Session Descriptions

Internationalization and Localization in Java

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.

Introducing Agility to Large Organizations

For several years, I was a member of a team of people caught in the middle of a 200+ person software development company, with senior management wanting "buzzword compliant process improvement" such as CMMI, and engineers wanting more ?agile? solutions (and people on both sides confusing Agile with ad-hoc). We were responsible for sorting it all out. Reconciling this was a herculean effort, and can be a source of lessons learned for your own process improvement efforts. Are you trying to be more agile in your organization? Are you expecting it to be harder than it needs to be because of political and bureaucratic forces beyond your control? Do you have to "educate" your senior management to protect them from buzzwords? Come learn from my successes... and mistakes.

Maintaining Project Integrity with JDepend, Macker, PMD, Maven, and other open source tools

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.

Groovy and Java: The Integration Story

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.

Groovy: The Next Generation of Java

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.

KEYNOTE: No, I Won't Tell You Which Web Framework to Use: or The Truth (with Jokes)

"Which framework should I use?" is the question most often heard on the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour. It's well worth asking. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. After years on the tour, most speakers have crafted a response that would make any Washington politician proud -- long on style, but essentially, "Well, it depends..."

Real World Grails

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.

The Zen of REST

Google quietly deprecated their SOAP search API at the end of 2006. While this doesn't mean that you should abandon SOAP, it does reflect a growing trend towards simpler dialects of web services. Google joins a number of popular websites (Yahoo, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us) that offer all of the benefits of web services without all of the complexity of SOAP.

Enterprise Security with Spring

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.

Message Driven POJOs with Spring

Spring 2.0 introduced support for Message-Driven POJOs meaning that it is now possible to receive JMS messages asynchronously and delegate the handling of those messages to simple objects even within a lightweight application running outside of any application server. If your POJO has a return value, it will automatically be sent to a response destination.

Agile Project Management (With Just a Bit About Mingle)

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.

Code Metrics & Analysis for Agile Projects

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.

Introduction to JRuby

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.

Productive Programmer: Acceleration, Focus, and Indirection

This session discusses how to use the Productive Programmer principles of acceleration, focus, and indirection to become a more productive programmer. This session describes these principles, but the primary focus of this session is demonstration of these principles with real-world examples.

Productive Programmer: Automation and Canonicality

This session discusses how to use the Productive Programmer principles of automation and canonicality to become a more productive programmer. This session describes these principles, but the primary focus of this session is demonstration of these principles with real-world examples.

Rails for JRuby

This session explains all the hype surrounding Ruby on Rails, in a context familiar to Java developers. It covers convention over configuration, ActiveRecord, controllers, views, Ajax, scaffolding, testing, and deployment...on the JVM, using JRuby.

The Productive Programmer: Practice (10 Ways to Improve Your Code)

No one writes perfect code: even the best developers fall into bad habits and traps. These topics from The Productive Programmer illustrate blind spots and helps you write better code.

Ajaxian Faces

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

JavaServer Faces: A Whirlwind Tour

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

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

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

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

Killer JavaScript Frameworks: Prototype, Scriptaculous, and Rico

An introduction to the popular Prototype JavaScript framework, and two frameworks built on top of Prototype: Scriptaculous and Rico.

RAD JSF with Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4jsf, Part One

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.

RAD JSF with Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4jsf, Part Two

A continuation of a 2-session presentation on Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4jsf.

The Google Web Toolkit, Part One

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.

The Google Web Toolkit, Part Two

The second part of a 2-session presentation on the Google Web Toolkit.

Groovy 101: core Groovy

It has been said that Grails is the addiction and Groovy is the drug. If you want to start building slick web applications rapidly with Grails it helps to start with a solid understanding of the Groovy language itself.

Monitoring Software Quality with Continuous Integration

The practice of continuous integration facilitates early visibility into the development process by regularly conducting software builds, thus integrating disparate software pieces earlier than later, which often times minimizes the interval between when a defect is coded and when it is discovered. Given the automated nature of continuous integration spawned builds, software teams can now start to look at their build process as something more useful than a simple compile and test process.

Refactoring Ant builds with Ivy, Groovy, and good old fashion common sense

Are your Ant builds giant XML files that scream for attention? Why not enhance your build process to act like a quality gate, much like a test suite would?

Adding Behavior to Java Annotations

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.

Glassbox: Open Source Java Monitoring and Troubleshooting

In this session you will learn about the Glassbox open source troubleshooting and monitoring tool. Glassbox enable detection of common application problems such as database failures, slow operations, thread contention, and excessive distributed calls. Glassbox enables low overhead monitoring and troubleshooting without needing to "bake in" instrumentation up front.

REST: The basics, and not so basic...

This presentation introduces REST, compares and contrasts REST with SOA and WS-*, and finally delves into some of the more subtle topics that affect RESTful systems.

Requirements Driven Design and Development (RDDD)

Validate that requirements are not missed during the design and development process by creating Requirements document test fixtures to clarify and validate the requirements between the end users, business analysts, architects, and developers early in the project.

Software Development Risk Analysis techniques

Once you leave academic "hello world" projects, software development is full of unknowns which result in the high rate of project failure we see too often in industry. Reasons for a project failure will vary based on the stakeholder interviewed. This session will provide a software development risk framework and examples you can apply in your projects to reduce or at least soften the impact of failure.

Domain Driven Design: Simplifying Enterprise Architecture

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.

Enterprise Applications with Spring: Part 1

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.

Enterprise Applications with Spring: Part 2

This session (the second part of the 2-part session) 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 make you effective at developing Spring-based applications.

Leveraging annotations with AOP

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.

Java6: Exploring Mustang

Mustang, the Java6 release, is out, and even if you're not looking to adopt the new platform right away, it's important to know what's there so you can start to plan for it. In this presentation, we'll go over the major new features of the Java6 platform, including the new integrated XML services capabilities (JAX-WS and JAXB), dynamic/scripting language support (javax.script), new JVM "attach" capabilities, new annotations supported by the javac compiler, and more.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to ClassLoaders

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.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Concurrency (Part 1: Threads)

Java's threading capabilities took a serious turn for the better with the release of Java5, thanks to the incorporation of the java.util.concurrent packages, a set of pre-built components for thread pooling and execution, synchronization, and more.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Concurrency (Part 2: Concurrency)

Java's threading capabilities have been a part of the Java platform since its inception, yet for many Java developers, using Threads still remain a dark and mysterious art, and synchronization beyond the use of the "synchronized" keyword is almost unknown.

Prerequisite: The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Concurrency (Part 1: Threads)

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Performance and Scalability

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?

Advanced Java Persistence API (JPA)

This session picks up where the Intro to JPA session left off and covers some of the more advanced topics in the Java Persistence API. Some of the topics covered in this session include switching persistence providers, versioning, compound keys, entity inheritance, and finally handling both simple and complex stored procedures. Some knowledge of JPA is recommended for this session as I will not be covering the basics of JPA (that is covered in a separate Intro to JPA session). Through a combination of slides and interactive coding I will demonstrate these advanced topics using both Hibernate and Toplink JPA.

EJB3 Core Specification (JSR-220)

EJB3 (JSR-220) offers some great improvements over the prior EJB specs in terms of development simplicity and new features. In this session we will explore in detail some of the new features of the core EJB 3 specification. Included in this session will be a hands-on discussion and demonstration of session beans, dependency injection, interceptors (aop), and Message-Driven Beans (MDB). For the interceptors discussion I will be showing how to define interceptors for enabling a method trace, mocking objects, and sending JMS message notifications to be later picked up by the MDBs I will be creating. During the session I will demonstrate the new features of EJB 3 through interactive coding examples. Note: this session does not cover the new Java Persistence API (JPA) - only the core specification.

Intro to Java Persistence API (JPA)

In addition to providing a simplified API, the new EJB3 specification (JSR-220) defines a standard ORM Java Persistence API (JPA) that is rapidly gaining in popularity. As you will see in this session, JPA bears a striking resemblance to popular ORM solutions like Hibernate and Toplink. In this session we will explore in detail the new Java Persistence API offered by JSR-220. We will start by discussing the overall design and architecture of the JPA and how the major components within JPA interact. We will then look at defining mapping objects (entities) and how to use the EntityManager to manage these entities. Through interactive coding examples we will investigate the pros and cons of detached entities and merging, how to map and use entity relationships (1-1, 1-N, N-1, and N-N), discuss Lazy Loading, and finally see how to use XML mappings rather than annotations. More advanced features of JPA will be covered in a separate session.

Java Persistence: Approaching the Silver Bullet

Java Persistence has come along way since the days of straight JDBC coding and custom framework development. We have at our disposal several outstanding open source frameworks such as Hibernate, Toplink, iBatis, and OpenJPA (just to name a few), and we now have a promising and emerging standards-based solution called Java Persistence API (JPA). However, all to often we find in the Java persistence space that it is a world of one-size-does-not-fit-all. We continually struggle with traditional ORM solutions like Hibernate when it comes to reporting queries, complex queries, complex relationships, and stored procedures, and we also struggle with managing the enormous amount of SQL required for solutions such as iBATIS or JDBC-based frameworks. In this coding-intensive session we will take a detailed look at identifying and overcoming the challenges we face when using frameworks such as Hibernate, iBATIS, and JPA, and how to combine the various persistence frameworks to create an effective Java persistence solution that approaches (but of course does not reach) the silver bullet.

Distributed Teams: Remote Agility

How do you keep a team scattered across time zones in sync?

Shippers Unite!

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

Software Development Techniques

Throughout our software careers we learn habits from our coworkers, from books we've read, and occasionally, from conferences we attend. Much of our competence comes from the tips and tricks we pick up as we go.

Advanced Domain Models in Grails: Enterprise Integration Made Easy

Have you seen someone develop a Rails or Grails application in a matter of minutes, only to later discover that their domain model and database schema followed conventions that are different from your existing systems? Or perhaps you're interested in using Grails, but you don't want to duplicate your existing Java domain classes in Groovy. In this session, we'll see how Grails makes it easy to hook into your pre-defined schemas or existing entity classes, while still getting all the rapid application development (RAD) goodness that Grails has to offer.

Getting Started with Grails

Grails is an open-source web application framework that's all about getting things done. Grails combines best-of-breed Java technologies (including Hibernate and Spring), convention over configuration, and the powerful and dynamic Groovy language. Together with these elements and Groovy's ability to seamlessly integrate with your existing Java code, Grails finally legitimizes rapid web application development for the Java platform.

Annotation Hammer

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.

OSGi: A Well Kept Secret

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

Programming with Mock objects

You are convinced that Test Driven Development is good for you and your project. You realize the benefits it has to offer. What's holding you back? All the code and components that your code so heavily depends on is most likely making you wonder if TDD is really for you. We will start out by looking at dependency and dependency inversion. Then we will discuss how mock objects can help separate our code from its dependencies.

get Fit

Unit testing tells you, the programmer, that your code (and the change) meets your expectations. How do you know if you are meeting your customers' expectations? Agile development is all about feedback and doing what's relevant to the customers, isn't it? Framework for Integration testing or Fit helps you to automate tests for customer expectations.

JBoss ESB Deep Dive

This session will be a deep dive into the capabilities of the open source JBoss Enterprise Service Bus 4.2 GA. An ESB is primarily categorized by its capabilties in the areas of protocol mediation/abstraction, transformation, orchestration, routing, endpoint registry, etc. Numerous live demos of ESB functionality.

Open Source SOA

At some point, code will be written, software tools will be acquired and systems will be built. Unfortunately the Java development world is a confused mess as it relates to a method of building a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based anything. Our objective is to answer the following questions: Should I use Web Services everywhere? Is an Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) useful and required? Should I be programming in the XML-based syntax of BPEL instead of Java? Do I need JBI and/or SCA? What Open Source implementations are available to solve SOA related challenges?