Session Schedule

By Neal Ford

Most of the software world has realized that BDUF (Big Design Up Front) doesn't work well in software. But lots of developers struggle with this notion when it applies to architecture and design. Surely you can't just start coding, right? You need some level of understanding before you can start work. This session describes the current thinking about emergent design & evolutionary architecture, including both proactive (test-driven development) and reactive (refactoring, composed method) approaches to discovering design. The goal of this talk is to provide nomenclature, strategies, and techniques for allowing design to emerge from projects as they proceed, keeping you code in sync with the problem domain.

Most of the software world has realized that BDUF (Big Design Up Front) doesn't work well in software. But lots of developers struggle with this notion when it applies to architecture and design. Surely you can't just start coding, right? You need some level of understanding before you can start work. This session describes the current thinking about emergent design & evolutionary architecture, including both proactive (test-driven development) and reactive (refactoring, composed method) approaches to discovering design. The goal of this talk is to provide nomenclature, strategies, and techniques for allowing design to emerge from projects as they proceed, keeping you code in sync with t

By Neal Ford

Refactoring is a fine academic exercise in the perfect world, but we don't really live there. Even with the best intentions, projects build up technical debt and crufty bad things. This session covers refactoring in the real world, at both the atomic level (how to refactor towards composed method and the single level of abstraction principle) to larger project strategies for multi-day refactoring efforts. This talk provides practical strategies for real projects to effectively refactor your code.

Refactoring is a fine academic exercise in the perfect world, but we don't really live there. Even with the best intentions, projects build up technical debt and crufty bad things. This session covers refactoring in the real world, at both the atomic level (how to refactor towards composed method and the single level of abstraction principle) to larger project strategies for multi-day refactoring efforts. This talk provides practical strategies for real projects to effectively refactor your code.

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: acceleration, focus, automation, and canonicality. This session 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. Focus describes how you can utilize your environment (both physical and computer) to greatly enhance your productivity. Canonicality (the DRY principle from The Pragm

By Neal Ford

Software is fundamentally a communications game, and good skills differentiates between good and great developers. This session describes communication techniques and skills to people who skipped English 102 to hack some code. I talk about effective communication techniques for presentations, documentation, memos, and how to sell your technical ideas to a non-technical crowd.

Software is fundamentally a communications game, and good skills differentiates between good and great developers. This session describes communication techniques and skills to people who skipped English 102 to hack some code. I talk about effective communication techniques for presentations, documentation, memos, and how to sell your technical ideas to a non-technical crowd.

By David Geary

This session introduces JSF 2.0 fundamentals, with emphasis on new features in JSF 2.0.

JSF 2.0 has been a long time coming, but now that it's here, it boasts an impressive set of improvements over JSF 1.X, including standardization of Facelets as the default display technology, a much richer event model, and built-in support for Ajax. Come to this session to see how you can use Java's standard web application framework to create industrial-strength web applications. This session will cover the following features of JSF 2.0: Resources Using Groovy System events Bookmarkable views Templating

Prerequisite: Familiarity with JSF, or other component-based frameworks

By David Geary

This session covers two of the most important features of JSF 2.0: composite components and built-in Ajax.

JSF is a component-base framework. Components are a powerful reuse mechanism, but they were rendered nearly inconsequential in JSF 1.X, because components were so difficult to implement. JSF 2.0 makes implementing cusomt components easy with a new feature that builds on Facelets and the new resource capabilities in JSF 2.0: composite components. This session shows you how to implement your own components with JSF 2. Additionally, this session covers the built-in Ajax that comes with JSF 2.0. Come to this session to see how you can easily implement custom components with integrated Ajax capabilities.

Prerequisite: Familiarity with JSF, or other component-based frameworks. Familiarity with Ajax. This session builds on the JSF 2.0 Introduction talk, so it is helpful, although not required, if you attend the intro talk before coming to this session.

By David Geary

An introduction to Flex for Java developers.

Want to develop expressive web applications? Them come to this session and see what Adobe's Flex is all about. Flex has lots of similarities to Java-based web development, so you'll find it easy to learn, and powerful to use. Come to this session if you want to take your web application user interface to the next level. This session will cover: An introduction to Flex ActionScript, HTTPService, and data binding Drag and drop Components View state Integrating with Java back ends

Prerequisite: Familiarity with Flex and at least one other web application framework

By David Geary

Learn to implement web applications with GWT.

Google Web Toolkit lets you create killer Java-based web applications using familiar Swing and AWT idioms. This session will introduce you to GWT and teach you the fundamentals of using this cutting-edge framework for creating rich user interfaces that run in a browser. For most of this session, and the session that follows--GWT fu, Part 2--I will live code a desktop-like, ajax-based, web application that illustrates the awesome power of GWT. In this session, I will cover the following topics: Widgets Remote procedure calls and database access Event handling Ajax testing

Prerequisite: Familiarity with a component-based framework, preferably a desktop application framework

By David Geary

Learn to do amazing stuff with GWT.

This session picks up where GWT fu, Part 1 left off. In this session, I will continue live-coding the Places application. In taking the Places application to its exciting conclusion, I will cover the following advanced aspects of GWT: Dialog boxes Sinking events DOM elements Working with HTML Modules Image loading and busy cursors Event previews Timers In this session, I focus primarily on implementing a viewport widget in a custom module, and using that widget in the Places application. When I'm done, we'll have a very cool web application that shows the awesome potential of Google Web Toolkit

Prerequisite: GWT fu, Part 1 is not a prerequisite for this session, but it will help if you have some familiarity with GWT.

By Brian Goetz

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

Based on the principles in the best-selling Java Concurrency in Practice, this talk focuses on design techniques that help you create correct and maintainable concurrent code. Presented in the style of Effective Java, this talk offers bite-sized items for effectively writing concurrent code, divided into three categories: writing thread-safe code, structuring concurrent applications, and improving scalability. Writing thread-safe code: - Encapsulate your data - Encapsulate any needed synchronization - Document thread-safety intent and implementation - Prefer immutable objects - Exploit effective immutability Rules for structuring concurrent applications - Think tasks, not t

By Brian Goetz

What's the worst thing that can happen when you fail to synchronize in a concurrent Java program? Its probably worse than you think -- modern shared-memory processors can do some pretty weird things when left to their own devices.

Java was the first mainstream programming language to incorporate a formal, cross-platform memory model, which is what enabled the development of write-once, run-anywhere concurrent classes. It is the Java Memory model that defines the semantics of synchronized, volatile, and final. However, because the most commonly used processors (Intel and Sparc) offer stronger memory models than is required by the JMM, many developers frequently use synchronization and volatile incorrectly, but have been insulated from failure by the stronger memory guarantees offered by the processor architecture they happen to be deploying on. (The infamous "double checked locking" idiom is an example of this sor

By Brian Goetz

Many developers believe that web frameworks "take care of" the details of concurrency, but this is only because most web applications make limited use of state. Stateful web applications also need to be careful about hazards like races. This talk will use the Java Memory Model to analyze common patterns of state management in web applications.

This talk builds on the concepts developed in The Java Memory Model to explore concurrency pitfalls in typical web and desktop Java applications. We'll see how common patterns for maintaining state in Java applications expose subtle vulnerabilities, and explore design techniques for building more robust applications as well as techniques for auditing typical server-side code for potential concurrency hazards.

Prerequisite: The Java Memory Model

By Brian Goetz

Ever wondered what happens to your bytecodes when they're executed by a Java Virtual Machine? This talk provides a peek "under the hood" of modern JVMs, exploring dynamic compilation, speculative optimization, garbage collection, and some hardware-specific optimizations.

While the earliest JVMs were interpreted, and as such got a bad rap for performance, the VM approach to program execution provides many avenues for optimization that are not possible in traditional, statically compiled languages. This talk attempts to give a sense of just what the JVM can do to squeeze extra performance out of typical Java programs. A few important optimizations will be discussed in detail, using examples of java code to show how the JVM makes common operations fast, or how it transforms your program into something completely different that produces the same result--in less time. Topics include: synchronization - why uncontended locks are (almost) free compilation - h

By Brian Goetz

Do software developers need to know anything about CPU architecture? They do if they aspire to be performance experts. Modern CPUs behave almost nothing like the sequential Von Neumann machine model we know and love.

This session provides an overview of the architecture of modern CPUs, how this has changed in recent years, and what the implications are for software development and performance management.

Managing software performance used to be a relatively straightforward process. Uniprocessors were the norm, the number of cycles each instruction took to execute was known, and it was mostly a matter of measuring how many instructions you were executing per unit of work -- and then reducing that number. The world has changed: The cost of individual instructions varies by several orders of magnitude, depending on how close the data is to the CPU, and improvements in throughput depend on effective use of parallelism. But to design and analyze performant programs, we have to understand something about the underlying hardware and how that has changed in recent years. For example, a cache miss m

By David Hussman

Many people simplistically apply agile recipes, assuming a one size fits all approach. This may lead to naive use beliefs like collocation breeds instant success. While sitting together always helps, it does not mean that people spontaneously collaborate to create sustainable value.

Instead of approaching agile methods like a recipe, this session will teach you to design agility that is a useful tool for your project community. We will cover practice selection ideas, tools for creating healthy development eco-systems and product discover tools. If you would like to improve the stickiness of your agility, stop in learn a pile of techniques to use before holding your first planning session.

Imagine you want to use agile methods and you’re looking for ideas from introduction to iteration, this is the path we will take. We start by will examining ideas for selecting which practices will improve your existing strengths and address your existing issues. From there, we will walk through growing product and customer knowledge, creating a collaborative work area and two levels of planning: planning to discover and planning to deliver.

By David Hussman

Agility comes in many forms. While you may start out using XP or Scrum, long term success will mean finding a groove which fits your company. This session provides a path for adopting or adapting agility which draws on the strength of the successful practices being used.

If you are wondering how successful communities find a collaborative groove, this session has many answers and ideas for those interested in producing successful agile communities. Working in pairs and as a large group, you will take a stab at defining how you might produce, learning about your individual strengths and challenges. Everyone will leave with some collection of skills proven as useful guiding newly forming project communities as well as long running projects and their extended communities.

By David Hussman

While actors and use cases often left users behind, personas and story maps bring the users to life and help mine real value. This session will teach you how to craft personas and use them to drive value into your development stream. The tools presented will help you better understand your buyers and users and build strong product backlogs and product road maps.

The session starts with an overview of what personas are and why people use them. From there, we will start from the beginning: who do you use to pattern your personas and who has the best skills to create them. Once we have created a few personas, we will explore how they can be used to craft story maps, create acceptance tests and help keep the user's experience, and their needs in the minds of the development community.

By David Hussman

Whether it was intentional or not, the agile community has been borrowing successful ideas from the lean manufacturing for years. Lean practices, like finding and removing wasteful work, can be applied without needing special permission or certification. Ideas like kanban (visual planning aids) and kaizen (continuous learning) are simple, helpful tools that are easily applied and produce great results.

This session will discuss how lean thinking has influenced agile methods and how you can use simple lean ideas to produce better software more often. We will not get stuck on wasteful discussions about "what is Scrum?" or "what is agile?" Instead we will talk about (and try - time permitting) a collection of useful lean practices and tools.

By David Hussman

How testable are your requirements? If they are user stories, you have better odds than others, but you may still struggling to increase your automated feature testing. Acceptance test driven (ATD) means understanding the needs or the value before you start coding, and it is often hard to make ATD sticky in organizations.

While tools and geekology are needed, the upstream flow with the larger project community must exist to be successful. The session will teach you how to spark ATD from idea to code, connecting the dots and the players along the way. From product concept to automated tests, we will discuss and practice various ways to connect business, development and testing around the creating and getting value from ATD.

After a short introduction, we will practice to tasks need to take an idea to a set of testable statements. We will touch on tools, but not over focus on tools. Tools come and go and being stuck on a tool is often the failing of making ATD sticky. The larger focus, and the deeper value, will be the importance of gathering the core players needed to create well formed acceptance tests that clarify value and promote collaboration within project communities.

By David Hussman

This session speaks to the question being asked so often: "what is an agile coach" From guiding planning sessions to pairing with developers to helping teams groom backlogs, this session provides insight into coaching agile projects and fostering the agility that produces. Whether you are a manager, developer, or tester, if you are interested in leading the adoption or tuning agility, this session will help prepare you for your first coaching gig.

The session starts by questioning how you might coach, after which we will walk through a project from a coach's perspective. From preproduction (getting ready to produce) to finding your groove (getting productive) during the early iterations. The session closes out with a few ideas for staying productive and keeping the band together. Show up ready to learn about and experience a slice of agile coaching.

By David Hussman

Being agile does not mean living life one iteration at a time. Agile projects without a long view can run into the common design problems of the past. Planning iteration by iteration is often foolish and feeds the myth that agile projects do not think beyond a few weeks. Successful agile projects plan within iterations and across iterations. The later planning is called release planning and it is the forum where agility first engages architecture and other cross cutting concerns.

Architects who think that agile projects evolve code one test at a time are only partially correct. Agile projects review and evolve architecture with unit tests, acceptance tests, architectural spikes, and continuous review of the system's ability to adapt and respond. There is a home for architects and architecture on agile projects, and other traditional roles, but the there are some new variations. This session will talk about the relationship of agile methods and architecture and design and how they can work together to make stronger products and systems. The session will draw on information and anecdotes will come from projects of all sizes within companies of all sizes, including so

By Matthew McCullough

This session will survey a wide range of tools across the Java space. We'll look at utilities such as VisualVM, jstatd, jps, jhat, jmap, Eclipse Memory Analyzer, jtracert, btrace and more.

Open Source is not just a suite of libraries you consume within your application, but now reaches into the space of tools to help you troubleshoot and improve your applications. The price of these tools eliminates barriers to their use and their open source nature allows you to mix and match them into compositions that work well for your application's unique debugging needs.

These tools will help you peel away layers of your application to expose bugs and performance ceilings. We'll interactively analyze the heap and garbage collection cycles of both local and remote applications, take snapshots of heap, query the heap for heavy usage, leaks and augment running code without a reboot and without breaking a sweat. After attending, you'll never look at Java debugging the same way again.

By Matthew McCullough

This session will survey a wide range of tools across the Web application debugging space, covering the REST, HTML, SOAP, CSS, TCP, Filesystem and JavaScript facets of an app. We'll look at utilities such as tcpdump, curl, Wireshark, JMeter, Firebug, JASH, Poster, SoapUI, Firediff, lsof, fs_usage, iwatch and more.

Open Source is not just a suite of libraries you consume within your application, but now reaches into the space of tools to help you troubleshoot and improve your applications. The price of these tools eliminates barriers to their use and their open source nature allows you to mix and match them into compositions that work well for your application's unique debugging needs.

Performance and load testing tools such as JMeter will expose bottlenecks, threading, and scalability concerns. Tools such as SOAPui and TCPMon allow you to inspect your SOAP and REST calls at the data structure level, and how Firefox Poster lets you test web services right from the browser. And when only a raw look will do, we can always fall back on the venerable TCPDump and Wireshark.

By Matthew McCullough

Many development shops have made the leap from RCS, Perforce, ClearCase, PVCS, CVS, BitKeeper or SourceSafe to the modern Subversion (SVN) version control system. But why not take the next massive stride in productivity and get on board with Git, a distributed version control system (DVCS). Jump ahead of the masses staying on Subversion, and increase your team's productivity, debugging effectiveness, flexibility in cutting releases, and repository redundancy at $0 cost. Understand how distributed version control systems are game-changers and pick up the lingo that will become standard in the next few years.

In this talk, we discuss the team changes that liberate you from the central server, but still conform to the corporate expectation that there's a central master repository. You'll get a cheat sheet for Git, and a trail-map from someone who's actually experienced the Subversion to Git transition. Lastly, we'll even expose how you can leverage 75% of Git's features against a Subversion repository without ever telling your bosses you are using it. Be forewarned that they may start to wonder why you are so much more effective in your checkins than other members of your team.

Prerequisite: Basic understanding of Subversion or similar version control system

By Matthew McCullough

Maven has been on the Java build tools scene for quite a number of years, but the adoption rate in enterprises is now going through the roof. Maven can seem daunting, but this presentation will equip existing Maven users with more efficient techniques and tools to overcome the biggest perceived Maven hurdles and build issues with ease.

We'll examine tools to help you find artifacts in central repositories, manage your corporation's internal Maven artifacts with a proxy tool such as Nexus, view and override dependency graphs, dependency management and multi-module best practices, create OS specific profiles, and leverage the latest Maven plugins for the top Java IDEs.

Topping it off, we will review migration paths from Ant, and why Maven just makes sense with your company's use of the ever growing web of open source libraries. This presentation will take beginning and mid-level Maven users up to a higher level of efficiency and mastery.

Prerequisite: Basic Maven knowledge

By Matthew McCullough

Cloud this, cloud that. It's all we are hearing about these days. And whether buzz-worthy or not, you need to get in-the-know so that you can talk effectively about how this could fit into the application strategy on your next project. Leverage 100s of hours of research distilled into a 90 minute presentation. Get bootstrapped with what cloud computing is and isn't, who the players are in this space, what unique features each offers, and then how Google is completely changing the game.

We'll navigate through a some demos of building and deploying an app live to the Google App Engine, and talk about the excellent tooling that the framework provides. Lastly, we'll put a reality check on cloud computing, and GAE specifically, looking at pitfalls and gotchas. You'll walk away having a thorough knowledge of cloud computing basics and the ability to build a practice app for GAE.

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.

For an intermediate-level audience.

By Ted Neward

So you know the platform security model, and now you want to use it in new and interesting ways, like creating a custom Policy implementation, a custom Permission, or create a custom security context in which code will execute. Perhaps you even wish to make certain objects accessible only to those with the right permissions, or cryptographic key. Nothing could be easier, despite Java security's reputation as a dark and arcane place.

In this presentation, we'll pick up where the "Platform Security" talk leaves off, and demonstrate how to engage the security model of the JVM at a much deeper level, regardless of your favorite programming language: Java, JRuby, Groovy, Scala, ....

Prerequisite: The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Platform Security

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

History is littered with the stories of iconoclasts--people who truly stood out as pioneers, lateral thinkers, and in some cases, outright heroes--and their successes and failures. From the baseball management vision of Branch Hickey to the glassblowing vision of Dale Chihuly to the engineering design vision of Steve Jobs, iconoclasts have changed our world in subtle and profound ways, sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly.

For an industry that seems so ripe and so rife with "special personalities", it would seem that programming is tied up deeply with iconoclasm. But what defines the iconoclast, what demarcates the "true" iconoclast from the mere pretender, and how can we use the characteristics of the iconoclast to change our own immediate surroundings for the better?

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

For so many Java developers, the java.util.* package consists of List, ArrayList, and maybe Map and HashMap. But the Collections classes are so much more powerful than many of us are led to believe, and all it requires is a small amount of digging and some simple exploration to begin to "get" the real power of the Collection classes.

In this presentation, Java developers will see the basic breakdown of the Collection API designs, the relationship of the interfaces to the implementations, how to create a new Collection implementation, and how the new Collections introduced as part of JSR-166 (the concurrency JSR) and Java6 make their programming lives easier.

By Ted Neward

Much noise has been made in recent years about functional languages, like Scala or Haskell, and their benefits relative to object-oriented languages, most notably Java. Unfortunately, as wonderful as many of those benefits are, the fact remains that most Java developers will either not want or not be able to adopt those languages for writing day-to-day code. Which leaves us with a basic question: if I can't use these functional languages to write production code, is there any advantage to learning about them? The short answer is yes, for the fundamental premise--"I can't use functional code on my Java project"--is flawed. Java developers can, in fact, make use of functional ideas, and what's better, they don't even have to reinvent them for Java--thanks to the FunctionalJava library, many of the core primitives--interfaces that serve as base types for creating function values, for example--already exist, ready to be used.

In this presentation, we'll go over some basic functional concepts, then start seeing how they apply in the FJ library, and show how to use FJ and functional ideas on common Java programming tasks. Let the excuse "I can only use Java" finally be consigned to the rubbish bin, once and for all.

By Ted Neward

Once you've learned the core Collections clases, you're done, right? You know everything there is to know about Collections, and you can "check that off" your list of Java packages you have to learn and know, right?

In this presentation, we'll go over what's missing from the Java Collections library, what is provided via other sources (Google and Apache, among others), and what you can provide for yourself, including a brief foray into the world of functional programing, and how it can make your Java code more elegant.

Prerequisite: Busy Java Developer's Guide to Collections

By Pratik Patel

Performance tuning any application is a black art that can consume much time. Fortunately, Java has many tools that can aid in this effort. There also are a number of basic tips that can help to analyze and fix performance problems. The Java memory model is usually something that you don't need to tune, but for high performance applications it is necessary to tweak. While there are a number of advanced things that can be done to performance tune an application, we'll discover that the simple, basic things are all that are usually needed to make your apps fly.

This session looks at how to setup and run an application with profiling tools and monitoring tools. We'll setup an application to run and put it under heavy load. While running, we'll interactively monitor it and look for problems and how to go about finding and fixing them. We'll also cover the basic issues you should look for when performance tuning. We'll look at memory management and how to tune it appropriately. We'll also look at some of the Java 6 tools available to monitor performance and look at the JVM internals. We'll focus on the simple things that can be done right away and then look at some more advanced tweaks to identify and fix performance issues. Along the way, you'll lear

By Pratik Patel

As with many technologies, the basics are easy. The hard part comes when the developer needs to do sophisticated integration, development, and testing as part of an enterprise application. A large enterprise application requires the developer to think of issues that affect the development, scalability and robustness of the application. This presentation will cover the advanced topics described below with a focus on the new persistence features in Spring 3.0 and JPA 2.0.

A large enterprise application often will have several sub-projects that each contain their own JPA persistence unit. This opens up a number of questions around how to organize the persistence units and how the code between sub-projects should interoperate. Developers will gain insight into these issues and will see a couple of solutions using live code examples. Many enterprise applications require integration with an application server's JTA mechanism. JTA integration allows for JPA components to work with container managed transactions and distributed transactions. A typical usage scenario for JPA & JTA is this: read from a database using JPA, perform some business logic, put a mess

By Pratik Patel

JUnit 4 is the latest release for the venerable unit testing framework used by all Java developers. JUnit 4 introduces many enhancements and features over Junit 3. This session focuses on using these new features. Code examples will drive this presentation to help the attendee understand the best way to start using the new features. We'll also cover core unit testing principles to refresh everyone's understanding of unit testing best practices.

This session on JUnit 4 covers the new features that will help accelerate the writing of your unit tests. These new features also open up new possibilities in test quality and test organization. We'll also look at how to introduce JUnit 4 for new tests while still being to run JUnit 3 tests simultaneously. Throughout we'll also look at unit testing best practices and how JUnit 4 helps to implement them.

By Pratik Patel

Dynamic languages running on the Java Virtual Machine are starting to gain traction for software development, specifically for large enterprise projects. This session explores obstacles to introducing dynamic languages into the enterprise, example applications that can ease the way, and issues surrounding integrating a dynamic language to Java projects. Using several code examples that demonstrate the power of using a dynamic language like Jruby or Groovy, attendees will gain insight into how dynamic languages are making in-roads to the enterprise. This session focuses on non-GUI related usages – whereas most people think of dynamic languages for Web development. The target audience for this session is enterprise developers and enterprise architects.

Dynamic Languages for the JVM for the enterprise Why even bother using a dynamic language when Java works for me? When's the right time to use a dynamic language? Where's the right place to start using a dynamic language? Obstacles you'll face: political, developer training, integration Aren't dynamic languages just good for Web stuff? Examples of dynamic languages in the enterprise Code demo: sophisticated scripting on the JVM – building integrating with databases and messaging (JMS)

By Pratik Patel

We've all heard about virtualization for deploying applications. How about leveraging virtualization for development? In this session, we'll look at some time saving tips and build a virtual VM for development and testing.

We've all heard about virtualization for deploying applications. How about leveraging virtualization for development? In this session, we'll look at some time saving tips and build a virtual VM for development and testing.

By Mark Richards

In the book "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know" (O'Reilly, 2009) I wrote about the importance of design patterns as a useful means of communication between architects and developers. Equally important to patterns is an understanding of AntiPatterns - things that we repeatably do that produce negative results. AntiPatterns are used by developers, architects, and managers every day and are one of the main factors that prevent progress and success. In this session we will look at some of the more common and significant development and architecture antipatterns. Through coding and design examples, you will see how these antipatterns emerge, how to recognize when the antipattern is being used, and most importantly, how to avoid them. By attending this session, you will be part of a movement to reduce the AntiPattern catalog from hundreds of entries to only a few.

Agenda - What are anti-patterns? - Factors that cause anti-patterns - Common software and architecture anti-patterns I have selected 7 of the most common anti-patterns I see continually in the industry and in my travels. We will be going into the details of each of these anti-patterns.

Prerequisite: None

By Mark Richards

One way to stop a conversation dead while at a party or gathering is to mention you are a software architect. Why? Because it takes about an hour (complete with Powerpoint slides) to explain what you do for a living. By then the person you are talking to is so bored they would rather sit in a corner licking nine-volt batteries. The problem is that no one inside or outside our industry really knows what a software architect is or what they do. In this highly interactive (and slightly humorous) session we will take a deep dive into the role a software architect plays in the IT industry. We will explore the characteristics an architect needs to have, and the elements that make a good architect and a bad architect. Through amusing antidotes and real-world examples, we will see how to become an effective software architect and help shape the industry in terms of the role and title of software architect.

Agenda During the introduction we will talk about the roles an architect plays, architect certification, and the decisions an architect typically makes. We will then take a deep dive into the qualities of a software architect, including Leadership and Communications, Technical Knowledge and Breadth, Domain Knowledge, and Methodologies. Interspersed into the mix will be some amusing anecdotes of my experiences as an architect, with a few jokes and humor thrown in for good measure

Prerequisite: None

By Mark Richards

In previous years I have given sessions related to my book "Java Transaction Design Strategies", where I have reviewed the basics of programmatic and declarative transactions and outlined the basic patterns described in the book. In this new session for 2009 I will focus on some of the pitfalls encountered while dealing with transactions and then how to develop an effective transaction strategy. I will start this session by describing and illustrating some of the common pitfalls I continue to see in both Spring and EJB. I will then describe four common transaction strategies you can use and implement, including a transaction strategy for high-speed transactions, a transaction strategy for client orchestration, a transaction strategy for use with API's, and finally a strategy for highly concurrent environments.

Note: This session assumes you know a little bit about transactions and have been using them in either Spring or EJB. It is not intended to be an introductory session on how transactions work. You can obtain a free PDF download of my transaction book at http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/JTDS to quickly come up to speed with transactions.

Agenda - Introduction - Common Transaction Pitfalls - API Transaction Strategy - Client Orchestration Transaction Strategy - High Concurrency Transaction Strategy - High Speed Transaction Strategy

Prerequisite: Java, Spring or EJB; some knowledge of transactions and JTA.

By Mark Richards

There's no doubt about it - messaging is quickly becoming a standard part of most application architectures, particularly as more and more companies struggle to find ways to integrate heterogeneous environments due to mergers, acquisitions, or to streamline existing application portfolios. The Java Message Service (JMS) API allows Java applications to implement messaging using a standard API, therefore removing the dependency of any particular messaging provider. In this introductory session we will take a look at the basics of messaging and the JMS API. I will start by discussing the different messaging models, the structure of a basic JMS message, and the JMS API interfaces and how they interrelate. Then through interactive coding I will show the basics of sending and receiving messages using the point-to-point messaging model and how to do request/reply processing. NOTE: this session is meant to be an introduction to messaging and JMS - no prior JMS or messaging experience is needed for this session.

Agenda: - Messaging Introduction - JMS Message Types - Primary JMS Interfaces - Configuring Queues and Topics - Sending and Receiving Messages - Request/Reply Messaging

Prerequisite: None

By Mark Richards

This session covers some of the more advanced features of JMS messaging, and is intended for those who are familiar with JMS and messaging in general. Some of the topics I will be covering in this session include message grouping (where I will demonstrate sending a large JPG image using messaging), transacted sessions, client-based acknowledgement, and some various messaging design considerations and things to watch out for from a design and coding perspective. I will be doing live coding demonstrations to illustrate the techniques described in this session. Although this session is entirely JMS provider agnostic, I will be using ActiveMQ, a popular open source JMS provider, during the live coding demonstrations.

Agenda - Details behind the acknowledgement modes - Message grouping / sending images and documents - Transacted sessions - JMS Design Considerations - Common Messaging Pitfalls

Prerequisite: Some knowledge of messaging and JMS would be helpful

By Mark Richards

The Java Message Service (JMS) provides an standard messaging API that allows you to send and receive messages using a variety of messaging providers (including Java EE application servers). The Spring Framework takes this abstraction one step further by providing an robust JMS messaging framework that greatly simplifies message processing. In this session we will see how to use the JMS Messaging Framework provided in Spring 2.5. I will start by describing Spring's overall messaging architecture and how to configure the various beans needed for messaging. Then, through interactive coding I will discuss and demonstrate Spring's JMS Template. which is used for sending messages and receiving messages synchronously. I will then discuss and demonstrate Message Driven POJOs, which are Spring's answer for asynchronous message listeners. After attending this session you will have all the necessary knowledge and code examples to use JMS in your Spring applications.

Agenda: - Spring Messaging Framework Overview - Configuring Spring JMS Resources - Using the JMS Template - Using Message Driven POJOs

Prerequisite: Knowledge of JMS and Spring

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

By Brian Sletten

The human web is reasonably well in hand by now. We are getting pretty good at building systems that people find valuable and entertaining. We have not spent as much time concerned about our software friends. There is a ton a rich content available on the web that is too difficult to extract in automated ways using just XHTML, the meta tag and microformats. This talk will introduce you to some emerging technologies from the Semantic Web camp to enrich your web pages with useful information for both automated extraction and improved browsing experiences.

Meta tags and microformats are useful but will only get us so far. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the metadata substrate of the Semantic Web that will take us to the next level of machine-processability and the Web. It allows you to express fairly arbitrary relationships about people, places, things, and content in an open world way. It is trivial to mix and match terms, vocabularies, etc. and to have a rich expressive capability not bound by the limitations of the relational data model and XML schemas. GRDDL is a technology for generating RDF metadata from content on demand. This can include XML documents, XML-RPC requests, XHTML pages, etc. The content could include authorship

By Brian Sletten

The human-friendly Web is about nicely-formatted, accessible content for users to browse. There is an emerging Data Web that relies on technologies from the Semantic Web stack to link increasingly rich connections between various data sources. SPARQL and RDF are the main tools for expressing and using this connectivity. This talk will introduce you to one of the practical and accessible aspects of employing these ideas on the Web and in the Enterprise.

Getting people to come to consensus on common models and schemas is usually the hardest part of any data integration strategies. These technologies help lower the bar on both the technical and social costs of stepping up your integration strategies. We will explore: an introduction to RDF and the SPARQL query language the fantastically successful Linked Data project that connections billions of interrelated content how to include relational data in the mix how to include enriched Web pages in the mix how to build client-friendly applications on top of this information

Prerequisite: The Semantic Web: The Future, Now and Rich Web Pages : Publishing Semantic Content with GRDDL and RDFa would both be helpful but are not required

By Brian Sletten

The goal for web services was always to reduce our burden by increasing the potential for reuse of business functionality. Somehow, we got lost along the way in a morass of confusing, unfulfilling and downright broken technologies.

While we are interested in pursuing REST-based systems for managing information, we need some strategies for tying it all together sensibly. If we abandon WSDL, SOAP and UDDI, what do we replace them with? This talk will walk you through combining resource-oriented strategies with technologies from the Semantic Web to describe, find, and bind to services in dynamic, flexible and extensible ways.

We will start to blur the distinction between data, documents, services and focus on information and how it is connected to what we already know.

This talk will introduce you to strategies for building on individual REST services to produce a well-described, dynamic, discoverable fabric of services that can be used in a variety of scenarios including: finding data sources finding transformation services orchestrating these sources and services in reusable ways publishing discoverable services

Prerequisite: The Semantic Web: The Future Now, Give it a REST and SPARQL : Querying the Data Web would all be helpful talks to have attended

By Venkat Subramaniam

This fast paced presentation is intended for experienced Java programmers. You will start by learning what Groovy is.

The presentation will quickly take you though several features in Groovy including typing, closures, working with strings and collections, Builders, interoperating with Java, and creating DSLs.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Projects often start out simple, but soon become complex and turn into a lose cannon. Organizations are struggling to maintain and evolve software. Poor code quality is a significant part of that problem. Improving the quality of code is critical to success of enterprise projects.

In this presentation we will discuss ways to identify code smell. We will discuss several code smells and how to clean it up. We will also discuss proactive ways to avoid that smell in the first place.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Testing is a key ingredient to the success of a project. However, testing becomes awfully hard when your application deals with dependencies and that is often the reality.

In this presentation we will discuss how to approach testing when the code has dependencies. We will discuss tools, techniques, languages, and principles that can help decouple, mock, and help us effectively test your application code.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Scala is a static fully object-oriented, functional language on the JVM. While taking advantage of the functional aspects, you can continue to make full use of the powerful JVM and Java libraries.

In this presentation we will take a in depth look at what Scala is, its strengths, weaknesses, and why, when, and where you'd use it on your applications.

By Venkat Subramaniam

In this presentation we will take a quick walk though the issues with concurrency and how the solutions provided in Scala and Clojure help address those.

The gaining popularity of multi-core processors has rekindled the concurrency question: How do you effectively implement multithreaded applications on the Java platform? The familiar approach in Java is to create threads and to manage access to shared mutable state using synchronized locks. This approach to concurrency is fraught with hard work and uncertainties. Have you marked the appropriate methods synchronized, did you decorate the relevant fields volatile, did you properly construct the mutually exclusive regions of code, and is there a potential for deadlock lurking in the code. In this talk you'll learn about alternate ways to tackling concurrency on the JVM. One approach i

By Venkat Subramaniam

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are languages targeted at a particular problem and domain. They have context and are fluent. They help users of applications at various levels to easily communicate with your application. Developing DSLs, however, are not easy. You could easily get dragged into using parsers and tools with steep learning curve.

In this presentation, we will look at various options to create DSLs on the Java platform. We will focus on external DSLs–these give you the absolute flexibility to chose syntax, but involve the most work as well. We will look at various tools and techniques that can ease this development effort.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Java is a well established language, that has been around for more than a decade. Yet, programming on it has its challenges. There are concepts and features that are tricky. When you run into those, the compiler is not there to help you.

In this presentation we will look at various concepts that you will use in general programming with Java. We will discuss the issues with those and how you can improve your code. We will look at concepts you can do better and those you should outright avoid.