Exploring Maven 2

Learn how to clean up your build process with Maven 2.

Spring-WS: Contract first web-services for Spring

Many web-service platforms make web-services easy by simply SOAP-ifying an object's interface. That's certainly a quick way to get started with web-services, but what happens when the object's interface changes?

Get Groovier with Grails

Inspired by the Ruby on Rails project, Grails brings the ease of web development and "convention over configuration" to the Java platform. We will learn how to create web applications using Grails, how to integrate it with Hibernate, and how to Ajax it, all using the built in features of Grails. This section assumes that you are familiar with Groovy or you have attended the “Groovy for Java Programmers” session. The session will be example driven with live coding where we will build a web application from scratch.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Applied AOP

Most people new to Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) are fed up with separation of concerns zealots explaining how great their techniques are at dealing with... logging. Ok, you get it. Logging is a cross-cutting concern that can be appropriately modularized. What else does AOP have to offer? A lot, it turns out. This talk will give an introduction to the motivations of AOP as well as a series of concrete examples drawn from enterprise and client side Java. Come learn how AspectJ-flavored AOP can begin to benefit you immediately either in development or production environments. Learn how to enforce architectural policies, find Swing threading issues, reduce the invasiveness of the Observer design pattern or even improve the reusability of your domain models. Now that Spring 2.0 provides support for AspectJ, the time has never been better to learn about these new (but backwards compatible) ways of thinking about building software.

Applied Design Patterns

Just about every modern software developer has a copy of the Gang of Four "Design Patterns" book sitting on a shelf; many of them have actually read it. The dark secret of the patterns community is that there is often a large gulf between whiteboard simplicity and real-world complexity. Language choice plays a part in the design (and even importance) of patterns. The situation is made even more confusing by the fact that many of the core patterns have now been "voted off the island" for one reason or another. This talk will give a pragmatic overview of the motivations behind design patterns and will focus on applying a handful of the GOF patterns to example scenarios in Java, Ruby and C#. A quick introduction to the role AOP plays in changing the patterns landscape will also be covered.

Applied REST

REST sounds like such a simple thing. But, what is it really? How do you convince your boss to let you try it when she has been sold on the equation SOAP = SOA + P(rofit)? How do you go about building, deploying, publishing and orchestrating web services without the (Un)Holy Trinity of SOAP, WSDL and UDDI?

Introducing the Semantic Web

Just as the world is feeling comfortable with the Web, Tim Berners-Lee et al inform us that what we have seen so far is just the beginning. His original plans at CERN were larger and grander. The Semantic Web is the new vision of machine-processable documents and metadata to improve search, knowledge discovery and data integration and management. While there are many naysayers chiding such grand visions, there are also pragmatic and useful technologies emerging that can be applied today.

Introduction to NetKernel : Software for the 21st Century

Imagine the simplicity of REST married to the power of Unix pipes with the benefits of a loosely-coupled, logically-layered architecture. If that is hard to imagine, it may because the architectures available to you today are convoluted accretions of mismatched technologies, languages, abstractions and data models.

NetKernel is a disruptive technology that changes the game. It has been quietly gaining mind share in the past several years; people who are exposed to it don't want to go back to the tired and blue conventions of J2EE and .NET. Not only does it make building the kinds of systems you are building today easier, it does it more efficiently, with less code and a far more scalable runway to allow you to take advantage of the emerging multi-core, multi-CPU hardware that is coming our way.

Come see how this open source / commercial product can change the way you think about building software.

Java5: The Language, The Libraries, The VM

Java5 introduced a whole slew of new features, including annotations (JSR 175), new language features (the enhanced for loop, generics, static imports, and more), new library support (java.lang.instrument, among others), and some interesting enhancements to the virtual machine itself.

Busy Developer's Guide to db4o

Tired of writing object-table mappings? For years, Java developers have wrestled with the problems of storing objects into relational format and retrieving them back again; for all that Hibernate and JDO and other O/R tools make it easier (though not easy) to do, isn't there another way? In this presentation, we'll explore an alternative approach, real object persistence, using the db4o toolkit (www.db4objects.com).

Java6: Exploring Mustang

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

Pragmatic XML Services

There's a lot of talk about web services, and most of it falls into one of two categories: lots of low-level talk about vendor-specific tools and extensions, or lots of high-level talk that never shows you a line of code. XML services aren't that hard, and in this talk, we'll see how, why and when to do one.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Annotations

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

Ajax Design and Architecture

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

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.

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.

Java/Ruby Integration with JRuby and ReST

You can have rapid web development with Rails without losing access to your critical Java code. With the explosion of the Ruby programming language, more developers will need a strategy for letting Java and Ruby interoperate. This session explores two strategies: JRuby and Rails-based web services.

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.

Agile Software Testing Strategies

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

Continuous Integration with Cruise Control

Continuous Integration is increasingly recognized as a vital practice in an Agile software shop. Traditionally it's been difficult to set up and administer. Today, that's no longer the case.

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.

Eclipse Projects You May Not Be Familiar With

Eclipse has met its goal of turning into a general purpose platform; it’s a lot more than just an IDE. Yes, there are plugins that add incremental functionality to Eclipse, but what's really going on behind the Eclipse Foundation's goal of taking over the world?

This session will provide an overview of the Eclipse Landscape, as well as provide a glimpse of what you can expect your Eclipse to look like in the next 12 months.

Test Driven Development in Eclipse

While many practitioners of TDD can perform all the steps manually, things are a lot more productive when you can automate some of the steps. But what's the difference between Test First, Test Driven Development, and Test Driven Design? Are they the same? This session will attempt to put these questions in context and show you how Eclipse can integrate and automate several development tasks.

Automating Business Value with FIT and FitNesse

The presentation will briefly discuss stories, the origin and authoring of story tests, and a demonstration of how FIT and FitNesse (FIT living within a Wiki) can be used to automate acceptance tests.

Creating, Telling, and Tracking User Stories

The participants of this session will become agile customers and product owners, using personas to create stories for a sample product development.

Losing Battles and Winning Wars: Adopting Agile

Adopting agile is different for each company, but most companies will go through some amount of change during the adoption of agile.

Ready, Set, Agile?

As with many methodologies, moving agile into an organizations poses larger challenges. Before jumping in, it helps to ask a few questions before "racing toward agility". This session will provide 3 tactical steps that can help your adoption of agile.

“Show Me the Numbers” - Agile Planning Tools and Techniques

This session will focus on tools and techniques for tracking an agile project plan from creation to project completion.

Spring Web Flow Jumpstart

Have you ever developed a web application with a long user action based on form input? Did you curse the Java community for their inability to address this very common application type? Well, attend this session about Spring Web Flow and you'll curse no more.

Spring XML Namespaces for Fun and Profit

Spring 2.0 introduces the new concept of XML-based configuration namespaces. These namespaces allow you to define domain specific languages for configuring your applications. This session will walk through the business case behind these namespaces as well as note Spring's own use of this system to simplify common configuration tasks. The session will finish with a live coding example of how to implement an XML namespace for your own application. This will include XML Schema definition, parser implementation, and packaging in a jar file for use by consumers.

The Spring Experience (in 90 minutes)

In this interactive session Ben walks you through the experience of building a simple Spring-powered application from the ground up.

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.

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.

The Google Web Toolkit, Part One

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

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

Ajax, Flash, and Java - Choosing The Right Rich Client Technology for Your Next Project

Today's users are beginning to demand richer and richer application experiences. Plain html pages simply don't cut it anymore. Applications like Google Maps (Ajax) and Yahoo Maps (Flash) show how the UI experience can be pushed to the next level. As an IT manager, how do you decide which route to take however? Should you use Ajax because it is the new "it" technology. Is Flash a viable option with its 95%+ browser availability? Perhaps Java deployed through web start is really the best choice in contrast to what the buzz would lead you to believe. This presentation takes a look at these three core rich client technologies from both deployment/user experience and ease of development perspectives.

Creating Polished Swing Applications

Too often, Swing applications are slow, ugly, and hard-to-maintain. It turns out that it doesn't have to be this way. Swing can be used to create highly-responsive, beautiful applications that are very maintainable. If this isn't consistent with your own experience, don't feel bad; its not very obvious how to make Swing sing.

Introducing the Eclipse Rich Client Platform

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

Easing into Agile

How do you get started with an Agile development methodology? Everyone has been talking about eXtreme Programming for years, but how do you get it introduced to your team? Many times, you're not simply transitioning from from one methodology to another -- you're introducing a methodology for the first time. Adding structure to a previously unstructured endeavor. Adding a touch of discipline where programmers once roamed free.

Groovy: The Next Generation of Java

This is the year of the dynamic scripting language. Ruby (and Rails) has won the hearts and minds of many independent software developers. JavaScript is experiencing a renaissance thanks to the wild success of AJAX and websites like Google Maps. And Groovy (JSR-241) brings the same level of excitement and "scripting goodness" to the Java platform.

Guerrilla Web Techniques

Frameworks? We don't need no stinkin' web frameworks. OK, so maybe that's overstating the case. Web frameworks do plenty of good things, but sometimes they can also be golden handcuffs. Too many web developers fall into the trap of thinking, "If it can't be done by my web framework, then it simply can't be done."

Holistic Testing

Mark Twain once said, "Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Do you feel the same way about Unit Testing? Are you actively testing your code, or are you just thinking about testing your code... some day... once you get some more free time...

Real World Web Services

In this talk, we'll survey the web services exposed by leading websites (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay) and discuss how they are driving the AJAX revolution. You'll see examples of RESTful, SOAP, and JSON web services, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Rolling Your Own Google Maps

The release of Google Maps was a "Wizard of Oz / Technicolor" moment for web developers everywhere. It didn't just change the way we look at mapping sites; it forever changed the way we look at all web sites. It put AJAX on the map, both figuratively and literally.