Great Lakes Software Symposium

November 16 - 18, 2007



Event Details

Location

Westin Chicago Northwest
400 Park Boulevard
Itasca, IL 60143
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NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in Chicago November 16 - 18, 2007. You may view the event details here ».

Session Highlights

Don't miss your chance to attend more than forty education and solutions sessions:

  • Seating is Limited
  • In-depth Discussions
  • Peer Exchange
  • Access to Speakers
  • Expert Panel Discussions
  • Hands-on Code Examples
  • Best Practices
  • Birds of a Feather Session
  • Insight on Cutting-Edge Tools

Featured Sessions

By Brian Sletten

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

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

By Brian Sletten

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.

By David Geary

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

By David Geary

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

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

By David Hussman

Why is so much documentation worthless? Wouldn't is be nice if your documentation actually reflected what your system does? One way to do this is to create what is being called executable documentation or executable specifications. If you are struggling with ambiguous requirements, lack of contact with the business, or a chasm between development and testing, this session is for you.

By David Hussman

Although there are many books about agile, but few provide a path for guiding you through the beginning of an agile project. Whether you are preparing for your first agile project, or taking the lead for the first time, this session will provide a guided tour filled with practical advice and a pile of anecdotes.

By Jared Richardson

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.

By Jared Richardson

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

By Jared Richardson

Creating and maintaining a solid automated test suite is critical to an Agile strategy, but often we're just told to "Do it." In this talk we'll look at several pragmatic strategies for creating and building your suite.

By Jeff Brown

Groovy is an agile dynamic language for the Java platform. Groovy has a Java like syntax along with many features inspired by languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk. This session covers a lot of ground including many interactive examples to hilite the powerful language features that make Groovy compelling. A lot of momentum is building in the Groovy and Grails communities right now and this session is aimed at Java developers who want to leverage the power of Groovy.

By Jeff Brown

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 Mark Richards

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.


By Mark Richards

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 defining and accessing session beans, dependency injection, declarative security, interceptors (aop), and Message-Driven Beans (MDB). For those of you who still like to write XML, I will also discuss and show how we can use XML rather than annotations within EJB3. 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.

By Mark Richards

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.

By Neal Ford

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

By Neal Ford

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

By Neal Ford

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.

By Neal Ford

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.

By Ryan Breidenbach

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

By Ryan Breidenbach

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

By Scott Davis

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

By Scott Davis

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

By Scott Davis

GORM (the Grails Object/Relational Mapper) is one of the many high points of the Grails web framework. GORM is a thin Groovy wrapper over Hibernate, but that doesn't begin to capture excitement of what GORM brings to the party. Imagine being able to call book.save() and book.delete() on your Book class; calling Book.get(1) to retrieve your book from the database by primary key; using Book.list() to pull an ArrayList of Book objects into your application. Now imagine getting all of that functionality (and more) for free with each new class you define. No interfaces to implement. No abstract classes to extend. Persistence that is transparent, automatic, and simple to use: GORM.

By Scott Delap

Rich client application development using Java can be intimidating giving the vast flexibility in application design and structure. It also can be frustrating to create the large number of support services (persistence, menus, event and job frameworks) that a large scale rich client applications needs. The Eclipse Rich Client Platform is one project attempting to solve these issues by providing a core infrastructure that not only provides the day to day services a rich client application developer needs, but also providing a suggested path to guide you down the road of designing your application. This presentation introduces both the Eclipse RCP and the tools provided by the Eclipse IDE that assist developers in writing RCP apps.

By Stuart Halloway

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

By Stuart Halloway

Contributing to open source is great for your career. In a few short hours, you can learn, teach, promote your skills, and improve the quality of the community. In this talk, we will show you how, by doing it.

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?

By Ted Neward

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

By Ted Neward

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

By Ted Neward

Want to get the soup-to-nuts story on Java annotations? In this presentation, we'll first talk about what annotations provide to the Java language. After setting ourselves a conceptual basis to operate from, we'll look at the language definition for Java annotations, from how to use them to how to define them. Finally, we'll take a look at the other side of annotations, consuming them at source-level (using "apt", the annotation processing tool), class-level (using a bytecode toolkit such as BCEL), and at runtime (using enhancements to the Reflection API made in Java5).

By Venkat Subramaniam

What benefit do new Java 6 features offer you. Are there issues with using these features.
The objective of this presentation is not simply to introduce you to the features, but to
the effective use of these as well.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Domain Driven Design (DDD) is an approach that places emphasis on the domain model and carrying it into implementation. DDD is mostly repackaging of fundamental OO Design. It brings new emphasis to what we should be already doing, but often find it hard and confusing given the realities and complexities of our real world. In this presentation we will take a close look at what DDD is and how to use it for agile development. We will discuss several design options, and also look at some examples of good modeling and layering.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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

By Venkat Subramaniam

What do you get when you mix an agile, object-oriented, dynamic language with a lightweight, flexible, and extensible framework? You get a Groovier Spring. Spring allows you to develop using Groovy as much as Java. Groovy brings some neat concepts to the Java Platform that is hard to realize directly through the Java language. Using these capabilities can lead to elegant and easier Spring development.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Most interest around Functional Programming (FP) has been academic until recently. Recent commercial languages are beginning to exploit FP features. Knowing more about FP will not only help us make better use of these features, but to
exploit those. In this session we will take a close look at FP.