Lone Star Software Symposium: Dallas
May 18 - 20, 2012 - Dallas, TX
Session Descriptions
Peter Bell - Evangelist/hacker for hackNY
Agile Recipes
You don't need to "do scrum" or "implement lean" to be agile.
Getting Started with Neo4j
Learn how to add Neo4j to your projects to add social, recommendation and other graph based capabilities to your applications.
NoSQL data modeling with Mongo and Neo4j
With NoSQL data stores you need to completely rethink how to model your data.
Practical Technology Selection and Adoption
What's the point attending a conference unless you do something with the knowledge you gain?
Professional Javascript development for the Java developer
Like it or not, with application servers like node.js and increasingly rich client MVC frameworks like backbone.js, Javascript is in your future.
The Lean Startup - for Enterprise Software Developers
Intuit and even the US government want to be "lean startups".
Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.
Build Your Own Technology Radar
A Technology Radar is a tool that forces you to organize and think about near term future technology decisions, both for you and your company.
Continuous Delivery Pt 1: Deployment Pipelines
Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. This workshop focuses on the Deployment Pipeline concept from Continuous Delivery.
Continuous Delivery Pt 2: Infrastructure
Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. This workshop focuses on the agile infrastructure required to implement a deployment pipeline and continuous delivery.
Functional Thinking
Learning the syntax of a new language is easy, but learning to think under a different paradigm is hard.
Howard Lewis Ship - Creator of Apache Tapestry
Backbone.js: Run Your Application Inside The Browser
Follow the trends and you'll notice that, increasingly, web applications are running in the browser. That can be great news … until you have to write the JavaScript for all that client-side behavior. Fortunately, a new breed of client-side MVC frameworks have emerged, including Backbone.js. You still have controllers, models, and views … just in the browser.
Modern Application Foundations: Underscore and Twitter Bootstrap
We're all increasingly in the business of writing richly interactive applications using HTML and JavaScript … that's a given. But the devil's in the details, and most applications get those details wrong. Building visually attractive applications that work in all browsers takes a lot of work ... and good as jQuery is, as more logic moves to the browser, something as sophisticated as jQuery is needed for data, not DOM, and that's Underscore.
Testing Web Applications with Geb
If you build web applications and cringe at the phrase "but how are we going to test it?" you're going to love Geb: the browser automation and testing tool. Geb is a Groovy framework for testing web applications: it builds on Selenium, but draws ideas from jQuery and elsewhere to make it productive and fun to test your applications in-browser.
Matthew McCullough - Head of Training, GitHub
Build Lifecycle Craftsmanship Tools
You've heard a bit about Git, Gradle, Jenkins, and Sonar, but are you putting them to use? Are you maximizing what they can offer in terms of standardized project models, faster incremental compiles, automated commit-triggered builds, and rapid source code analysis? In this intense presentation, live demonstrations will be given for all of the latest versions of the aforementioned tools and what they have to offer a highly proficient Java developer.
Git Workshop (Bring A Laptop)
Git is a version control system you may have been hearing a bit about lately. But simply hearing more about it may not be enough to convince you of its value. Getting hands on experience is what really counts. In this workshop, you'll bring your Windows, Mac or Linux laptop and walk through downloading, installing, and using Git in a collaborative fashion.
Prerequisite: Basic knowledge of a version control system. Subversion knowledge is a plus, but not imperative.
Gradle Workshop (Bring a Laptop)
Gradle. Another build tool? Come on! But before you say that, take a look at the one you are already using.
Whether your current tool is Make, Rake, Ant, or Maven, Gradle has a lot to offer. It leverages a strong object model like Maven, but a mutable, not predetermined one. Gradle relies on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) lifecycle like Maven, but one that can be customized. Gradle offers imperative build scripting when you need it (like Ant), but declarative build approaches by default (like Maven). In short, Gradle believes that conventions are great -- as long as they are headed in the same direction you need to go. When you need to customize something in your build, your build tool should facilitate that with a smile, not a slap in the face. And customizations should be in a low-ceremony language like Groovy. Is all this too much to ask?
Prerequisite: Knowledge of any build tool such as Ant, Maven, Rake, BuildR, Make, Leiningen, or SBT.
Jenkins Continuous Integration (Bring a Laptop)
The team dynamics and agile process revolution of the last several years has taught us that continuous integration (CI) is a necessary part of a healthy agile team. Jenkins (formerly Hudson) is the idea and footprint leader in the CI space. A recent survey stated that over 70% of all CI installations have Jenkins in their DNA. What's so awesome about this particular CI tool?
Get on board with a ground-up survey of how to install, apply, upgrade, and leverage the free an open source Jenkins Continuous Integration server for your build, whether it be Ant, Maven, Gradle, JavaScript, Rake, or just shell scripts.
Prerequisite: Knowledge of any build tool such as Ant, Maven, Rake, BuildR, Make, Leiningen, or SBT.
Sonar Code Metrics Workshop (Bring a Laptop)
You're serious about improving the quality of your code base, but with 10,000 lines of code, where do you start and how do you ensure the greatest ROI for the re-work your team members will perform?
Sonar is an open source tool that brings together the best of breed static and dynamic analysis of Java projects. The result is a unified view of problematic areas of your code on a time-line basis, allowing the team to attack the problems with the best ROI, and maintain a more watchful eye for positive and risky trends in the codebase in the future.
Prerequisite: Knowledge of any build tool such as Ant, Maven, Rake, BuildR, Make, Leiningen, or SBT.
Nilanjan Raychaudhuri - Author of "Scala in Action"
Simple concurrency with Akka
In this presentation I will introduce an open source tool called Akka. This tool is written in Scala and provides the right abstract level we need to write fault tolerant and scalable application in Java. Akka framework comes with three different approaches that we could use to build concurrent applications: Actors, STM (Software Transaction Memory) and Agent. I will discuss each of these approaches with code examples so that audience could see how these approaches works and some of its use cases.
Solving integration problems with Apache Camel
Enterprise integration is a hard problem. Not only you have deal with multiple applications build using various programming languages and deployed in various platforms, they also speak different protocols. In this presentation we will introduce you to an open source tool integration framework called Apache Camel. This tool implements all the well know integration patterns from "Enterprise Integration Patterns" book by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf and provides you with a nice DSL to integration heterogeneous systems.
Scala Koans - A new and fun way to learn a Scala programming language (Bring a Laptop)
Have you looked into Scala? Scala is a new object-functional JVM language. It is statically typed and type inferred. It is multi-paradigm and supports both object oriented and functional programming. And it happens to be my favorite programming language.
If you are interested in Scala, how you are planning to learn Scala? You probably are going to pick up a book or two and follow through some examples. And hopefully some point down the line you will learn the language, its syntax and if you get excited enough maybe build large applications using it. But what if I tell you that there is a better path to enlightenment in order to learn Scala?
Mark Richards - SOA and Integration Architect, Author of Java Message Service
AMQP: From Concept To Code
Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is a new way of looking at messaging that is quickly gaining in popularity and use, particularly in the financial services industry. Unlike JMS, which defines a standard API across platforms, AMQP defines a standard wire-level protocol across languages and platforms, finally making true cross-platform messaging a reality. In this session I will start by describing exactly what AMQP is and what problems it specifically solves (that JMS can't!). I will then describe the basic architecture and how AMQP routes messages, and then, through live interactive coding, demonstrate how to build a simple producer and consumer using RabbitMQ to send and receive AMQP messages. We will also take a brief look at other aspects of AMQP such as performance and how to guarantee that the message reaches a consumer.
Prerequisite: basic knowledge of general messaging
Enterprise Architecture Workshop
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is one of the most misunderstood terms in our industry. Ask 10 people what EA is and you will get 10 different answers. To better understand what EA is and how it impacts your company (and you!) we will go back in time to maritime Britain in the late 1700's. Through exercises in designing a fleet of war ships and making decisions about what to do with the fleet you will understand the various approaches, directions, and implications of EA and how necessary EA is to achieve any company goal. So put your admirals hat on and climb aboard this workshop for a maritime adventure you won't forget!
Enterprise Architecture Workshop Part 2
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is one of the most misunderstood terms in our industry. Ask 10 people what EA is and you will get 10 different answers. To better understand what EA is and how it impacts your company (and you!) we will go back in time to maritime Britain in the late 1700's. Through exercises in designing a fleet of war ships and making decisions about what to do with the fleet you will understand the various approaches, directions, and implications of EA and how necessary EA is to achieve any company goal. In part one the workshop you will decide on an EA approach and construct a fleet of ships based on that approach given a specific scenario, In part two of the workshop you will then engage those fleets in battles with others based on the different directions (project initiatives) discussed during the session. The fleet exercises you will be doing are specifically designed to reinforce the concepts presented in this session. This is a two-part workshop with workshop exercises in both Part 1 and Part 2, so it is important to attend both parts for the workshop exercises to work.
I will be handing out the rules for the fleet game we will be playing at the start of the exercises.
Integration Architecture: Concepts and Patterns
Very few applications stand alone anymore. Rather, they are combined together to form holistic systems that perform complex business functions. One of the big challenges when integrating applications is choosing the right integration styles and usage patterns. In this session we will explore various techniques and patterns for application integration, and look at what purpose and role open source integration hubs such as Camel and Mule play in the overall integration architecture space (and how to properly use them!). Through actual integration scenarios and live coding examples using Apache Camel you will learn which integration styles and patterns to use for your system and how open source integration hubs play an part in your overall integration strategy
The Art of Problem Solving
I commonly think of those of us in the IT industry as problem solvers. Whether developer, designer, or architect, we are all presented with problems and work to find a way to solve them, usually through technology. In my opinion this is what makes this industry so much fun. Let's face it - we all love challenges. Sometimes, however, the problems we have to solve are hard - really hard. So how do you go about solving really hard problems? That's what this session is about - Heuristics, the art of problem solving. In this session you will learn how to approach problems and also learn some the common techniques for solving them effectively. So put on your thinking cap and get ready to solve some easy, fun, and hard problems.
Prerequisite: An open mind and a willingness to learn how to better approach and solve problems
Nathaniel Schutta - Author, speaker, software engineer focused on user interface design.
Beyond jQuery
It's been ages since you copied random JavaScript off a nameless webpage and your JavaScript is every bit as elegant as any server side code. You know the ins and outs of jQuery and you've even built a plugin or three...but is that it? How do we build rich web applications without resorting to heavy weight proprietary components? How do we leverage HTML5 and everything it brings to the table? How do we craft elegant user experiences that integrate fully with the RESTful web services that are all the rage on the backend? How do we build apps that are at home on a 3.5 inch phone as they are on the 15 inch notebook? This talk goes beyond jQuery to explore new libraries like Backbone are bringing even more to the front end developer's toolbox.
Code Craft
Despite what some developers think, we spend a lot more of our time reading code, code that was often written by someone that isn't around anymore. How do we deal with this common scenario without resorting to burning our predecessor in effigy? Better, how can we write code in such a way that our successors will heap effusive praise upon us at the mere mention of our name? During this talk, we'll read actual code discussing ways it could be improved. As we work through real examples, we'll explore the importance of patterns, principles like SOLID and SLAP and essential practices like unit testing and continuous integration.
Designing for Mobile
The word just came down from the VP - you need a mobile app and you need it yesterday. Wait, you've never built a mobile app...it's pretty much the same thing as you've built before just smaller right? Wrong. The mobile experience is different and far less forgiving. How do you design an application for touch? How does that differ from a mouse? Should you build a mobile app or a mobile web site? This talk will get you started on designing for a new, and exciting, platform. Whether that means iPhone, Android, Windows Phone or something else, you need a plan, this talk will help.
JavaScript Libraries You Aren't Using...Yet
You're all over jQuery - you write plugins in your sleep - and before that, you were a Prototype ninja. Your team treats JavaScript like a first class citizen, you've even written more tests than Kent Beck. Is that all there is in the land of the JavaScript developer? Believe it or not, the JavaScript party hasn't stopped. What other libraries are out there? What do they offer? This talk will survey the field of modern JavaScript libraries getting you up to speed on what's new. We'll dive in just deep enough to whet your appetite on a wide variety of libraries such as Backbone, Underscore, Zepto and more.
Leading Technical Change
Technology changes, it's a fact of life. And while many developers are attracted to the challenge of change, many organizations do a particularly poor job of adapting. We've all worked on projects with, ahem, less than new technologies even though newer approaches would better serve the business. But how do we convince those holding the purse strings to pony up the cash when things are "working" today? At a personal, how do we keep up with the change in our industry?
The Mobile App Smackdown: Native Apps vs. The Mobile Web
Mobile is the next big thing and your company needs to there. But what does there actually entail? Should you build a native app? On which platforms? Do you have the skills for that? What about the web? Can you deliver an awesome experience using nothing but a mobile web browser? This talk will help you navigate these treacherous waters. We'll discuss the pros and cons of the various approaches and give you a framework for choosing.
The Who and What of Agile - Personas and Story Maps
Successful projects require any number of practices but if you don't know who you're building it for or what you're supposed to build, failure is a distinct possibility. How do we capture the who and what? Personas and story maps are two effective techniques that you can leverage. After discussing the basics, we'll break into small groups and you'll have a chance to actually try building a set of personas as well as a story map.
Ken Sipe - Architect, Web Security Expert
Complexity of Complexity
Of all the non-functional requirements of software development, complexity receives the least attention and seems to be the most important from a long term standard point. This talk will look at some of forces that drive complexity at the code level and at a system level and their impact. We will discuss what causes us to over look complexity, how our perception of it changes over time and what we can do about it?
Getting Agile Right!
Whether you are just getting started, or you’ve made an attempt and well… it could be better… a lot better, this session is for you. Ken has been working on Agile projects as a coach and mentor for a number of years. Come discover the common reasons teams fail to get it right. Bring your own challenges and lets discuss. This is set to be an engaging and illuminating discussion.
Groovy Power Tools
Groovy has been around for some time and is generally recognized as a highly productive object-oriented language with a tight association with Java. Groovy seems to be going through a second wave of popularity with a more diverse repertoire of benefits, including building, deploying and testing, in addition to rapid web development. The fastest growth of productivity tools are all powered by Groovy. Discover the Groovy Truth!
MongoDB: Scaling Web Applications
Google “MongoDB is Web Scale” and prepare to laugh your tail off. With such satire, it easy to pass off MongoDB as a passing joke… but that would be a mistake. The humor is in the fact there seems to be no end to those who parrot the MongoDB benefits without a clue. This session is about getting a clue.
OOP Principles
For decades object-oriented programming has been sold (perhaps over sold) as the logical programming paradigm which provides “the way" to software reuse and reductions in the cost of software maintenance as if it comes for free with the simple selection of the an OO language. Even with the renewed interests in functional languages, the majority of development shops are predominately using object-oriented languages such as Java, C#, and Ruby. So most likely you are using an OO language… How is that reuse thing going? Is your organization realizing all the promises? Even as a former Rational Instructor of OOAD and a long time practitioner, I find great value in returning to the basics. This session is a return to object-oriented basics.
Spock - Unit Test and Prosper
Spock is a groovy based testing framework that leverages all the "best practices" of the last several years taking advantage of many of the development experience of the industry. So combine Junit, BDD, RSpec, Groovy and Vulcans... and you get Spock!
This is a significant advancement in the world of testing.
Prerequisite: junit
Web Security Workshop
As a web application developer, most of the focus is on the user stories and producing business value for your company or clients. Increasingly however the world wide web is more like the wild wild web which is an increasingly hostile environment for web applications. It is absolutely necessary for web application teams to have security knowledge, a security model and to leverage proper security tools.
Venkat Subramaniam - Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.
Applying Groovy Closures for fun and productivity
You can program higher order functions in Groovy quite easily using closures. But the benefits of closures go far beyond that. Groovy has a variety of capabilities hidden in closures.
Automated testing tools and techniques for JavaScript
Programmers often complain that it is hard to automate unit and acceptance tests for JavaScript. Testability is a design issue and with some discipline and careful design we can realize good automated tests.
Creating DSLs in Groovy
Domain Specific Languages have two main characteristics, fluency and context. Creating external DSLs has the advantage of good validation. However, we have to struggle with parsers. Internal DSLs offer the benefit of using the language as the host and its compiler as the parser. For a language to be a host, it needs two important characteristics: low-ceremony and metaprogramming.
Grails beyond the Hello World
Grails is a powerful web development framework. You've heard and seen those demos that show how simple it is to create applications with it. But, you're not convinced. Your realities are not that simple, you have existing database to integrate with, you have existing applications to run side-by-side, and you're worried how flexible Grails is to meet those needs.
Integrating Groovy and JVM Languages
Java - Groovy integration just works, for most part. Calling into Java code from Groovy is pretty straight forward. Calling into Groovy from Java is easier than you may think (and that's the hard part!). There are a few rough edges you will run into when you try to call from Groovy into other languages.
Programming with HTML 5
Developing a rich user interface for web applications is both exciting and challenging. HTML 5 has closed the gaps and once again brought new vibe into programming the web tier. Come to this session to learn how you can make use of HTML 5 to create stellar applications.
Rediscovering JavaScript
JavaScript is one of those very powerful languages that is often misunderstood and underutilized. It's quite popular, yet there's so much more we can do with it.
Scala Koans - A new and fun way to learn a Scala programming language (Bring a Laptop)
Have you looked into Scala? Scala is a new object-functional JVM language. It is statically typed and type inferred. It is multi-paradigm and supports both object oriented and functional programming. And it happens to be my favorite programming language.
If you are interested in Scala, how you are planning to learn Scala? You probably are going to pick up a book or two and follow through some examples. And hopefully some point down the line you will learn the language, its syntax and if you get excited enough maybe build large applications using it. But what if I tell you that there is a better path to enlightenment in order to learn Scala?
Taming Shared Mutability with Software Transactional Memory
Mutability is something we're quite used to in Java. Sharing is a good thing. However, shared mutability is pure devil's work. If we remove shared mutability, all the problems of concurrent go away. In practice, however, it's hard to completely get rid of shared mutability. This is where STM comes in with managed shared mutable variables. In this presentation we will take an example driven approach to dive deep into STM, look at what it has to offer, explore different implementations, and how we can design concurrent applications without any explicit locks.
Using Traits and Mixins in JVM Languages
Java eliminated quite a bit of complexity by eliminating multiple inheritance (MI). But that also meant we lost some design capabilities. The primary problem with MI was method collisions. What if methods can collaborate rather than collide. Traits and mixins, in languages like Scala and Groovy, offer us some real nice design choices. These can be used to implement more elegantly some common design patterns.
Craig Walls - Author of Spring in Action
Building Web Applications with Spring MVC
In this session, we'll start with the basics of Spring MVC development, focusing on how to leverage the new annotation-driven model. With that foundation set, we'll continue by exploring the new features in Spring 3.0 and 3.1 to build RESTful web applications that can serve both human-facing content as well as resources that are consumed by machine clients.
Developing Next-Generation Applications
For a long while, we've built applications pretty much the same way. Regardless of the frameworks (or even languages and platforms) employed, we've packaged up our web application, deployed it to a server somewhere, and asked our users to point their web browser at it.
But now we're seeing a shift in not only how applications are deployed, but also in how they're consumed. The cost and hassle of setting up dedicated servers is driving more applications into the cloud. Meanwhile, our users are on-the-go more than ever, consuming applications from their mobile devices more often than a traditional desktop browser. And even the desktop user is expecting a more interactive experience than is offered by simple page-based HTML sites.
With this shift comes new programming models and frameworks. It also involves a shift in how we think about our application design. Standing up a simple HTML-based application is no longer good enough.
Effective Spring
After almost a decade and several significant releases, Spring has gone a long way from challenging the then-current Java standards to becoming the de facto enterprise standard itself. Although the Spring programming model continues to evolve, it still maintains backward compatibility with many of its earlier features and paradigms. Consequently, there's often more than one way to do anything in Spring. How do you know which way is the right way?
Securing Spring
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.
Spring Data
This session starts with a high-level look at all that the Spring Data project has to offer. Then we'll dive deeper into a few select Spring Data modules, including Spring Data Neo4j, Spring Data MongoDB, Spring Data Redis, Spring Data JPA, and Spring Data JDBC Extensions
