Rocky Mountain Software Symposium

November 9 - 11, 2007 - Denver, CO


Denver Marriott South @ Park Meadows
10345 Park Meadows Drive
Littleton, CO   80124
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Session Descriptions

Craig Walls - Author of Spring in Action

Spring Cleaning: Tips for managing XML clutter in your Spring configuration

The biggest complaint about Spring is the vast amount of XML required to configure an application. In this presentation, I'll show you ways to reduce or even eliminate much of the XML required to configure Spring.

Spring in Action

Spring has been one of the most exciting frameworks to emerge in the past few years. With Spring you can decouple your application's objects, enrich them with AOP, and apply transactional boundaries and security to them declaratively. It simplifies data access, remoting, web services, and JMS. It comes with its own web framework. And, even though Spring eliminates much of the need for EJBs, it will still integrate nicely with any EJBs you may have lying around. What's not to love?

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?



Venkat Subramaniam - Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.

Annotation Hammer

Annotation is an interesting feature in Java. However, like any features, there are good uses and bad uses. When should you use Annotation? This presentation will answer that question for you.

Domain Specific Languages

Domain Specific Languages or DSLs are languages that target a specfic kind of problem or domain. We've had various degree of success with DSLs, over the past several years, in narrow areas. However, DSLs are not widely used in general purpose application partly because the popular widely used languages today do not make it easy.

OSGi: A Well Kept Secret

In this presentation we will introduce OSGi and discuss how it can help modularize and version your enterprise Java applications.

Spring into Groovy

What do you get when you mix an agile, object-oriented, dynamic language with a lightweight, flexible, and extensible framework? You get a Groovier Spring. Spring allows you to develop using Groovy as much as Java. Groovy brings some neat concepts to the Java Platform that is hard to realize directly through the Java language. Using these capabilities can lead to elegant and easier Spring development.

get Fit

Unit testing tells you, the programmer, that your code (and the change) meets your expectations. How do you know if you are meeting your customers' expectations? Agile development is all about feedback and doing what's relevant to the customers, isn't it? Framework for Integration testing or Fit helps you to automate tests for customer expectations.



Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Engineer

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.

Data Integration : Beyond Cutesy Mashups

Ever since we started doing relational joins, we've looked for ways to tie data together. The web has given us no end of new data sources to integrate but it seems like the best we can come up with is locating Starbucks on Google Maps. The problem with browser-based mashups is that they don't survive the session, we have no way of referring to the results in future queries and ultimately we don't maintain ownership or control of the process.

We want control of our data and our mashup results. We want ever more ways to view, explore and requery them in multi-faceted ways. Do you know what your data integration strategy is for the next few years? Are you sure? You owe it to yourself to come find out.

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.

REST : Information-Driven Architectures for the 21st Century

There is a shift going on in the Enterprise. While still used and useful, the promises of the SOAP/WSDL/UDDI Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) stack have failed to live up to their promise. A new vision of linked information is enveloping online and Enterprise users. The REST architectural style is squarely behind this thinking as a way of achieving low-cost, flexible integration, increased data security, greater scalability and long-term migration strategies.

If you have dismissed REST as a toy or are unfamiliar with it, you owe it to yourself to see what is so interesting about this way of doing things.

RESTlet for the Weary

If you have started to take a look at REST as way of exposing web services or managing information spaces, you may be frustrated by the support offered by legacy containers. There is no direct support for REST concepts in the J2EE specs (yet). XML-based configurations are so 1990's. Come learn about Restlets, a little API that has caught the attention of many in the RESTafarian community.

Prerequisite: REST (unless you are very comfortable with REST)



Ted Neward - Enterprise, Virtual Machine and Language Wonk

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).

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 Debugging

Bugs? We all know your code has no bugs, but someday, you're going to find yourself tracking down a bug in somebody else's code, and that's when it's going to be helpful to have some basic ideas about bug-tracking in your toolbox. Learn to make use of the wealth of tools that the Java Standard Platform makes available to you--tools that your IDE may not know exist, tools that you can make use of even within a production environment.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Java Platform Security

Permissions, policy, SecurityExceptions, oh my! The Java platform is a rich and powerful platform, complete with a rich and powerful security mechanism, but sometimes understanding it and how it works can be daunting and intimidating, and leave developers with the basic impression that it's mysterious and dark and incomprehensible. Nothing could be further from the truth, and in this presentation, we'll take a pragmatic, code-first look at the Java security platform, including Permissions, the SecurityManager and its successor, AccessController, the Policy class and policy file syntax, JAAS, and more.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Performance and Scalability

Wondering why your enterprise Java app just... sucks? Trying to figure out why you can't get more than 10 concurrent users online at the same time? Looking for ways to try and spot the slowdowns and ways to fix them?



Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.

Agile Project Management (With Just a Bit About Mingle)

You can read books about Agile projects, but you must consult real-world experience to really understand the dynamics of agile project management. This session discusses agile management topics including estimation, project tracking, and useful metrics (and how to obtain them). And just a little about Mingle, the agile project tracking tool from ThoughtWorks.

Code Metrics & Analysis for Agile Projects

What does code + methodology have to do with one another? Everything! Agile projects focus on delivering working code, and tools exist to allow you to verify some quality metrics for your code. This session is a survey of tools and metrics that allow you to determine the quality of your code and strategies to "wire it" into your agile project.

Implementing SOA

This talk avoids SOA hype and gets to the meat of the matter: how do you implement a Service-Oriented Architecture, what are the technological pitfalls, how do you test it, and what traps should you avoid. No marketecture: just implementation details.

Pragmatic Extreme Programming

This session talks about how to actually get XP done in the real world (and what to tell your boss).

Productive Programmer: Acceleration, Focus, and Indirection

This session discusses how to use the Productive Programmer principles of acceleration, focus, and indirection to become a more productive programmer. This session describes these principles, but the primary focus of this session is demonstration of these principles with real-world examples.

Productive Programmer: Automation and Canonicality

This session discusses how to use the Productive Programmer principles of automation and canonicality to become a more productive programmer. This session describes these principles, but the primary focus of this session is demonstration of these principles with real-world examples.


Brian Sam-Bodden - Java author, Ruby geek and Open Source Advocate

10 ways to use Hibernate effectively

Learn 10 tried and true ways to improve the way you use Hibernate today. In this session you would learn about a collection of 10 tips, tricks, practices and tools that will make you more effective at designing, implementing, testing and tuning your application's Hibernate-powered object-relational layer.

Beginning Drools - Rule Engines in Java

Drools is an open source pure-Java implementation of a forward chaining rules engine. Drools can be used in a J2SE or J2EE application and allows you to express rules programatically or by building domain specific rule languages. Learn how Business Rules with Drools can make your Java applications more flexible and robust.

Beginning Object-Relational Mapping with Hibernate

Hibernate is an open source Object-Relational Mapping Framework that mostly automates the tedious and time-consuming task of persisting Java objects to a relational database. Hibernate is quickly becoming the preferred way for enterprise developers to overcome the object-relational impedance mismatch and a good alternative to the coarse-grained Entity EJBs, low-level raw JDBC, and by-committee specifications like JDO. Learn what your choices in the ORM arena, what to look for in an ORM tool, and how to get started with Hibernate for your next J2SE or J2EE project.

Professional Java UI development with the Eclipse RPC

Learn how to build featured rich applications using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. The Eclipse platform is an open tools platform, on top of this platform you can build your own applications (which do not need to be IDE like or IDE related). Yet you can enjoy the benefits of working with a mature and featured rich platform that can greatly reduce the amount of time required to create a professional-looking and robust Java UI application.



Chris Maki - Principal Engineer at Overstock.com, author JPA 101: Java Persistence Explained

Getting to know Maven 2

Getting to know Maven 2, focuses on key Maven 2 concepts so you can start using Maven today. Maven 2 was released about two years ago, and is rapidly becoming the build tool of choice for projects like AppFuse and Spring. Unlike other tools that help you compile your source code, Maven 2 represents a holistic view of project management. Not only does it allow you to build your project, it provides metrics, reports, documentation and repository management. Topics covered include:What is Maven (Myths and Facts), an overview of maven, building an example Maven project, and how to use multi-module projects.

Java Persistence: the next generation

The Java Persistence API, finalized in May of 2006, represents the unified persistence model for both Java SE and Java EE environments. Bringing together the expertise of the Hibernate, TopLink, and JDO communities, JPA is now the standard persistence model for Java applications. Java Persistence: the next generation presents a detailed overview of the JPA specification. The topics covered are:Object/Relational mapping using annotations; good-bye XDocletPackaging, the only XML you really need, EntityManager, where simplicity meets complexity, Java EE in an SE environment: Spring to the rescue, and JPQL, SQL done write.



Jason Hunter - Author of Java Servlet Programming

Forgotten Web Algorithms

In this talk I'll explain -- without any needless math or boring proofs -- several fun algorithms of interest to back-end web programmers. Each algorithm was selected because it's really practical, really interesting, or both. The algorithms aren't always the same but can include: public key cryptography, credit card checksum validation, TCP Slow Start, two's complement, priority queues, the XOR swap, and the Google MapReduce function for massively distributed calculation.

Web Publishing 2.0

If we're moving toward Web 2.0, what does that mean for online publishing? In this talk I'll answer that question. Based on my experience as Principal Technologist at Mark Logic working with dozens of the largest online publishers, I'll present a vision for how the Web 2.0 concepts like personalization, collective intelligence, the long tail, and the importance of "owning the data" can and should reshape the face of online publishing -- and how XML, XQuery, and XML-aware text search act as the key enablers. I'll also introduce new Web Publishing 2.0 concepts like "Sweat the content" and "Give answers not links".

What's New in Java 6

The Java 6 (Mustang) release should make your life easier, for a change. It doesn't alter the core language like Java 5 did. It doesn't pack in so many sub-JSRs that you'll be overwhelmed by the amount you have to learn. Instead Java 6 adds several handy things that honestly should have been added before. Among the improvements we'll cover in this fast-paced class:

  • A new Console class
  • A real Compiler API
  • A GIF writer
  • Pluggable Locale data
  • Access to disk partition size data
  • Array reallocation
  • Low-level floating point functions
  • Reflective access to parameter names
  • Access to network interface details
  • Pluggable annotation processing
  • Improved class file format
  • Streaming XML with StAX
  • A new Scripting interface

XQuery By Example: Building an Email Archive System

The classic searchable email archive system is cluged together -- a frankenstein monster combining a relational database with a search engine, with Java just barely able to keep the two together. In this talk we'll demonstrate how email is more content than data, how it's better encoded in XML rather than relational tables, and how Java can convert emails to XML and drive an XQuery backend to produce a simpler and more scalable email archive system.



Stuart Halloway - CEO of Relevance

JRuby

JRuby is not one, but two great technologies: the Ruby language, and the Java Virtual Machine and libraries. In this talk you will learn the basics of programming JRuby, and how to integrate JRuby code into existing Java projects.

JavaScript for Java Programmers

This presentation covers JavaScript from the perspective of a Java programmer. We assume that you may be using an Ajax toolkit, but still need to be able to read, modify, and test the JavaScript code in your application. You will learn the common idioms of JavaScript by looking at working code from Prototype and Scriptaculous.

Screwing Up Agile

Agile software techniques like Scrum and XP are increasingly popular; there are tons of resources on the web to help you do agile right. Tragically, there are very few resources to help you screw up an agile project. This talk will show you how to ruin agile projects.

This Week In Refactoring

Contributing to open source is great for your career. In a few short hours, you can learn, teach, promote your skills, and improve the quality of the community. In this talk, we will show you how, by doing it.



Brian Goetz - Author of Java Concurrency in Practice

Beyond ACID: transactions management, in theory and practice

Transactions are the software building blocks of enterprise applications, but not all transactional systems are created equally. This talk covers the basics of what transactions are, why they are essential to building reliable enterprise software, the fundamental properties of transactions, and how transactions are supported and implemented in popular frameworks such as Java EE and Spring.

Effective Concurrent Java

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

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.

Structuring concurrent applications in JDK 5.0

JDK 5.0 is a huge step forward in developing concurrent Java classes and applications, providing a rich set of high-level concurrency building blocks.

The Java Memory Model

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



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

RAD JSF with Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4jsf, Part One

In this session, see how you can get Ruby On Rails-like productivity on the Java side of the house with this compelling combination of technologies.

RAD JSF with Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4jsf, Part Two

A continuation of a 2-session presentation on Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4jsf.

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.

The Google Web Toolkit, Part Two

The second part of a 2-session presentation on the Google Web Toolkit.



Scott Davis - Author of "Groovy Recipes"

Advanced Grails

Many demonstrations of new technology focus on the shiny turnkey features -- "Look at what this thing magically does for you out of the box!" While Grails has many gee-whiz scaffolding features, it is a framework first. A framework should "make easy things easy and hard things possible." (Apologies to the Perl community for co-opting their battle cry.) This talk focuses on the hard things that are possible with Grails, but require just a bit of glue code to implement.

Groovy and Java: The Integration Story

I'm attracted to Groovy because of its spirit of inclusiveness. Because it extends my platform of choice, not replaces it -- include a single JAR in your classpath and you are Groovy-enabled. Because it offers full bidirectional integration with Java. Because it offers a nearly flat learning curve for experienced Java developers. Come see how you can use Groovy to augment your existing Java codebase.

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.

KEYNOTE: No, I Won't Tell You Which Web Framework to Use: or The Truth (with Jokes)

"Which framework should I use?" is the question most often heard on the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour. It's well worth asking. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. After years on the tour, most speakers have crafted a response that would make any Washington politician proud -- long on style, but essentially, "Well, it depends..."

Real World Grails

Scott Davis is the Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com. The website, in addition to being, umm, about Groovy, is implemented in Grails. This talk shows you how to get started with Grails, but also talks about the experience of using it in a live, production web site.

The Secrets of GORM

GORM (the Grails Object/Relational Mapper) is one of the many high points of the Grails web framework. GORM is a thin Groovy wrapper over Hibernate, but that doesn't begin to capture excitement of what GORM brings to the party. Imagine being able to call book.save() and book.delete() on your Book class; calling Book.get(1) to retrieve your book from the database by primary key; using Book.list() to pull an ArrayList of Book objects into your application. Now imagine getting all of that functionality (and more) for free with each new class you define. No interfaces to implement. No abstract classes to extend. Persistence that is transparent, automatic, and simple to use: GORM.



David Bock - Principal Consultant, CodeSherpas Inc.

Internationalization and Localization in Java

Internationalization and Localization in Java is easy, right? Everyone knows you just store your strings in some resource bundles, set the locale, wave your hands a little bit, and your application is good-to-go. Right? Maybe not... Java provides some great utilities to get started, but leaves you needing more when it comes to things like screen layout, cultural sensitivities, semantic differences in translation, use of color and iconography, and other issues.

Introducing Agility to Large Organizations

For several years, I was a member of a team of people caught in the middle of a 200+ person software development company, with senior management wanting "buzzword compliant process improvement" such as CMMI, and engineers wanting more ?agile? solutions (and people on both sides confusing Agile with ad-hoc). We were responsible for sorting it all out. Reconciling this was a herculean effort, and can be a source of lessons learned for your own process improvement efforts. Are you trying to be more agile in your organization? Are you expecting it to be harder than it needs to be because of political and bureaucratic forces beyond your control? Do you have to "educate" your senior management to protect them from buzzwords? Come learn from my successes... and mistakes.

Maintaining Project Integrity with JDepend, Macker, PMD, Maven, and other open source tools

How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a big ball of code you have to plod through to try to get anything done? How many times have you been the ?new guy? on an established project where it seems like the code grew more like weeds and brambles than a well-tended garden? With a few good structural guidelines and several tools to help analyze the code, we can keep our project from turning into that big ball of mud, and we can salvage a project that is already headed down that path.