Lone Star Software Symposium: Austin
July 20 - 22, 2012 - Austin, TX
View the event details here ».
Video Preview
Programming with HTML 5
Friday 1:15 PM - Venkat Subramaniam
Developing a rich user interface for web applications is both exciting and challenging. HTML 5 has closed the gaps and once again brought new vibe into programming the web tier. Come to this session to learn how you can make use of HTML 5 to create stellar applications.
Watch Video Preview >NoSQL Smackdown 2012
Friday 1:15 PM - Tim Berglund
Alternative databases continue to establish their role in the technology stack of the future—and for many, the technology stack of the present. Making mature engineering decisions about when to adopt new products is not easy, and requires that we learn about them both from an abstract perspective and from a very concrete one as well. If you are going to recommend a NoSQL database for a new project, you're going to have to look at code.
Watch Video Preview >Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST I
Friday 1:15 PM - Brian Sletten
The first in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Watch Video Preview >Turtles, Architecture, & Agility
Friday 1:15 PM - Kirk Knoernschild
A little old lady once challenged a well-known scientist’s explanation on the structure of the universe, countering that the world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise. The scientist rebutted the little old lady’s challenge with one of his own by asking what the tortoise was standing on. The little old lady’s sly reply was that it’s, “turtles all the way down.” So too is software architecture “turtles all the way down”.
Watch Video Preview >Spock: Logical Testing for Enterprise Applications
Friday 1:15 PM - Kenneth Kousen
The Spock framework brings simple, elegant testing to Java and Groovy projects. It integrates cleanly with JUnit, so Spock tests can be integrated as part of an existing test suite. Spock also includes an embedded mocking framework that can be used right away.
Watch Video Preview >Rediscovering JavaScript
Friday 3:15 PM - Venkat Subramaniam
JavaScript is one of those very powerful languages that is often misunderstood and underutilized. It's quite popular, yet there's so much more we can do with it.
Watch Video Preview >Hadoop
Friday 3:15 PM - Tim Berglund
When you want to measure fractions of a millimeter, you get a micrometer. When you want to measure centimeters, you get a ruler. When you want to measure kilometers, you might use a laser beam. The abstract task is the same in all cases, but the tools differ significantly based on the size of the measurement.
Likewise, there are some computations that can be done quickly on data structures that fit into memory. Some can't fit into memory, but will fit on the direct-attached disk of a single computer. But when you've got many terabytes or even petabytes of data, you need tooling adapted to the scale of the task. Enter Hadoop.
Watch Video Preview >Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST II
Friday 3:15 PM - Brian Sletten
The second in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Watch Video Preview >OSGi Demystified
Friday 3:15 PM - Kirk Knoernschild
OSGi was once heralded as a contender for most important technology of the decade. Today, most developers have heard of OSGi, but few are using it to develop their enterprise software applications.Is OSGi failing? Who is using it? And what exactly are its benefits?
Watch Video Preview >Groovy Workshop
Friday 3:15 PM - Kenneth Kousen
This half-day workshop will bring you up to speed on the specifics of the Groovy programming language. We'll touch on most of the major features of the language, from collections and closures to builders, AST transformations, and metaprogramming. Specific examples will cover topics from Groovy itself and will be supported by unit and integration tests and built using Gradle.
Watch Video Preview >Automated testing tools and techniques for JavaScript
Friday 5:00 PM - Venkat Subramaniam
Programmers often complain that it is hard to automate unit and acceptance tests for JavaScript. Testability is a design issue and with some discipline and careful design we can realize good automated tests.
Watch Video Preview >Connected Data with Neo4j
Friday 5:00 PM - Tim Berglund
Neo4j is an open-source, enterprise-class database with a conventional feature set and a very unconventional data model. Like the databases we're already used to, it offers support for Java, ACID transactions, and a feature-rich query language. But before you get too comfortable, you have to wrap your mind around its most important feature: Neo4j is a graph database, built precisely to store graphs efficiently and traverse them more performantly than relational, document, or key/value databases ever could.
Watch Video Preview >Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST III
Friday 5:00 PM - Brian Sletten
The third in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Watch Video Preview >Modular Java Architecture - TODAY!
Friday 5:00 PM - Kirk Knoernschild
Modularity is coming to the Java platform! Java 8 will introduce the Jigsaw module system. OSGi is here today. Don’t wait to start designing modular software. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need a framework or a new runtime to start building modular software applications. You can start today. Learn how!
Watch Video Preview >Resource-Oriented Architectures : RDF/SPARQL
Saturday 9:00 AM - Brian Sletten
The fourth of a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Watch Video Preview >Scaling Agility
Saturday 9:00 AM - Kirk Knoernschild
We know agile methods are proven on small teams, but really...almost any process works with a team of one. As the team scales, however, the challenges mount. In this session, we focus on proven practices that help large software development teams in excess of 100 developers maintain agility. We also explore how to scale agile across the enterprise.
Watch Video Preview >Gradle Jumpstart (Bring a Laptop)
Saturday 9:00 AM - Tim Berglund
Gradle is a compelling new build tool that incorporates the lessons learned from a decade of Ant and Maven. More than just a compromise between declarative and imperative build formats, or between convention and configuration, Gradle is a sophisticated software development platform that simple builds easy and complex, highly automated continuous software delivery pipelines possible to build. Using its extensible APIs and expressive DSL, you're equipped to build your next build.
Watch Video Preview >Understanding Hibernate through Grails
Saturday 9:00 AM - Kenneth Kousen
The Grails Object Relational Mapping (GORM) API is an elegant domain specific language on top of Hibernate. To really understand how it works, you need to understand how Hibernate sees the world. This workshop will explore the behavior of GORM, from following object state transitions to managing the session to fetching lazy associations and more.
Watch Video Preview >Lightweight Web Apps with Ratpack
Saturday 11:00 AM - Tim Berglund
Ratpack is a hyper-lightweight, Groovy-based web framework for developing and deploying simple apps in a hurry. Like its high-achieving cousin Gaelyk, it provides Groovy developers with a way to create web apps without days of iteration zero setup time.
Watch Video Preview >Resource-Oriented Architectures : RDFa
Saturday 11:00 AM - Brian Sletten
The fifth in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Watch Video Preview >Scala for the Intrigued
Saturday 11:00 AM - Venkat Subramaniam
Scala is a statically typed, fully OO, hybrid functional language that provides highly expressive syntax on the JVM. It is great for pattern matching, concurrency, and simply writing concise code for everyday tasks. If you're a Java programmer intrigued by this language and are interested in exploring further, this section is for you.
Watch Video Preview >Complexity Theory and Software Development
Saturday 1:30 PM - Tim Berglund
Some systems are too large to be understood entirely by any one human mind. They are composed of a diverse array of individual components capable of interacting with each other and adapting to a changing environment. As systems, they produce behavior that differs in kind from the behavior of their components. Complexity Theory is an emerging discipline that seeks to describe such phenomena previously encountered in biology, sociology, economics, and other disciplines.
Watch Video Preview >Effective Java Reloaded
Saturday 1:30 PM - Matt Stine
Even with the recent explosion in alternative languages for the JVM, the vast majority of us are still writing code in "Java the language" in order to put bread on the table. Proper craftsmanship demands that we write the best Java code that we can possibly write. Fortunately we have a guide in Joshua Bloch's Effective Java.
Watch Video Preview >Effective Spring
Saturday 1:30 PM - Craig Walls
After almost a decade and several significant releases, Spring has gone a long way from challenging the then-current Java standards to becoming the de facto enterprise standard itself. Although the Spring programming model continues to evolve, it still maintains backward compatibility with many of its earlier features and paradigms. Consequently, there's often more than one way to do anything in Spring. How do you know which way is the right way?
Watch Video Preview >Visualizing Data on the Web
Saturday 1:30 PM - Brian Sletten
We are far from the early days of ugly HTML. We have sophisticated visualization tools available to us now to help our users consume complex data in attractive and informative ways.
Come hear how you can adopt these visualization systems (calling them libraries is inappropriate) today.
Watch Video Preview >Developing Next-Generation Applications
Saturday 3:15 PM - Craig Walls
For a long while, we've built applications pretty much the same way. Regardless of the frameworks (or even languages and platforms) employed, we've packaged up our web application, deployed it to a server somewhere, and asked our users to point their web browser at it.
But now we're seeing a shift in not only how applications are deployed, but also in how they're consumed. The cost and hassle of setting up dedicated servers is driving more applications into the cloud. Meanwhile, our users are on-the-go more than ever, consuming applications from their mobile devices more often than a traditional desktop browser. And even the desktop user is expecting a more interactive experience than is offered by simple page-based HTML sites.
With this shift comes new programming models and frameworks. It also involves a shift in how we think about our application design. Standing up a simple HTML-based application is no longer good enough.
Watch Video Preview >Decision Making in Software Teams
Saturday 3:15 PM - Tim Berglund
Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.
Watch Video Preview >HTML5 For Developers
Saturday 3:15 PM - Nathaniel Schutta
Wonder what all the fuss is about HTML5? This session will show you how to leverage HTML5 in the applications you are building today. We'll start with a gentle overview describing just what HTML5 is all about and then we'll delve into the details. We'll look at the new elements HTML5 brings to the table, why canvas isn't just something you find in the art department, how geolocation can find Waldo and much much more.
Watch Video Preview >Programming Clojure
Saturday 3:15 PM - Venkat Subramaniam
Clojure is an exciting language on the JVM for several reasons. It brings the power of functional programming and the characteristics of dynamic typing into a single fold. It is a language that has done quite a few things right. It is lightweight, highly expressive, concise, and offers quite an interesting, simple, yet very powerful solution to handle concurrency. In this session you will learn the key strengths of this language and how you can integrate it with your Java projects.
Watch Video Preview >JavaScript Libraries You Aren't Using...Yet
Sunday 9:00 AM - Nathaniel Schutta
You're all over jQuery - you write plugins in your sleep - and before that, you were a Prototype ninja. Your team treats JavaScript like a first class citizen, you've even written more tests than Kent Beck. Is that all there is in the land of the JavaScript developer? Believe it or not, the JavaScript party hasn't stopped. What other libraries are out there? What do they offer? This talk will survey the field of modern JavaScript libraries getting you up to speed on what's new. We'll dive in just deep enough to whet your appetite on a wide variety of libraries such as Backbone, Underscore, Zepto and more.
Watch Video Preview >Spring Data
Sunday 9:00 AM - Craig Walls
This session starts with a high-level look at all that the Spring Data project has to offer. Then we'll dive deeper into a few select Spring Data modules, including Spring Data Neo4j, Spring Data MongoDB, Spring Data Redis, Spring Data JPA, and Spring Data JDBC Extensions
Watch Video Preview >Taming Shared Mutability with Software Transactional Memory
Sunday 9:00 AM - Venkat Subramaniam
Mutability is something we're quite used to in Java. Sharing is a good thing. However, shared mutability is pure devil's work. If we remove shared mutability, all the problems of concurrent go away. In practice, however, it's hard to completely get rid of shared mutability. This is where STM comes in with managed shared mutable variables. In this presentation we will take an example driven approach to dive deep into STM, look at what it has to offer, explore different implementations, and how we can design concurrent applications without any explicit locks.
Watch Video Preview >Code Archaeology
Sunday 9:00 AM - Matt Stine
Feature requests are steadily pouring in, but the team cannot respond to them. They are paralyzed. The codebase on which the company has "bet the business" is simply too hard to change. It's your job to clean up the mess and get things rolling again. Where do you begin? Your first task is to get the lay of the land by applying a family of techniques we'll call "Code Archaeology."
Watch Video Preview >The Who and What of Agile - Personas and Story Maps
Sunday 11:00 AM - Nathaniel Schutta
Successful projects require any number of practices but if you don't know who you're building it for or what you're supposed to build, failure is a distinct possibility. How do we capture the who and what? Personas and story maps are two effective techniques that you can leverage. After discussing the basics, we'll break into small groups and you'll have a chance to actually try building a set of personas as well as a story map.
Watch Video Preview >Advanced JavaScript for Java Devs
Sunday 11:00 AM - Pratik Patel
So you think you've picked up enough JavaScript to be dangerous, but feel like the whole prototypical language thing is still a mystery. In this session, we'll go from basic JavaScript to advanced JavaScript. We'll discuss and code modular JavaScript with CommonJS. We'll look into the details of a prototype language and discuss things like parasitic inheritance. We'll also look at JavaScript libraries that will help you get the most out of JavaScript - not jQuery, but a library like UnderscoreJS and SugarJS.
Watch Video Preview >Building Web Applications with Spring MVC
Sunday 11:00 AM - Craig Walls
In this session, we'll start with the basics of Spring MVC development, focusing on how to leverage the new annotation-driven model. With that foundation set, we'll continue by exploring the new features in Spring 3.0 and 3.1 to build RESTful web applications that can serve both human-facing content as well as resources that are consumed by machine clients.
Watch Video Preview >Rock SOLID Software
Sunday 11:00 AM - Matt Stine
Object-oriented programming was formally introduced in the 1970's with the advent of Smalltalk. C++ took it mainstream in the 1980's, and Java carried it to the next level in the 1990's. Unfortunately, if you examine the vast majority of Java codebases, what you'll find is a bunch of C-style structs (a.k.a. JavaBeans) and functions. As these codebases grow, a number of design smells can potentially crop up, which in turn cripple our ability to respond to change. We need SOLID principles that we can apply to keep our software clean and malleable.
Watch Video Preview >Leading Technical Change
Sunday 2:15 PM - Nathaniel Schutta
Technology changes, it's a fact of life. And while many developers are attracted to the challenge of change, many organizations do a particularly poor job of adapting. We've all worked on projects with, ahem, less than new technologies even though newer approaches would better serve the business. But how do we convince those holding the purse strings to pony up the cash when things are "working" today? At a personal, how do we keep up with the change in our industry?
Watch Video Preview >Mobile Development Options 2013
Sunday 2:15 PM - Pratik Patel
There's a bevy of options for developing mobile apps. If you're looking at cross-platform solutions, there's a multitude of options to choose from. In this session we'll explore the three basic categories for developing mobile apps: native, cross-platform-to-native, and mobile web. We'll discuss the sweet spot for each of these three approaches and the benefits and drawbacks of each. Technologies discussed include Android, iOS, HTML5/CSS3, Phonegap, Titanium, and jQuery Mobile.
Watch Video Preview >Securing Spring
Sunday 2:15 PM - Craig Walls
In this session, I'll show you how to secure your Spring application with Spring Security 3.0. You'll see hot to declare both request-oriented and method-oriented security constraints. And you'll see how SpEL can make simple work of expressing complex security rules.
Watch Video Preview >Stop, DevOp, and Roll Out Software
Sunday 2:15 PM - Matt Stine
What is the DevOps movement? It a nutshell, it is the idea that the days of silos are over. Development, QA, and operations can no longer be thought of as separate warring divisons with their own "turfs." Instead, we must focus on the fact that we are all part of a single value stream for the customer. By collaboration and shared expertise, we can find real overlaps between our previously segregated areas of expertise and optimize that value stream.
Watch Video Preview >Hacking Your Brain for Fun and Profit
Sunday 4:00 PM - Nathaniel Schutta
The single most important tool in any developers toolbox isn't a fancy IDE or some spiffy new language - it's our brain. Despite ever faster processors with multiple cores and expanding amounts of RAM, we haven't yet created a computer to rival the ultra lightweight one we carry around in our skulls - in this session we'll learn how to make the most of it. We'll talk about why multitasking is a myth, the difference between the left and the right side of your brain, the importance of flow and why exercise is good for more than just your waist line.
Watch Video Preview >Securing the Modern Web with OAuth
Sunday 4:00 PM - Craig Walls
In this session, we'll look at OAuth, focusing on OAuth 2, from the perspective of an application that consumes an OAuth-secured API as well as see how to use OAuth to secure your own APIs.
Watch Video Preview >Master of Puppet
Sunday 4:00 PM - Matt Stine
Puppet is a powerful framework for the automation of tasks typically performed by system administrators as part of software infrastructure provisioning and maintenance. Puppet adoption is rapidly increasing, boasting use by companies such as Google, RedHat, Constant Contact, Zynga, and Shopzilla.
Puppet is composed of three principle components:
- a declarative language for expressing system configuration,
- a client and server for distributing it,
- and a library for realizing the configuration









