

Session Topics:

• JRuby's origins
• Calling Java from Ruby
• Calling Ruby from Java
• Limitations and pitfalls
• Example usage
• Rails on Java
• Testing
• Dynamic programming
• The future

By Neal Ford

Ruby is the revenge of the Smalltalkers. Not since Smalltalk has a language had such powerful meta-programming facilities. While this may seem like a minor feature, it turns out that surgical meta-programming allows solutions to problems that are clearer, more concise, more maintainable, and take orders of magnitudes fewer lines of code.

This session shows one of the reasons that JRuby is the most powerful mainstream language today: meta-programming. It shows tons of meta-programming techniques in Ruby, including open classes, the shadow meta-class, defining methods, method_ & const_missing, dynamically adding and removing mixins, and more. And each of these comes with an example that actually makes sense!

Session Topics

• Modules
• Structs
• Freezing
• Messages and Dynamic Invocation
• The Shadow Meta-class
• Code as Objects
• Delegation
• Open Classes
• Aspects
• Missing!
• Const
• Method
• Reflection
• Mixology

By Ted Neward

Wondering why your enterprise Java app just... sucks? Trying to figure out why you can't get more than 10 concurrent users online at the same time? Looking for ways to try and spot the slowdowns and ways to fix them?

In this talk, we'll look at the various things that can occur in an enterprise Java app (from the smallest web site to the largest multi-resource environment) to make your Java apps perform and scale less well than they should, and how you can work to correct them. We'll examine a variety of broad concepts to apply in architecture and design, and examine what factors make an enterprise application slow, then use a variety of tools to figure out how to remedy them.

By Ted Neward

Ever since its 1.1 release, the Java Virtual Machine steadily becomes a more and more "hackable" (configurable, pluggable, customizable, choose your own adjective here) platform for Java developers, yet few, if any, Java developers take advantage of it. Time to take the kid gloves off, crack open the platform, and see what's there. Time to play.

In this presentation, we'll examine several of the "hackable" customization points inside the JVM: the boot classpath, allowing us to add or modify existing JDK classes without violating the license agreement; the JNI Invocation API, allowing us to create custom Java launchers to establish an environment for the JVM that corresponds to exactly the way we want it; or even replace core Java classes with our own versions. Innocents beware--we're a long way from "Hello, Java". (Attendees should have some familiarity with C/C++ code and native build practices to get the most out of this talk.)

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.

Learn to use jdb, jconsole, jps, jstat, and other tools to identify and squash software defects that just won't reveal themselves during development. Then, just in case those tools aren't enough for you, we'll look at how to write your own, special-purpose tools using the same technology backplane.

By Ted Neward

Crashes? Outages? Slow response? We all know that it's never your code that causes these things, but for some reason those pesky system administrators still insist on paging you at 4AM to come in and fix those problems, anyway. For some reason, they just keep expecting you to support this thing, even after QA said it was OK!

In this presentation, we'll talk about some of the reasons why monitoring in a production application is so important, and why it's not just a system administrator concern. Next, we'll talk about some simple monitoring facilities that don't require any new APIs or new libraries, yet still deliver some useful monitoring capabilities to developers, sysadmins and management. Next, we'll look at using JMX tools to keep an eye on what's going on inside of the JVM itself and/or your applications server, then how to use JMX to create your own points of monitoring interest. Finally, we'll look at how system administrators can build their own monitoring tools by using languages like Groovy and/or JRuby as the ultimate JMX client. And, for the really hard-core, we'll even take a look at how to use tools like JVMTI and/or java.lang.instrument to write custom monitoring agents.

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.

For a beginning to intermediate Java audience.

By Ted Neward

Scala is a new programming language incorporating the most important concepts of object-oriented and functional languages and running on top of the Java Virtual Machine as standard "dot-class" files.

Sporting the usual object-oriented concepts as classes and inheritance, Scala also offers a number of powerful functional features, such as algebraic data types, immutable objects by default, pattern matching, closures, anonymous functions and currying, and more.

Combined with some deep support for XML generation and consumption, Scala offers Java programmers an opportunity to write powerful programs with concise syntax for a new decade of Java programming.

By Brian Sletten

There is a shift going on in the Enterprise. While still used and useful, the promises of the SOAP/WSDL/UDDI Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) stack have failed to live up to their promise. A new vision of linked information is enveloping online and Enterprise users. The REST architectural style is squarely behind this thinking as a way of achieving low-cost, flexible integration, increased data security, greater scalability and long-term migration strategies.

If you have dismissed REST as a toy or are unfamiliar with it, you owe it to yourself to see what is so interesting about this way of doing things.

There is tremendous interest in REpresentational State Transfer (REST) as an architectural style for building scalable, flexible, information-driven architectures in the Enterprise. The success of the Web has caught our attention in the face of increased complexity and many failures with more traditional Web Services technologies. The problem is that it is difficult to sell a way to do things. Managers do not want to feel like they are innovating in the middleware space. They want to understand why they should deviate from the blue prints laid down by the industry leaders. They want to understand when they should use REST, when they should use SOAP and when they might fallback to regular old Java-based messaging. They want to make business-based technology decisions that lay a path to forward progress rather than paying for technological flux.

This talk will introduce REST and walk through why it is so important and makes such a difference. We will talk about REST API design, security, long-lived systems, content-negotiation, contract enforcement, when REST might not make sense, etc.

REST and the Web Architecture are the basis for many exciting things happening on the Web and within our organizations. You owe it to yourself to make sure you really "get it".

This talk should be accessible to everyone but is probably intermediate level.

By Brian Sletten

If you have started to take a look at REST as way of exposing web services or managing information spaces, you may be frustrated by the support offered by legacy containers. There is no direct support for REST concepts in the J2EE specs (yet). XML-based configurations are so 1990's. Come learn about Restlets, a little API that has caught the attention of many in the RESTafarian community.

The Restlet API was created by a guy who wanted object-level support for RESTful concepts, but didn't want to make the move to an advanced resource-oriented environment like NetKernel. He wanted his REST and conventional environments too. He also wanted a path to more modern containers that aren't tied to a blocking I/O model like the Servlet spec is.

This talk will include a brief review of REST and its primary concepts and will then provide an introduction to the Restlet API and how it supports these ideas. It will then focus on standing up a REST-oriented infrastructure using the Restlet API and a variety of other open source tools to support a publish/find/bind infrastructure without touching SOAP/WSDL/ or UDDI.

This talk will not try to convince you about using REST. If you aren't familiar with the concepts or want convincing, please come to the "REST" talk first.

Prerequisite: REST (unless you are very comfortable with REST)

By Brian Sletten

How well do you understand the dynamics of your applications? In our systems, we detect when simple things happen. Customers log in, people buy things, a stock is sold at a particular price, inventory shifts locations... all of these events mean little things, but what about the larger picture? Complex events are particular patterns of simpler events that suggest something deeper is happening. Do you know how you'd discover these bigger picture occurrences? Come hear how the Esper open source software represents a new class of complex event processing (CEP) frameworks that can be added to even high volume, high transaction systems.

Trying to write software to track event occurrence is difficult to do correctly and almost impossible to do efficiently. The problem is that the higher volume and performance our systems get, the harder it becomes and the more important it is to highlight interesting or unexpected activity that isn't represented simply by a log entry.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Event Stream Processing (ESP) systems are emerging as a new strategy for processing and detecting complex sequences of more rudimentary events that could have bigger implications to your production systems. While commercial software is starting to add this behavior, Esper represents one of the most accessible and widely-used frameworks for adding CEP/ESP capabilities to Java applications.

By Brian Sletten

You're a good Java programmer. You understand the JDK libraries and how to use them. The problem is that many fundamental APIs don't take the bigger performance picture in mind. Garbage collection can end up killing your app if you aren't careful. Concurrency problems and contention can keep your well-intentioned software from leveraging modern hardware architecture that support multi-core and multi-cpu systems.

Who knew that simply using the standard library code the way it was designed was opening you up for performance problems in your apps?

Don't worry, Javolution has your back.

Javolution is a small (300K) API designed to bring many of the benefits of the Real-Time Java Specification (RTJS) to J2SE, J2ME, GCJ and CLDC through deliberate design decisions.

It includes re-implementations of the java.util, java.lang, java.text, java.io and java.xml to demonstrate time-deterministic behavior. It also includes a framework for testing its own performance, supporting parallel computing, communicating with C/C++ applications and a real-time object to XML marshalling framework.

Come see how you can get some of the time-determinism and concurrency benefits in either your client or server side applications. This is a fairly deep talk and is largely a decomposition of an API that changes the runtime characteristics of the VM's runtime performance with only the tools offered by the language and the VM.

By Jeff Brown

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

Dynamic languages provide a lot of power and flexibility compared to statically typed languages. Groovy brings that power and flexibility to the Java platform in a way that is totally compatible with all of your existing Java code, tools and infrastructure. This session covers all of the fundamentals of Groovy and gives developers a whole lot of practical information they need to get started with the language.

By Jeff Brown

Dynamic languages bring a lot of interesting elements to the table for teams interested in doing Test Driven Development (TDD). Groovy lends itself very well to TDD and this session demonstrates many features of the language and its libraries that help teams build more testable systems and build better tests.

The value of Test Driven Development (TDD) has become widely accepted. The practice has extended beyond just XP teams. Good TDD practices yield high quality software and help teams maintain confidence in their software as complexity grows. The dynamic nature of Groovy makes TDD easy and fun. Groovy may be used to unit test not only Groovy code but other code as well. Testing Java code with Groovy is a snap. Learn to use the power of Groovy to test your systems.

By Jeff Brown

Metaprogramming is a key component in building truly dynamic and flexible applications with Groovy. Groovy's metaprogramming capabilities bring great new possibilities to the table that would be very difficult or just plain impossible to write with Java alone. This session will demystify a lot of the magic that seems to be going on inside of a Groovy application.

When Java developers are first introduced to Groovy one of the first things they notice is how much easier things are in Groovy compared to Java. Boilerplate code typically generated by your IDE all melts away to nothing in a Groovy bean. Creating XML is a snap, not a tangled mess. File I/O is a breeze. Those developer productivity gains are an important part of the story. However, in addition to making easy the things you are used to doing the hard way Groovy brings whole new capabilities to the party that Java developers don't even think about because you can't do those things with Java. Many of those capabilities are made possible because of the powerful metaprogramming capabilities of the language. Learning the metaprogramming capabilities of the language takes developers the rest of the way to fully taking advantage of the power of Groovy. The metaprogramming capabilities offered by the language provide everything that an application development team needs to build systems that are far more capable than their all Java counterparts.

Prerequisite: A Thorough Introduction To Groovy

By Jeff Brown

Grails is a full stack MVC framework for building web applications for the Java platform. Grails makes web application development both fun and easy. This session covers all of the fundamentals of building web applications with Grails.

Businesses need rich web applications and developers want to be able to build those applications without the pain that usually comes along with doing so. Grails addresses these needs very well. Grails demolishes many of the pain points that Java developers have almost (not quite) become numb to after years of suffering. This session covers all of the fundamentals:

• Introduction To Grails
• Domain Objects
• Controllers
• GSPs
• Custom TagLibs
• GORM

By Jeff Brown

Grails makes web application development both fun and easy. This session dives beyond the basics to cover advanced details of Grails that bring the really exciting features to your applications.

Getting started building web applications for the Java platform is easy. Following that through to rich interactive applications that solve the business needs is more tricky. Grails goes the whole way to address pain points not only for simple applications but of real enterprise applications with real demands. This session steps through many of the advanced features of Grails that help get your applications through that last 20% that teams often struggle with.

Prerequisite: Grails - Agile Web 2.0 The Easy Way

By Venkat Subramaniam

Java has been around for well over a decade now. It started out with the goal of being simple. Over the years, its picked up quite a bit of features and along comes complexity. In this presentation we will take a look at some tricky features of Java, those that can trip you over, and also look at some ways to improve your Java code.

Java features Set of tricks Tips to improve your Java code

By Venkat Subramaniam

In this presentation we will take a look at Google's dependency injection framework, discuss its features, capabilities, strengths, and weakness. We will then discuss where it stands in comparison to Spring.

What's Guice? Features of Guice Using Guice Comparison to Spring

By Venkat Subramaniam

How do you ensure your applications meet the expectations of your key customers? In this session we will explore using the FIT tool and Behavior Driven Design tools to do exactly this.

Unit Testing helps you, the programmer, verify your application meets and continues to meet your expectations. But how do you ensure that your application meets and continues to meet the real expectations, those of your domain experts and key customers? We will take a look at two distinct approaches for customer acceptance testing. We will take a look at using FIT for testing behavior and at Behavior Driven Design tools and techniques. Both these approaches can helps us create what is called executable documentation and to stay sane in the world of changing requirements and evolutionary design.

By Venkat Subramaniam

DSL or Domain Specific Languages focus on a domain or problem at hand. They're expressive, but their restricted scope keeps them simple and small from the user point of view. However, designing them is not easy. In this presentation we will explore the features of Groovy and show how they can be used to create DSLs.

What's DSL? Characteristics of DSLs Types of DSLs Designing DSLs Groovy features that enable DSLs Examples of DSLs in Groovy Creating DSLs in Groovy

By Venkat Subramaniam

In this presentation we will take a look at what BDD is and look at tools to create them in Java and Groovy.

What's BDD? Benefits of BDD Tools for BDD Creating BDD in Java Creating BDD in Groovy

By Venkat Subramaniam

We all have seen our share of bad code. We certainly have come across some good code as well. What are the characteristics of good code? How can we identify those? What practices can promote us to write and maintain more of those good quality code. This presentation will focus on this topic that has a major impact on our ability to be agile and succeed.

Characteristics of quality code Metrics to measure quality Ways to identify and build quality

By Venkat Subramaniam

Groovy's dynamic capabilities makes it an attractive language for Meta Programming. There are several facilities to intercept method calls to do AOP kind of operations. You can also inject methods dynamically. You can also easily perform method synthesis as well. In this presentation we will take a look at techniques that make Groovy pretty Hip for MOP.

Exploring MOP Understanding Groovy's method handling mechanism Accessing methods and properties dynamically Method interception Method injection Method synthesis Method delegation Applying MOP to real world projects

By Venkat Subramaniam

A good design is critical for success with agile development. That does not mean a big up-front design. The design has to be evolutionary. However, the design you evolve must be extensible and maintainable. After all, you can't be agile if your design sucks.

In this presentation, we will address what evolutionary design is, and will delve into principles and practices that can help realize an effective evolutionary design.

By Venkat Subramaniam

The first item in the Agile Manifesto reads that we must prefer "people and interaction over process and tools." Given a choice between average people with superior tools and superior people with average tools, you are likely to achieve greater success with the latter. However, it is important to be continuous and not be episodic?so you want to get continuous feedback about the state, health, and quality of your code and application. Tools can help us a great deal to realize this and make us productive.

In this presentation we will take a look at tools (and their relevance and value) that can help smoothly execute your projects.

By David Bock

Internationalization and Localization in Java is easy, right? Everyone knows you just store your strings in some resource bundles, set the locale, wave your hands a little bit, and your application is good-to-go. Right? Maybe not... Java provides some great utilities to get started, but leaves you needing more when it comes to things like screen layout, cultural sensitivities, semantic differences in translation, use of color and iconography, and other issues.

This presenter spent 9 years developing applications for the U.S. State Department that have been deployed in dozens of countries and languages. While some aspects of internationalization and localization are trivial, there are plenty of issues that are not. If you have an application that you expect to localize into other locales, there will be information here that is invaluable to you. This talk is entertaining for the war-stories alone! No other no-fluff presentation will feature pictures of the presenter waiting in line behind a herd of sheep to cross a pontoon bridge into Bosnia.

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? How many times have you been the ?new guy? on an established project where it seems like the code grew more like weeds and brambles than a well-tended garden? With a few good structural guidelines and several 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.

This talk will talk about everything from build processes, teamwork, and project structure through versioning, release plans, upgrde strategies, package dependencies, and more. Using real-world scenarios from two projects with 12-15 people working together over a 5-year time span, this presentation will offer advice based on multiple successful deliveries of real software.

By David Bock

Maven is a build tool that does a lot, demos well, and leaves the build maintainers managing what seems like unbridled complexity. It doesn't have to be that way - Maven is driven by some strong 'build process methodology', and that complexity can become manageable by wrapping your head around it. Furthermore, you can migrate to Maven 'piecemeal', by mapping your existing ant build to the Maven Lifecycle and calling your existing Ant tasks - you can decide to sip the Maven kool-aid.

Ideally, a build tool should be so simple and approachable that it fades into the project background and allows anyone to maintain it. Unfortunately, Maven's power comes at the expense of this ideal - Maven's philosophy is more like "the build process is so important that the people maintaining it should be steeped in the ways of Maven". This talk will give you the exposure you need without elevating The Maven Way to a religion.

In this talk we will cover:

Internals of the Maven POM Integrating Maven with Eclipse The Maven Build Lifecycle, and hooking your own goals into it Calling Ant tasks from Maven Extending your build with existing Maven Plugins Maven subprojects and the SuperPOM Writing your own Maven Plugins

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.

By Keith Donald

Spring has a number of interesting modules for web application development, including Spring Web MVC, Spring Web Flow, Spring JavaScript, and Spring Faces. This session will provide an overview of these modules and show how they relate to one another. By the end of this session, you'll understand how Spring simplifies the development and deployment of rich web applications. You'll also gain a glimpse into the roadmap for Spring Web 3.0.

Spring Web MVC is a popular web framework, and the base platform for powering Spring-based web applications.
Version 2.5 introduces significant new features that simplify the core MVC programming model, including support for annotated @Controllers.

Also building on the Spring MVC platform are a number of interesting extensions. Spring Web Flow 2 adds significant new features for implementing flows within a Spring MVC-based app. Spring Faces, a new module, provides groundbreaking support for JavaServerFaces in a familiar Spring MVC environment. And last but not last least, Spring Javascript, a new module, integrates leading UI toolkits such as Dojo into a Spring MVC environment.

Come to this session to get an update on the state of Spring Web, see how to put these technologies into practice, and learn what's coming in Spring Web 3.0.

By Keith Donald

Spring JavaScript is a JavaScript abstraction framework that allows you to progressively enhance a web page with behavior. The framework consists of a public JavaScript API along with an implementation that builds on the Dojo Toolkit. Spring.js aims to simplify the use of Dojo for common enterprise scenarios while retaining its full-power for advanced use cases. Come to this session to learn to use Spring.js and Dojo to create compelling user interfaces.

This session will walk through using Spring.js to add a number of rich web capabilities to your applications, including: - Decorating standard HTML links and forms with Ajax events - Linking in partial updates to a page - Adding effects such as progress indicators, blinds, and popups - Performing client-side validation

In addition, you'll see how Spring.js can help with: - Gracefully degrading when JavaScript is not available - Meeting requirements for accessibility - Applying progressive enhancement techniques

By Keith Donald

Web Flow is a Spring Web MVC extension that allows you to define Controllers using a higher-order domain-specific-language. This language is designed to model user interactions that require several requests into the server to complete, or may be invoked from different contexts. This session dives deep into the features of the Web Flow definition language, and illustrates how to use it to create sophisticated controller modules.

In this session you will learn: - How to implement reusable controller modules as self-contained bundles that can be refreshed without container restart - How to solve the back button problem and duplicate submit problem - How to handle Ajax events and render partial responses - How to simply data access concerns and prevent lazy loading exceptions by using flow-managed persistence - How to secure flows, including their startup - How to test your controller logic - General best-practices for designing and implementing flows - Techniques for achieving flow reuse, including use of flow definition inheritance - Guidelines for deploying flows alongside Spring Web MVC multi-action @Controllers - How to implement common user interaction patterns such as master detail, wizard, and tabbed UI.

By Keith Donald

Spring's approach to integrating JavaServerFaces technology is novel and innovative; an approach that lets you maximize your investment in Spring while still adhere to standard JSF idioms. In this session, Keith will go "behind the scenes" and explore the framework architecture underpinning Spring's JSF integration. Attendees will gain valuable framework design and architectural insight.

A deep-dive design session into how Spring and JSF integrate, and how the integration has evolved over the years.

By David Geary

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.

This session is taught by a member of the JSF Expert Group for JSF 1.0 and 2.0., and co-author of the best-selling book on JSF: Core JavaServer Faces. David will take you through a whirlwind introduction to JSF including what JSF is, how it was developed, and how you can best take advantage of the technology. Here is a list of topics:

Components, managed beans, value expressions, and static navigation i18n, CSS, and actions The Faces Context and Faces messages The JSF Event Model Using JavaScript with JSF

This introduction to JSF also contains 5 live-code demos, where David will develop a simple, but robust application during the course of the session.

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.

By David Geary

Facelets is a combination of Tiles and Tapestry, and it's the hottest JSF-related open source project on the planet. It's popularity is well deserved, and in fact, much of what is in Facelets today will make its way into the JSF 2.0 spec due out in 2008. So not only can you come to this session and see some really cool demos that you can put to use in the real world, but you'll also be learning JSF 2.0 before it's even been defined! How's that for a ROI?

This session is 90 minutes of nothing-but-Facelets, so we're going to cover a good bit of ground. You'll see all of the basics, such as templating, error handling and debugging, and some of the more advanced aspects, such as creating your own components and tag libraries.

Prerequisite: Some knowledge of JSF is essential. If you're familiar with a templating framework, such as Velocity or Tiles, that's a plus, but not required.

By David Geary

Have you ever stopped to think that you need to learn two frameworks to develop a non-trivial, database-backed, web application? Struts and iBatis; JSF and Hibernate; Tapestry and EJB3.0. Two frameworks. And then you have to learn to use them together. Why do we have to learn two frameworks just to retrieve "Hello World" from a database and show it in a view. Isn't that crazy?

Now you can use one framework, and use one component model. One. Isn't that nice?

Seam, a framework built on JSF and EJB3.0, unifies the JSF and EJB component models. Seam is a steam roller, quickly gathering market share among JSF newbies and longtime believers alike. Come see what it's all about.

This session is an introduction to Seam. If you're already using Seam, then you might want to see what else is on the schedule during this talk, because we're going to cover the basics, such as validation and data models. But if you know a little about JSF and you're curious about Seam, this talk is for you.

Prerequisite: Some knowledge of JSF is required. If you don't know what a managed bean is, for instance, then attend JSF Whirlwind before this session.

By David Geary

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

In this, the first of a two-part session on the GWT, you will learn about the framework and its fundamental capabilities, such as: rapid development with project and application generators; the GWT widget hierarchy; remote procedure calls; the GWT's history mechanism, including its integration with the Back button and bookmarks; and integrating JavaScript frameworks, such as Script.aculo.us, with your GWT applications.

By David Geary

In the second part of this talk, you will learn how to extend the GWT by implementing custom widgets, including a scrolling viewport and a drag and drop framework. After discussing custom widgets, you will see how to integrate database access into your GWT applications, and how to deploy your GWT applications to external servers.

You will also learn how to integrate GWT widgets into legacy applications built with web application frameworks such as Struts, JavaServer Faces, or Tapestry. The GWT is one of the most powerful Ajax frameworks on the planet, and one of the few that let you easily implement desktop-like applications that run in a browser, and because of that, it has gained incredible mindshare in a short period of time. Come to these two sessions on the GWT and see what all the buzz is all about.

By John Heintz

This presentation introduces and demonstrates Liquibase: a new Java tool to support automating database refactoring and deployment.

Agile Database tools and techniques have been evolving to catch up with the existing support for source code. Many projects struggle to keep external databases (and DBAs) in sync with rapidly changing and tested source development.

Support for Agile Database development needs to include tools support for the following areas: * Database Refactorings * Schema Version Control * IDE Support * Scripted tools (Ant, Maven, command line)

Liquibase is an LGPL-licensed Java tool for tracking, managing, and applying database changes. Liquibase enables the database schema, reference data, and data change scripts to be managed as effectively as source code on Agile projects: * the CI build doesn't break from forgotten SQL script runs * developers don't have to coordinate check-ins/outs with each other * embedded or external databases can be managed with the same scripts * databases can be automatically upgrades, or SQL generated for review

This presentation introduces these topics and demonstrates Liquibase with an example application showing Spring Framework, Ant, and continuous build integrations.

By John Heintz

Java's Annotations provide a way to add data to program elements. Annotations are used to configure containers, describe persistence configuration, set security roles, and are defined by nearly every recent JSR standard. This presentation explains the processing options available for consuming Annotations and demonstrates the techniques with live code demonstrations.

The presentation: * introduces Annotations and how to create custom Annotations, * surveys the techniques that can add implementation effects from Annotations (code generation, bytecode transformation, runtime reflection), * demonstrates adding behavioral effect to an example with APT, Reflection, Javassist, and AspectJ, * wraps up with best practices for using and defining Annotations.

No prior experience is necessary, and attendees will learn how to define and to provide behavior for custom Annotations in their own systems.

By Ramnivas Laddad

Developing enterprise applications ain't easy. You not only have to worry about constantly evolving business logic, but also need to address infrastructure concerns ranging from transaction management and security to manageability and integration with diverse external applications. Spring, the most popular lightweight enterprise application framework, comes to the rescue by simplifying the common needs of enterprise applications. This session (part 1 of 2) presents the core concepts of the Spring Framework.

In this session we discuss the motivations behind the Spring way of creating enterprise applications. We cover the core ideas such as POJOs, dependency injection, container configuration, aspect-oriented programming, and portable abstraction layers. We also show how all of these concepts work together using a simple application. By the end of this session, you will have a clear idea of what Spring is and what it can do for you.

By Ramnivas Laddad

This session (part 2 of 2) will cover advanced concepts in the Spring framework. While the core concepts in the first session will get you started with Spring, the advanced concepts in this session will help you be more effective at developing Spring-based applications.

In this session, we will cover several advanced concepts including how to extend Spring to meet your special requirements. We will also cover effective ways to test your Spring applications. You will learn how to use Spring effectively across a wide range of technical areas such as web applications, persistence, messaging, manageability, batch processing, and security. By the end of this session, you will be ready to start using Spring - or if you have already started using Spring, you should be able to do so more effectively.

By Ramnivas Laddad

Spring Security (formerly known as 'Acegi') enables self-contained, consistent, and extensible solutions for securing your applications. Version 2.0 provides major enhancements including a domain-specific XML namespace, convention-based defaulting, and annotation support. This provides a significantly simpler experience for developers while still supporting the same degree of flexibility.

Spring Security's interceptor-based approach is non-invasive even when extended to accommodate domain-specific requirements. The two main security processes (authentication and authorization) are decoupled in order to provide flexibility across a wide variety of providers and strategies. This presentation will include an overview of Spring Security's pluggable authentication process and how it accommodates a wide range of possibilities including Database, LDAP, Single Sign On, and even an in-memory option for development and testing. We will then proceed to cover authorization where you will see its consistent approach for securing web requests and method invocations. Throughout the session, we will walk through a sample application that demonstrates Spring Security's core features.

By Ramnivas Laddad

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a proven paradigm for enforcing broad organizational policies. In this session, we will explore the definition and enforcement of software architecture policies to help keep a code base clean. We will examine several reusable examples you can apply within your own organization to catch architectural violations.

Architectural policies originate from a variety of sources: consensus among developer community about generally accepted programming idioms and best practices, your own ideas on what a good architecture looks like, requirements of the underlying framework, core architecture of the specific project, and specific design choices made by the team on a project. In short, policies represent accumulated knowledge to create better quality software. If there is no enforcement, the errors may go undetected during development and show up only in the deployed system. Often if one error is allowed to go undetected, the associate code often ends up mistaken as design pattern.

In this session, we look at ways to implement architectural enforcement policies along with many reusable examples. Attendees will learn to define policies, and ensure architectural violations are detected immediately upon their introduction into a code base leading to a solid implementation that is faithful to its design.

By Ramnivas Laddad

Specifying metadata using annotations has gained huge popularity since its introduction in Java 5. However, the story on consuming annotations isn't as clear. Reading and processing annotation is still a complex process often requiring you to understand byte-code manipulation tools and their low-level API. As a result, most developers shy away from using custom annotations, limiting their usages of annotations only those prescribed by frameworks. The result is missed opportunities for programming simplification. In this session, we explore how AOP can make it a simple task to consume annotation in a powerful manner.

This session explores many opportunities to consume annotations using Spring AOP and AspectJ. The examples discussed in this session cover a wide range from auditing, monitoring to security, transaction management, and policy enforcement. It also examines best practices in using annotations to avoid pre-processor like use of them.

By Scott Leberknight

This session introduces the Hibernate Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) framework, showing the basics of persisting Java objects to relational databases. No prior knowledge of Hibernate or ORM is assumed.

Persistence is a key element of most applications, whether web or desktop. Relational databases are the defacto standard for enterprise data storage and object-oriented (OO) programming, for example in Java, is the predominant technique to build applications today. Relational databases and OO, however, are completely different paradigms. Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) seeks to bridge this gap to allow easy persistence of objects to relational databases. Hibernate is a leading ORM framework providing persistence of Java objects to relational databases. This session introduces Hibernate and covers ORM alternatives available today; getting started with Hibernate; mapping objects to database structures; interacting with Hibernate APIs to find and persist objects; transactions; and finally, architectural considerations and suggestions for integrating Hibernate into applications.

By Scott Leberknight

Hibernate is a very powerful object/relational mapping framework. With the vast amount of power also comes the responsibility to choose which features of Hibernate to use and how to use them, as well as things to avoid. We'll look at some real world Hibernate tips and tricks in this session.

Hibernate is one of the most popular and successful object/relational frameworks available today. In this session we'll look at some real world tips for using Hibernate effectively. Topics we'll cover include: logging and debugging Hibernate-generated SQL; using annotation mappings, ImprovedNamingStrategy, and MappedSuperclass; understanding lazy-loading and the n+1 problem; basics of performance tuning Hibernate applications; using inheritance in your domain model; managing sessions; effective use of the second-level cache; validation using Hibernate Validator; and when not to use Hibernate in an application.

By Scott Leberknight

Hibernate is one of the pre-eminent object/relational mapping technologies, but the Hibernate Search project adds full-text search capabilities to an already extremely capable tool to allow you to Google your domain objects.

Hibernate Search provides the means to add full-text search to your domain objects by leveraging Apache Lucene under the covers. You control which domain objects are searchable, how they should be indexed, and Hibernate Search takes care of the dirty work for you. It handles the object/index impedance mismatch and the task of managing the search indices. You can also execute full-text searches and retrieve actual domain objects transparently. We'll also discuss various architecture alternatives including using Hibernate Search in both clustered and non-clustered environments.

Prerequisite: A basic understanding of Hibernate.

By Alex Miller

This presentation will look at the many new additions in Java 5 and 6 for concurrent programming such as Atomics, Locks, synchronizers, and concurrent collections. In particular, we will be looking at common concurrency idioms around locking and access to shared state, thread coordination, thread pooling, and work execution. Each of these topics will be presented with code examples demonstrating common idioms and the usage of these new concurrency primitives.

Some topics we will cover in detail include: * Thread coordination with Thread.join(), CountdownLatch, and CyclicBarrier * Access to shared state with synchronized, volatile, Atomics, Lock, ReadWriteLock * Using Locks and Conditions to achieve more flexibility than synchronized and wait/notify * Concurrent collections like ConcurrentHashMap, CopyOnWriteArrayList, and ConcurrentSkipListMap * Work execution with Queues, ThreadPools, and Executors

By Alex Miller

Did you know that Java 5 and 6 added 8 new interfaces and 16 new collection implementations to the JDK, more than doubling the size of the collection API? Collections 201 gives you an update on all of the interfaces, implementations, and utilities and gives you guidance on picking the perfect collection. In particular, Java 5 introduced a new major collection type Queue and a whole new java.util.concurrent package with data structures optimized for concurrent use.

This presentation will give an overview of the major collection types, with a particular focus on additions in Java 5 and 6 with interfaces like Queue, Deque, NavigableSet as well as new implementations like ConcurrentHashMap, ConcurrentSkipListSet/Map, and the family of Queue implementations like LinkedBlockingQueue.

In addition to covering the interfaces and implementations, we will also look at the backing data structures, iterator types, concurrency and performance concerns, and more.

By Alex Miller

Terracotta is an open-source Java clustering technology. It creates a virtual, durable Java heap that is shared across a cluster of Java Virtual Machines. This is done by dynamically instrumenting bytecode at load time to intercept calls to read and write fields, and also to enter and exit monitor locks. Information about these calls is then transmitted to the Terracotta Server (which can also be clustered) and out to other nodes in the cluster as needed. The advantage of this approach is that many Java programs can be clustered without code changes by providing just external Terracotta configuration. Many performance optimizations are performed to minimize communication and locking costs. Terracotta is commonly used for session sharing in web applications, distributed caching, and distributed workflow processing.

This presentation will give an overview of the Terracotta technology, how it's implemented, and common use cases that can benefit from the technology. We will look at some code and cluster some Java applications during the presentation.

Some topics that will be covered include: * Terracotta architecture * Heap replication without serialization * Distributed synchronized and wait/notify, cluster locking * Use cases * Example programs

By Jared Richardson

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

We'll talk about discovering what went wrong (and what went right!) with your last project, solving code integration issues, resolving lingering quality problems, establishing automated test suites, reining in soaring project requirements and more.

By Jared Richardson

An overview of the Agile software approach from the book Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects.

This book provides a comprehensive look at the software life cycle and can be used to retool the way you, and your team, builds software. While we can't cover the entire book in nintey minutes, we can look how a holistic view of the software life cycle helps you improve your projects and makes your life easier.

By Jared Richardson

A great team builds great software, but how do you build a great team?

Let's move beyond getting lucky and look at some key practices that will help you build your scattered cats into a well-oiled machine.

By Jared Richardson

An agile team is first and foremost "a team". When that gets lost in the rush to get a product out the door, the people suffer as well as the products. It's bad for the company, but even worse for the team members. We'll learn how to defuse some of the more common problems you'll run into on dysfunctional teams.

Restoring trust and providing visibility is hard once you've been burned. It's not always possible, but we'll examine concrete steps you can take to start rebuilding your trust and your team.

By Jared Richardson

There are a number of great techniques you can use across technologies and projects. Come hear some of my favorite ways to move "beyond" and contribute a few of your own. We'll discuss topics ranging from glue languages to ditching your IDE to building your brain.

In this session we'll discuss:
- Move beyond tools - Glue languages - Inbox Zero - Learning to learn - Not being a cog anymore - Macro Object Orientation - Clean code - Looking smarter than you are - Open source tool stacks - Tighter feedback loops - Scripted deployments - Scripting databases - Virutalization And more...

By Jared Richardson

Technical debt has long been recognized in technical circles for years, but convincing your manager to budget time to repay "technical debt" has always been problematic. Let's couch the term technical debt concept in language more familiar to our managers: credit card debt.

Like credit card debt, technical debt accumulates slowly over time, and usually takes just as long to pay off. The interest slowly builds up until you're no longer able to pay off the principle: your entire development cycle is devoted to just "paying the interest". We'll examine common types of technical debt and strategies to effectively communicating the problems, and their solutions, to your managers.

By Eitan Suez

Over the last few years, I have taken a different approach to building domain-driven software applications.

Implementing various application concerns (such as form construction, validation, ui navigation, search, authorization) generically (i.e. in such a fashion that the implementation is decoupled from, or agnostic of the application domain) has enabled me to reuse the implementations across projects. In this talk, Eitan will be sharing his experiences with this approach, and the results it has yielded. We will explore how to go about implementing various concerns generically, discussing algorithms, and reviewing implementations and their merits.