JRuby in Practice

Ruby has made an significant upward trend in the past few years. Alongside this trend Charles Nutter and the fantastic JRuby team have implemented a version of Ruby that runs on the JVM giving you the power of Ruby coupled with the advantages of running on the JVM. Come see for yourself how you can harness the power of rapid development in Ruby and still maintain all the Java interoperability you need to help you build on top of your existing systems.

Programming Clojure

Find out why Clojure is Java.next

• Clojure provides clean, fast access to all Java libraries
• Clojure provides all the low-ceremony goodness you know and love from dynamic languages
• Clojure includes Lisp's signature feature: Treating code as data through macros.
• Clojure's emphasis on immutability and support for software transactional memory make it a viable option for taking advantage of massively parallel hardware.

Domain Driven Design: Building Complex Software

DDD is a proven approach for modeling and building sophisticated software that deals with complex domains. Learn what it does, what kinds of projects it is best for, and how to start to implement DDD in your organization.

Engineering your DSLs

The easy part of implementing Domain Specific Languages is coding them. The hard part comes when you have to think about testing, documenting, evolving and providing appropriate editing interfaces for them.

How to Select a Technology

We're covering lots of cool new technologies, but which ones should you adopt? In this presentation we'll look at the technology adoption lifecycle, core vs incidental technologies, the importance of community, the benefits and costs of "cool", how "real options" can manage your risks and a range of other tools and techniques for successfully selecting and adopting new technologies for your enterprise projects.

Prerequisite: A slight confusion about which technologies to prioritize adoption of

NoSQL? No Problems

There are a wide range of NoSQL options, most of which solve very different problems. In the first part of this session we'll look beyond the hype to understand some real world use cases where NoSQL options can either replace or enhance a relational solution. You might be surprised at some of the reasons companies have chosen to successfully develop NoSQL based solutions.

In the second part of the session we'll look through a range of the common NoSQL offerings like CouchDB, MongoDB, Redis, Neo, Cassandra, Riak and hosted solutions like Googles BigTable and Amazons SimpleDB.

Requirements and Estimating

"What will it cost?" "When will it be done?". Unfortunately, almost a decade after the agile manifesto was written, these are still questions we have to answer on a regular basis.

In this session we'll cover a range of practical techniques for improving your requirements gathering and increasing the accuracy of your project estimates while also setting realistic expectations for your project stakeholders based on practical experience in specifying, quoting and delivering over four hundred applications over the last ten years.

Prerequisite: Previous experience with missing a milestone or blowing an estimated budget!

Complexity Theory and Software Development

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Some systems are too large to be understood entirely by any one human mind. They are composed of a diverse array of individual components capable of interacting with each other and adapting to a changing environment. As systems, they produce behavior that differs in kind from the behavior of their components. Complexity Theory is an emerging discipline that seeks to describe such phenomena previously encountered in biology, sociology, economics, and other disciplines.

Decision Making in Software Teams

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Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.

Gaelyk: Lightweight Groovy on the Google App Engine

You love Groovy and you're a believer in cloud computing. For a larger project you might choose Grails and hosting on Amazon EC2, but what if you want to take advantage of the nearly massless deployments of a cloud provider like the Google App Engine? You could make Grails work, but it's not always the best fit. Enter Gaelyk.

Learning Open Source Business Intelligence

Traditionally, business intelligence tools have been a high-cost part of any enterprise's software inventory. Recently, options have emerged that allow architects to build a credible business intelligence stack out of entirely open-source components. In this brief overview, we will demonstrate ETL, reporting, and analytics tool that can be deployed free or at low cost. Learn how to turn your company's transactional database into a rich data asset with a business-friendly user interface that integrates into your existing software infrastructure.

Open Source Business Intelligence Workshop

Once you're familiar with the concepts of data warehousing, star schemas, cubes, and pivot tables, then it's time to dive in and look at how the tools really work. Continuing from the quick demos in Part I, this workshop session will have you building an actual ETL process with Talend Open Studio. This hands-on exercise will acquaint you with the tooling and solidify the concepts you've learned.

Prerequisite: Learning Open Source Business Intelligence (or a solid grasp of BI concepts)

Practical Agile Database Development

Do your team's agile practices extend to the database? Agile methods are fairly well-understood as they apply to code, but these principles are not commonly understood or practiced on the databases that typically accompany enterprise software projects. Learn the tools, techniques, and mindset your team needs to make incremental improvements to the database’s design over time with confidence.

Aspect Oriented Programming With Spring AOP

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) complements Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) by providing another way of thinking about program structure. The key unit of modularity in OOP is the class, whereas in AOP the unit of modularity is the aspect. Aspects enable the modularization of concerns such as transaction management that cut across multiple types and objects. (Such concerns are often termed crosscutting concerns in AOP literature.)

Compile Time and Runtime Metaprogramming With Groovy

The dynamic nature of Groovy makes it a fantastic language for building dynamic applications for the Java Platform. The metaprogramming capabilities offered by the language provide everything that an application development team needs to build systems that are far more capable than their all Java counterparts. Taking advantage of Groovy's metaprogramming capabilities brings great new possibilities that would be very difficult or just plain impossible to write with Java alone. Building Domain Specific Languages in Groovy is easy to do once a team has a good understanding of the Metaobject-Protocol (MOP) and the method dispatch mechanisms used by the Groovy runtime environment.

Extending Grails - The Plugin System

Grails is a super powerful framework for building applications for the Java platform. Grails addresses the pain points that the other web applications frameworks leave you with. This session covers the details you need to further extend Grails to help Grails help you in your environment.

GORM Inside And Out

GORM is a super powerful ORM tool that makes ORM simple by leveraging the flexibility and expressiveness of a dynamic language like Groovy. With GORM developers get access to all of the power and flexibility of an ORM tool like Hibernate without any of the complexity.

Prerequisite: Advanced Grails

Grails - How to Build Enterprise Apps

Grails represents technology that offers great flexibility and power without the complexity introduced by other Java web application frameworks. Custom tag libraries are a snap. GSP Templates provide a simple mechanism for reusing UI elements. Sitemesh is integrated to help provide a consistent presentation across the entire application. GORM is super powerful ORM. Grails provides simple mechanisms for leveraging the power of Ajax.

Groovy For Java Programmers

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.

TDD with Groovy

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.

Implementing RESTful Web Services

RESTful web services have become the preferred approach to synchronously integrating heterogeneous systems. The architectural style’s success is due in large part to its simplicity. Furthermore, REST is based on a small set of widely accepted standards, such as HTTP and XML and requires far fewer development steps, toolkits and execution engines than conventional SOAP web services.

Resource-Oriented Concurrent Processing

Traditional concurrent development on the Java Platform requires in depth knowledge of threads, locks, and queues (oh, my!). Fortunately, new functional languages that run on the Java Platform, such as Scala, have made concurrent programming easier.

An alternate approach is to implement concurrent processes using a resource oriented computing (ROC) platform. At the heart of this ROC platform is a microkernel that allows processing to scale linearly as more CPUs are added. Consequently, developers are freed from the complexity of Java concurrency and functional programming.

Resource-Oriented Enterprise Service Bus

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides a platform for service provisioning. The core capabilities that enable provisioning across an enterprise include addressing, routing and transformations. Addressing is the ability to specify the location of a service regardless of transport. Service routing defines a message path across a number of servers or nodes and message content transformations are implemented using XML technologies such as XSLT and proprietary adapters.

Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA) goes beyond RESTful web services and provides a more extensible transport-independent foundation. Furthermore, ROA pushes the integration functionality to the edge of the network (as a URI), translating into better service management and scalability.

Improving Customer Conversations

It’s not easy to build the right product. People sometimes don’t know exactly what they need, want things that won’t help, and don’t imagine what’s possible. Agile project capture requirements on cards that contain a statement of want and benefit and notes on how to confirm the need is met. The intention isn’t to fully document the requirement on the card, but to make a note and create a reminder for a conversation with the customer. Whether you are using agile methods or traditional requirements, valuable products start with understanding the customers context, their problems, what they want, and how they use a product. However, most people aren’t born with the ability to speak naturally in user stories or fully formed requirements statements. So we must learn how to ask the right questions, draw out pertinent information and understand the customer’s world in those conversations.

Team Traps and How to Avoid Them

Some teams soar; others wallow, bicker and slog their way to uncertain results. Teams that soar have a few things in common: they have a shared goal, interdependent work, complimentary skills, mutual accountability. Slogging teams have a few things in common, too. They fall into predictable traps.

The New Work of management in Agile Organizations

Sometimes I see teams that reject all direction and go their own way, declaring, 'We are self-organizing'. They are missing an important fact. When someone is paid by a company to be part of a team, that team exists within the organizational context.

On the other hand, some managers hear the words "self-organizing" and believe the team is on its "own" that they can go into semi-retirement. But that's not the case, either.

In fact,both are risky over-simplifications.

When teams self-organize there's still plenty for managers to do, but management attention must shift from individual to team performance, and creating an environment where teams can excel.

Working with Complex Adaptive (Human) Systems

The world abounds with complex theories and complex advice about complex adaptive systems. But most of them aren't very helpful when it comes to knowing what to do to make a system work better. In this interactive session, we'll explore three levers that you can use to influence patterns of behavior in complex adaptive systems...such as software development teams.

High-Performance Scalability for Enterprise Applications with Enterprise Ehcache

Scaling enterprise applications is hard. Traditional architectures that use the database as a hub of application data and shared state lead to performance bottlenecks, excessive database license and hardware costs, and vendor lock-in. Many homegrown or patched-together solutions at worst don’t work and at best suck hours of developer time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Architectural Kata Workshop

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Fred Brooks said, "How do we get great designers? Great designers design, of course." So how do we get great architects? Great architects architect. But architecting a software system is a rare opportunity for the non-architect.

The kata is an ancient tradition, born of the martial arts, designed to give the student the opportunity to practice more than basics in a semi-realistic way. The coding kata, created by Dave Thomas, is an opportunity for the developer to try a language or tool to solve a problem slightly more complex than "Hello world". The architectural kata, like the coding kata, is an opportunity for the student-architect to practice architecting a software system.

Architectural Kata Workshop, Part II

Fred Brooks said, "How do we get great designers? Great designers design, of course." So how do we get great architects? Great architects architect. But architecting a software system is a rare opportunity for the non-architect. The kata is an ancient tradition, born of the martial arts, designed to give the student the opportunity to practice more than basics in a semi-realistic way. The coding kata, created by Dave Thomas, is an opportunity for the developer to try a language or tool to solve a problem slightly more complex than "Hello world". The architectural kata, like the coding kata, is an opportunity for the student-architect to practice architecting a software system.

Busy Java Developer's Guide to Advanced Collections

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?

Prerequisite: Busy Java Developer's Guide to Collections

Busy Java Developer's Guide to Android: Basics

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Android is a new mobile development platform, based on the Java language and tool set, designed to allow developers to get up to speed writing mobile code on any of a number of handsets quickly. In this presentation, we'll go over the basic setup of the Android toolchain, how to deploy to a device, and basic constructs in the Android world.

Busy Java Developer's Guide to Games

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Games? What do games have to do with good business-oriented applications? Turns out, a lot of interesting little tidbits of user-interface, distribution, and emergence, found normally in the games we play, have direct implications on the way enterprise applications can (or should) be built.

Busy Java Developer's Guide to MongoDB

MongoDB is designed for problems without heavy transactional requirements that aren't easily solved by traditional RDBMSs, including problems which require the database to span many servers.

Like other document-oriented database systems such as CouchDB, MongoDB is not a relational database management system. The database manages collections of JSON-like documents which are stored in a binary format referred to as BSON.

Busy Java Developer's Guide to Multi-Paradigm Design

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The Java Virtual Machine is home to several different languages beyond Java, many of which mix ideas (paradigms) together to create a flexible language. Languages which support these different paradigms can be awkward and hard to understand how to use at first.

Pragmatic Architecture

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Building an application is not the straightforward exercise it used to be. Decisions regarding which architectural approaches to take (n-tier, client/server), which user interface approaches to take (Smart/rich client, thin client, Ajax), even how to communicate between processes (Web services, distributed objects, REST)... it's enough to drive the most dedicated designer nuts. This talk discusses the goals of an application architecture and why developers should concern themselves with architecture in the first place. Then, it dives into the meat of the various architectural considerations available; the pros and cons of JavaWebStart, ClickOnce, SWT, Swing, JavaFX, GWT, Ajax, RMI, JAX-WS, , JMS, MSMQ, transactional processing, 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 Collections

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.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Functional Java

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.

Test Driven Development in Java: Live and Uncensored

One of the barriers to wider adoption of TDD is that it is best taught from within a team, and the technical challenges of writing tests frequently thwart those looking to teach themselves.

Common AntiPatterns and How To Avoid Them

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.

Prerequisite: None

Enterprise Integration Using Apache Camel

Apache Camel is a robust open source integration framework that handles routing and mediation tasks associated with enterprise integration. Camel allows you to quickly and easily route messages and integrate components in a distributed, decoupled manner. For example, using the Camel Java DSL, you can send and receive JMS messages in just a couple of lines of Java code. In this live coding session I will describe what Camel is, describe the overall architecture, show why it is useful, and demonstrate through live coding examples how to use the Camel Java DSL to write simple (and complex) routing logic. By attending this session you will learn Camel well enough to use it at work the next day.

The Art of Messaging

Messaging is both a science and an art. Messaging is a science with respect to the mechanics of the JMS API and the syntax for sending and receiving messages. However, messaging is also an art when it comes to applying the JMS API to solve real-world problems. In this session I will review some of the more common use cases for messaging and show techniques for significantly increasing both the performance and scalability of messaging-based applications. Using ActiveMQ, you will see how to create embedded brokers, how to use asynchronous logging with Log4J and JMS, and how to significantly speed up your messaging applications. In this session I will also describe and demonstrate some emerging trends in messaging, including RESTful JMS (that is, JMS over HTTP) and also AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). Come to this session to find out how much fun messaging can really be!

Prerequisite: Some knowledge of JMS and Messaging in general

HTML 5 Fact and Fiction

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For the last few years, the web has been all a-twitter about web 2.0 (and even the occasional reference to web 3.0.) Yes, the days of static web applications are officially over and while libraries like jQuery and Prototype make it easier to build modern applications, ultimately they are papering over issues in the web standards (and the browsers that implement them.) Today we're building to standards that are from the paleolithic era of web design but that's changing - and HTML 5 is a large part of that. In this talk, we'll discus just what HTML 5 is and why it matters. We'll show how you can build to HTML 5 today and which browsers support what. Thankfully, after many years of stagnation, the future of web applications looks bright!

JavaScript Beyond the Basics

JavaScript is one of the most widely used languages around and yet its also one of the most misunderstood. With Ajaxified UIs becoming the norm, this humble language is once again at the forefront.

Testing the Web Layer

While your project might have nearly 100% code coverage on the server tier, many projects ignore testing the web layer. With more and more code being pushed to the browser, a lack of tests for the client code begs for trouble.

jQuery: Ajax Made Easy

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Sure, Ajax might not be the hardest thing you'll have to do on your current project, but that doesn't mean we can't use a little help here and there. While there are a plethora of excellent choices in the Ajax library space, jQuery is fast becoming one of the most popular. In this talk, we'll see why. In addition to it's outstanding support for CSS selectors, dirt simple DOM manipulation, event handling and animations, jQuery also supports a rich ecosystem of plugins that provide an abundance of top notch widgets. Using various examples, this talk will help you understand what jQuery can do so you can see if it's right for your next project.

Agile Velocity

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The agile development process is all about early and often feedback. One aspect of feedback is how is the team doing... Are we accurate in our estimates? Are we consistent in our velocity? As velocity varies, what is it telling me?

Architecture: Non-Functional Requirements

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The agile focus of software development puts heavy focus on user requirements through user stories. However we can not lose sight of the non-functional requirements as well. The software could be written to the exact specification and desire of the user, however if it takes 5 minutes for a request response, or it only supports 2 users or it isn't secure, then we still haven't done our jobs as developers.

Debugging your Production JVM

So your server is having issues? memory? Connections? Limited response? Is the first solution to bounce the server? Perhaps change some VM flags or add some logging? In todays Java 6 world, with its superior runtime monitoring and management capabilities the reasons to the bounce the server have been greatly reduced.

Enter The Gradle

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This presentation introduces the audience to the power of Gradle through many real-world examples that are demonstrated live. By the end of the presentation, you'll understand how Gradle helps to elegantly solve the challenges that we face in our daily enterprise builds.

Enterprise Security API library from OWASP

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When it comes to cross cutting software concerns, we expect to have or build a common framework or utility to solve this problem. This concept is represented well in the Java world with the loj4j framework, which abstracts the concern of logging, where it logs and the management of logging. The one cross cutting software concern which seems for most applications to be piecemeal is that of security. Security concerns include certification generation, SSL, protection from SQL Injection, protection from XSS, user authorization and authentication. Each of these separate concerns tend to have there own standards and libraries and leaves it as an exercise for the development team to cobble together a solution which includes multiple needs.... until now... Enterprise Security API library from OWASP.

Security Code Review

Security concerns abound... According to Gartner 75% of all attacks are at the web application tier. There has never been a more urgent time to understand the security concerns and how to apply solutions to our web applications.

So you want to be an Architect

This session is a quick look at all aspects of being a corporate software architect. Whither you are a developer looking to move into the role of architect, needing to have an understanding of what is expected or already in the role of software architect looking for new and interesting ideas, this session is for you.

How to Approach Refactoring

You can't be agile if your code sucks. You know that you have to constantly refactor your code and design. But the questions is how? In this presentation, instead of looking at a laundry list of refactoring techniques, we will instead look at how to effectively approach refactoring and along the way discuss some core principles to look for.

Keynote: It could be heaven or hell (being a polyglot programmer)

Keynote discussing the benefits and challenges of being a polyglot programmer.

Objective-C for Experienced Programmers

This session is intended for programmers with good working knowledge in at least one OOP language and interested in learning Objective-C to develop Mac and iPhone Apps.

Scala Tricks

Scala is a very powerful hybrid functional pure object oriented language on the JVM. Scala is known for its conciseness and expressiveness. In this presentation we will look at some common tasks you do everyday in developing applications and see how they manifest in Scala.

Tackling Concurrency on the JVM

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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.

Test Driving Multithreaded Code

Once I got convinced about the benefits of TDD, I used it pretty extensively and consistently to drive the design and development of my code. So, it came as a surprise when I was trying to convince myself that those practices do not apply on a highly multithreaded code I was creating on a project. Thankfully, I set out to prove that TDD does not apply, but ended up proving myself wrong.

What's Brewing in Java

Java has come a long way, and yet there is so much that's happening in this space. In this presentation we will take a look at the exciting additions and changes coming up in the next version of Java.

Prerequisite: Good programming knowledge of Java

Beyond Scaffolding: A deeper dive into Spring Roo

In this session, we'll go beyond the Spring Roo basics and see what makes it tick. We'll learn how to guide Spring Roo with annotations, how to customize a Roo-generated application, and how to write a Spring Roo addon.

Introducing Spring Roo: From Zero to Working Spring Application in Record Time

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In this example-driven session we'll see how to swiftly develop Spring applications using Spring Roo. We'll start with an empty directory and quickly work our way up to a fully functioning web application. You'll see how Roo handles a lot of heavy-lifting that you'd normally have to do yourself when working with Spring. And we'll stop at a few scenic points along the way to see how Roo accomplishes some of its magic.

Modular Java: An Introduction to OSGi

Contrary to what you may have heard, OSGi is neither complex, nor heavyweight. In this session, I'll show you how OSGi can actually simplify application development rather than complicate it. We'll look at the benefits of modularity, the fundamentals of OSGi, and see how to develop basic OSGi bundles. We'll also see how a few gadgets in the OSGi toolbox can ease the development of OSGi bundles.

NoXML: Spring for XML-Haters

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In this presentation, we'll explore all of the ways to do bean wiring in Spring We'll take a pragmatic view of each style, evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, and applicability to varying circumstances.

Securing Spring

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In this session, I'll show you how to secure your Spring application with Spring Security 3.0. You'll see hot to declare both request-oriented and method-oriented security constraints. And you'll see how SpEL can make simple work of expressing complex security rules.

What's new in Spring

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In this session, I'll lead a guided tour through the latest that Spring has to offer. Whether you're a Spring veteran or a Spring newbie, there will be something new for nearly everyone.