Central Iowa Software Symposium
August 1 - 3, 2008 - Des Moines, IA
Howard Lewis Ship
Creator of Apache Tapestry
Howard Lewis Ship is the creator and lead developer for the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over ten years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.
Howard is respected in the Java community as an expert on web application development, dependency injection, Java meta-programming, and developer productivity. He is a frequent speaker at JavaOne, NoFluffJustStuff, ApacheCon and other conferences, and the author of "Tapestry in Action" for Manning (covering Tapestry 3.0). Lately, he's been dipping his toes into alternate languages, including Clojure.
Howard is an independent consultant, offering Tapestry training, mentoring and project work as well as training in Clojure. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his son, Jacob.
Presentations
Introduction to Tapestry 5
Tapestry 5 is a complete rewrite of Tapestry from the ground up. It takes everything good about Tapestry and cranks the volume up to eleven, while removing the frustrating parts of using Tapestry. This session takes the wraps off this new and innovative technology, showing off important new features such as live class reloading (the ability to change your Java classes and continue using the application without interruption or redeployment), the simplified coding model, and the total lack of XML. This session is of interest to those already using Tapestry 4, and those new to Tapestry and ready to jump on the bandwagon.
Tapestry 5 really does take everything great about Tapestry and crank it up, all with the goal of making your job as a web developer easier. Being able to change your classes at will within a running application is just the tip of the iceberg; Tapestry 5 is designed to break down the barriers to developer productivity by simplifying every aspect of creating a web application.
Tapestry 4's base classes and abstract methods are all gone, replaced with pure POJOs and a handful of annotations. All the XML configuration of Tapestry has been removed as well. Tapestry 5 practices convention over configuration with a vengeance, introducing smart defaults and intelligent logic to let Tapestry do the right thing.
Pragmatic Patterns with Tapestry 5 IoC
Everyone likes the Gang of Four design patterns, but it's not always clear just how to make use of them in your day to day coding efforts. Hidden inside Tapestry 5 is an Inversion of Control (IoC) container that is structured around several common patterns (Chain of Command, Strategy, Decorator and Filter Chain will be covered). This isn't academic navel-gazing ... this is about leveraging the common patterns so that you can write code you can easily test, and about creating frameworks and toolkits that can be easily extended.
We'll see how Tapestry uses these patterns, and go from there into how you can apply the same techniques to your own projects, resulting in better, cleaner, more testable code.
This session also serves as an introduction to the Tapestry 5 IoC container.
Guerilla Unit Testing Part 1: TestNG
Part one (of two) covers the TestNG unit testing framework, and shows how it integrates with Selenium (for integration testing).
In part one of this two part session, we'll discuss the basics of unit testing and show how to use TestNG. We'll discuss how to use the tool, organize tests, and collect results, as well as integrate with IDEs, Ant and Maven. Lastly, we'll see advanced uses of TestNG combined with Selenium to automate integration testing within a test suite.
Guerilla Unit Testing Part 2: The Weird and Wonderful EasyMock
In part two (of two) we go in depth on EasyMock, the weird and wonderful tool for creating mock objects on the fly. We'll do a good bit of live coding as we examine how to use, tame and extend this powerful tool.
Unit testing with only gets you so far; even when you've refactored your code and hidden all your implementations behinds interfaces you are still stuck with the problem of testing the individual pieces. If you've hit this point and despaired, know that there are tools to help ... including the weird and wonderful EasyMock. We'll discuss unit testing in general, and how EasyMock is used to to generate mock objects, allowing you test each class in isolation. We'll be doing some live coding to show you step-by-step how to build up a unit test, interpret EasyMock's baffling error messages, and set yourself up for easy reuse of testing code.
Books
by Howard M. Lewis Ship
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The creator of Tapestry details how to use this new framework's components to create rich web-based GUIs using links, images, and HTML forms. The challenges of web application development are discussed, such as managing server-side state properly, application localization, and maintaining synchronization between the client web browser and the application server. At the same time, the benefits of a clean separation between presentation logic and business logic and how well Tapestry succeeds in keeping these two concerns apart are identified. Written for new Tapestry users and even developers new to creating web applications in general, this guide includes extensive notes on development "gotchas," including common Tapestry errors and how to fix them. Advanced techniques are covered as well, including creating entirely new components, integration with traditional servlet and JSP applications, and creation of client-side JavaScript. Finally, a complete J2EE application, the Virtual Library, is presented and analyzed in detail.
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The creator of Tapestry details how to use this new framework's components to create rich web-based GUIs using links, images, and HTML forms. The challenges of web application development are discussed, such as managing server-side state properly, application localization, and maintaining synchronization between the client web browser and the application server. At the same time, the benefits of a clean separation between presentation logic and business logic and how well Tapestry succeeds in keeping these two concerns apart are identified. Written for new Tapestry users and even developers new to creating web applications in general, this guide includes extensive notes on development "gotchas," including common Tapestry errors and how to fix them. Advanced techniques are covered as well, including creating entirely new components, integration with traditional servlet and JSP applications, and creation of client-side JavaScript. Finally, a complete J2EE application, the Virtual Library, is presented and analyzed in detail.



