Central Ohio Software Symposium

May 19 - 21, 2006 - Columbus, OH


Columbus Marriott North
6500 Doubletree Avenue
Columbus, OH   43229
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NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in ColumbusJune 7 - 9, 2013.
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Session Descriptions

Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.

Introduction to Tapestry

This session delves into details about building web applications with Tapestry, covering configuration, templates, and separation of concerns.

Pragmatic Extreme Programming Part 1: Planning & Design

This session begins a detailed discussion about how to actually get XP done in the real world (and what to tell your boss). This session includes artifacts (project tracking sheets, code coverage reports, etc.) from real XP projects.

Pragmatic Extreme Programming Part 2: Architecture, Coding, and Testing

Continues the discussion from Part 1, focusing on how to keep the benefits of XP without sacrficing it's effectiveness. This session shows real artifacts of XP in action.

Real-world Agile Development

Lots of developers want to use Agile development technique but don't know where to start. This session discusses how to get started with Agility, the key benefits you can expect, and the pitfalls to avoid.

Testing with Selenium

This session describes the use and workings of Selenium, the open source web user interface testing tool.

The Productive Programmer

This session shows you how to become a more productive programmer every day by using tools that you didn't know you already had.

Web Application Security Vulnerabilities

This session highlights common mistakes made by web programmers, stating the problems and avoidance techniques.



David Geary - Author of Graphic Java, co-author of Core JSF, member of the JSF Expert Group

Ajaxian Faces

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

JSF: State of the Art

In 2005, JSF hit its stride, as evidenced from overwhelming support from both vendors and the open-source community. JSF 1.0 had plenty of holes, but open-source projects have arisen to address those needs. This session takes a look at three of those projects: Tomahawk (MyFaces component library) FaceletsSeam

JavaServer Faces: A Whirlwind Tour

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

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

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

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

Killer Web UIs

User interfaces are usually the most turbulent aspect of an application during development. Constant tinkering with the UI means constant changes to your code, so as a UI developer, you want to minimize the scope and effects of those code changes.

Open-source Java provides two powerful software packages that help you manage UI complexity: Tiles and Sitemesh. Tiles composes webpages from discrete regions of your user interface known as tiles. A tile contains a JSP page for layout and one or more JSP pages for content. Sitemesh decorates webpages with decorators that can be associated with URL patterns. Once you set up your decorators, you can decorate pages that match a decorator's URL pattern.

Shale: Turbo-charge your JSF Apps

JavaServer Faces is a well designed user interface framework, but it lacks a number of features you might otherwise expect out of the box; for example, JSF does not explicitly provide support for client-side validation.

So, from the folks that brought you Struts, comes Shale, a collection of useful enhancements to JSF. A top-level Apache Software Foundation project, Shale adds some really cool features to vanilla JSF, including:

Web flow: script dialog flow Remote Method Calls: easily call JavaBean methods from JavaScript Tapestry-like views: code views in pure HTML Use Apache Commons Validator validators on the client or server, or both JSF testing framework: mocks for easy JSF testing

There's a lot of cool stuff in Shale that makes JSF a much more compelling proposition. Come see what it's all about.



Justin Gehtland - Founder of Relevance, co-author of Better, Faster, Lighter Java

Advanced Hibernate

Hibernate is easy to get started with, but can sometimes be hard to make efficient or secure. In fact, the default settings for Hibernate createapplications that will run slowly, cause unwanted round trips to the database, and may be more restrictive and/or permissive from a security standpointthan you would otherwise want.

Ajax Architecture

Ajax applications have unique architectural challenges and opportunities. This presentation will show you how to take advantage of the Ajax's strengths, and work around its quirks.

Introduction to Hibernate

O/RM (Object/Relational Mapping) seeks to eliminate repetitive or tedious work enabling the CRUD (create, read, update, delete) that underlies most applications. Hibernate is a popular, open-source O/RM tool that uses reflection (instead of code generation, like EJB, or bytecode injection, like JDO) to manage your persistence layer. This session will introduce you to Hibernate. After an overview of common usage scenarios, including web and enterprise applications, we'll examine the basics of getting Hibernate running. We'll cover the mapping file format and syntax, including common relational mapping structures. Then, we'll examine the Hibernate API for interacting with the framework. Finally, we'll cover the common architectural decisions you'll have to make as you include this (or any other) O/RM framework.

Java Platform Security and JAAS

The Java platform is built from the ground up with security in mind. This talk will introduce the security features of the J2SE, building quickly from the basic classes to realistic examples. You will learn the core APIs: SecurityManager, AccessController, Permissions and Policy JAAS Subjects, Principals, and LoginModules

Spring Dependency Injection

Dependency Injection (DI) is the cornerstone of Spring. The core concept is quite simple, but (surprise!) actual practice can become complex. To take full advantage of Spring DI, you need to understand not only the basics on configuration, but also the container lifecycle model and the various hooks provided by the framework.

Spring Intro

The Spring framework is one of the fastest growing open source frameworks. New job postings are gaining rapidly, and many customers are adopting Spring instead of heavier alternatives. In this session, we’ll introduce Spring. You’ll see how Spring can give you much of the power of EJB, without the complexity or pain.

Spring uses concepts like dependency injection and aspect oriented programming to ease standard enterprise development. Spring developers write plain, ordinary Java objects (POJOs), instead of sophisticated components. In this session, you’ll see a basic Spring application. You’ll also see some details about some of the enterprise integration strategies, including:

• Spring AOP • Transactions • Persistence • Model/view/controller

When the session is over, you won’t be an expert, but you should have a much clearer understanding of what Spring does, what it doesn’t do, and why it’s growing so rapidly.

Spring Security with ACEGI

Spring offers developers a simpler, more robust method for configuring applications. These benefits extend to security through the ACEGI framework. ACEGI makes the otherwise daunting task of securing your application logical and straightforward. More importantly, through its support for single sign-on provision through Yale's CAS system and its ability to provide instance-level authorization, Spring extends the common security model of most J2EE apps beyond what they are traditionally capable of.



Kirk Knoernschild - Software Developer & Mentor

Agile Architecture

Traditionally, we attempt to make the right architectural decisions early due to the significant anticipated cost affiliated with making incorrect decisions. But this contradicts agile practices which have taught us to embrace change. So how do agile and architecture come together? Conceptually, the goal of agile architecture must be to eliminate the architectural significance of change by crafting software that can easily adapt to change. In practice, developing agile architecture is much more difficult.

Benefits of the Build - A Case Study in Continuous Integration

Agile processes such as XP and RUP advocate continuous integration, where shorter iterations produce an incremental and functional growth of the system. The fundamental component of any Continuous Integration strategy is an automated and repeatable build. In addition to ensuring your application is always in a functional state, a robust build strategy enables a number of other important lifecycle activities.

Dependency Management Techniques

Why is software so difficult to change? When you establish your initial vision for the software’s design and architecture, you imagine a system that is easy to modify, extend, and maintain. Unfortunately, as time passes, changes trickle in that exercise your design in unexpected ways. Unlike what you had anticipated, each change begins to resemble nothing more than another hack, until finally the system becomes a tangled web of code that few developers care to venture through. Eventually, modifications to the software intended to improve the system have the opposite affect of breaking other parts of the system. The software is beginning to rot.

GOF Patterns Applied

Design Patterns are proven and powerful techniques that can help improve the resiliency, maintainability, and extensibility of your applications. However, overusing or misapplying patterns is a common mistake often times resulting in applications that are over-architected, and resemble a tangled web of classes. How can patterns be applied to achieve the goal of better software?



Ramnivas Laddad - Author of AspectJ in Action, Principal at SpringSource

Enterprise AOP with AspectJ

Enterprise application development is a gold mine for applications of AOP. There are many crosscutting concerns found in a typical enterprise application, ranging from well-known security and transaction management to application- and technology-specific concerns. Using AOP leads to implementations that are easy to understand and easy to change.

Performance Monitoring in J2EE Applications

J2EE has become the main new platform for enterprise application deployment. Good performance is an important business requirement. Supporting this requirement needs application profiling during the development phases and performance monitoring after application deployment. Come to this session to understand challenges and choices in monitoring J2EE applications.

Spring AOP in Depth

Support for aspect-oriented programming is an important part of the Spring framework. It is the AOP support that allows keeping implementation of functionality such as transaction management and security out of your POJOs. While many developers only use aspects provided with Spring, once you understand how it all works, you can make a better use of those aspects, extend them, and write brand new aspects.

Testing Strategies for Web Applications

Ever wondered if you can automate testing of your web application, but couldn't produce a satisfactory solution? If so, this is the session for you! Attend this session to understand the alternatives you have for unit and functional testing of web applications.

The State of AOP

A lot is happening in the field of Aspect-oriented programming (AOP). AspectJ and AspectWerkz, the two leading AOP implementations, have merged, bringing in their respective strengths. The merged version, AspectJ 5, adds many new features aimed at simplifying writing and deploying aspects. The new features include an annotation-based and XML-based syntax to define aspects, support for new Java 5 concepts, and load-time weaving. The tools support for AOP continues to improve, as well. Further, the most popular IOC framework, Spring, enables integrating aspects written in AspectJ. There is also serious discussion and preliminary work going on to support AOP right into the VM itself. All in all, there is a lot to learn about the changes in the exciting field of AOP. This session is designed to help you get up to date with all these changes.



Mark Richards - SOA and Integration Architect, Author of Java Message Service

EJB3 Core Specification (JSR-220)

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

Intro to Java Persistence API (JPA)

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

Java EE Command Pattern Architecture

Tired of dealing with EJBs but cannot use other frameworks like Spring? How would you like to replace all of your remote Stateless Session Beans with POJOs and still access them remotely within Java EE? By using the Java EE Command Pattern we can write EJBs as POJOs and solve many of the issues facing EJB, including testability, configuration complexity, and performance, and still remain within the boundaries of the Java EE container. The Java EE Command Pattern is a simple pattern that can significantly reduce the complexity of large-scale Java EE enterprise applications. In this session we will explore the numerous issues facing a typical EJB architecture and learn how the use of the Java EE Command Pattern can solve these issues. We will walk through the different design alternatives and see how the command pattern is implemented in both EJB3 and in Spring. Through interactive coding examples you will learn what components make up the Command Pattern framework and what simple coding changes are required to convert a complex remote EJB-based application to a much simpler remote POJO-based application.

The Enterprise Service Bus: Do We Really Need It?

There has been a significant amount of buzz in the community and industry about the definition and role of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), particularly within the area of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). In this product-agnostic high energy session we will take a step back and consider whether we really need an ESB. Through real-world application and architecture scenarios we will see where an ESB would be helpful and where it would be overkill. We will take a look under the hood and find out just what an ESB is really doing, and take a quick look at JBI (JSR-208) and see the impact it has on the ESB worls. Then, using product-agnostic coding examples we will learn what an Enterprise Service Bus is supposed to do, then answer the question about whether the ESB is just a bunch of hype or if we really need it.



Jared Richardson - Agile coach and co-author of Ship It

Pragmatic Tracer Bullets

Are your product designs hit or miss? Do you have trouble building a loosely coupled system? Is your code incestuous? Refactoring not an option with your code base? Tracer Bullets help keep your project out of the fire.

Tracer Bullet Development:

* helps you create great software
* lends itself to an iterative cycle
* can be used for demos early and often
* is easily refactored
* allows your teams to work in parallel
* makes a very testable system

Software Development Techniques

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

Software Tools That Make Life Easier: Part One

a.. Do you spend more time fighting your tools than writing code? b.. Do you avoid merging your code with your teammates because of “Integration Hell”? c.. Do the same bugs keep sneaking back into your product? d.. Do your builds depend on the roll of the dice?

A good set of infrastructure tools can go a long way toward smoothing out these and other problems. Come see how to make your toolset work seamlessly in the background so you can Just Work. We'll cover source code management (SCM), build scripts, automated test harnesses, automatic builds, feature tracking and issue tracking.

Software Tools That Make Life Easier: Part Two

This talk is a continuation of Part One of the Tools talk. During Part Two we'll cover Continuous Integration, automated testing, bug tracking, and feature tracking.



Venkat Subramaniam - Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.

Groovy for Java Programmers

Object-oriented scripting languages, or agile dynamic languages, as some like to call those, are gaining programmers' attention. Groovy bring this excitement to the Java platform with its ability to generate byte code. You can use Groovy instead of Java for some parts of your application. By learning it, you can switch between the languages where you consider fit.

Java 5 Features, What's in it for you?

A number of new features have been introduced in Java. What benefit do these features offer you. Are there issues with using these features. For instance, when should you use annotation? The objective of this presentation is not simply to introduce you to the features, but to the effective use of these as well.

Open Source Tools for Agile Development

As a Java developer, you have taken the time to learn the basics of the language and relevant parts of its rich API. However, you need more than that to develop serious industrial strength applications. In this presentation, the speaker will introduce you to a number of open source tools which you can use to improve your application quality and your development process.

Portal Standards and implementation

Portals and Portlets allow you to personalize your web application. However, developing and deploying portlets across different portals can be a challenge. What is WSRP and JSR-168. How are these related and how are these different? Are these competing technologies or do they work with each other?

Practices of an Agile Developer

You have worked on software projects with varying degree of success. What were the reasons for the success of your last project? What were the reasons for those that failed? A number of issues contribute to project success - some non-technical in nature. In this presentation the speaker will share with you practices in a number of areas including coding, developer attitude, debugging, and feedback. The discussions are based on the book with the same title as the talk.

Programming with Mock objects

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

Prudent OO Design

Is your code object-oriented? Developing with objects involves more than using languages like Java, C#, C++ or Smalltalk for that matter. From time to time, the OO paradigm stumps even expert developers. Agile programming becomes a mere act of hack if we code without knowing the OO principles. What are these principles – the ones that influence your design? In this presentation the speaker will present some of the challenges that are fundamental in nature. Then he will present OO Design principles and good practices for prudent development of OO code.

Refactoring your code - a key step in agility

Refactoring is one of the core practices in Agile Software Development. Refactoring is based on some core principles that apply to more than writing good code. But, what's refactoring? Why should you do it? How do you go about doing that? What tools are available to successfully refactor your App?

Working with Rules Engines

Rule based programming allows us to develop applications using declarative rules. These can simplify development in applications where such rules based knowledge is used for decision making.



Bruce Tate - Author of 3 JavaOne best sellers

Effective Teams

Most conferences will try to tell you that the secret to good software development lies with a process, or a technology, or an architecture. Here's a dirty little secret. You can build working software with an outdated two tier archtiecture, a waterfall process and COBOL. How? By building a great team. These techniques were used to build one of the most unique and complex up and coming Ruby on Rails sites.

Politics of Persistence

This session will help a Java developer choose a persistence framework. After the session, you will • Understand the core strengths and weaknesses of the main persistence frameworks in the Java space • Understand where marketing influences can impact persistence • Know what’s going on behind the scenes to impact the persistence pictures • Answer questions about persistence frameworks that might not be mainstream

Three Technologies to Watch

The state of the art is progressing rapidly, and dynamic languages are driving the revolution. Find out about these topics that will be central to programming. We'll discuss continuation servers, metaprogramming frameworks and functional langauges.

What's New in Spring 2

In this session, we'll review the new features of Spring 2.0. If you've been using Spring 1.x, you'll want to hear about the improvements.

Where Agile meets Argyle: New processes in established companies

Agile programming is a collection of core principles and techniques that allow software developers to create lighter, more responsive applications, and to have fun doing it. Many established organizations are either openly or sub-conciously hostile to many of the principles of Agile development.



Glenn Vanderburg - Chief Scientist, Relevance Inc.

Java Collections Power Techniques

The Java Collections framework is a cornerstone of Java development. It's been a part of J2SE for six years now. Every Java developer knows it—how to create Lists, Maps, and Sets, how to put things into them and take things out, and how to iterate over the contents. But there's a lot more to the collections framework than that -- and very few programmers really know how to exploit the power that's just under the surface.

Java Performance Myths

Performance myths about the Java platform abound, from the general "Java is slow", to the more specific "reflection is slow", "allocation is slow", "synchronization is slow", "garbage collection is slow", etc. Many of these myths have their root in fact (in JDK 1.0, everything was slow); today, not only are many of these statements not true, but Java performance has surpassed that of C in many areas, such as memory management.

JavaScript Exposed: There's a Real Programming Language in There! (Part 1)

With the sudden importance of Ajax, it's time to take JavaScript seriously. That means learning it the right way: looking at the fundamentals of the language and surveying its strengths and weaknesses, instead of just copying other people's poorly written examples.

JavaScript Exposed: There's a Real Programming Language in There! (Part 2)

Building on part 1, this talk dives deep into JavaScript's object model. We'll see how it differs from more mainstream object-oriented languages, and why. We'll explore how to hide some of those differences, as well as the reasons you might not want to. Additionally, we'll cover useful tools for JavaScript testing, debugging, and profiling.

Modern Project Infrastructures

The support infrastructure for your software project is a crucial factor for success. A new generation of tools offers significant benefits over their predecessors. This talk discusses how to choose the right mix of tools for a top-shelf project infrastructure.