Event Details

Location

Radisson Hotel & Conference Center
2040 Airport Drive
Green Bay, WI 54313
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Session Descriptions

Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Consultant

Brian Sletten

Give it a REST

As developers, we sometimes get to make choices about the technologies we use, sometimes not. We base these decisions on personal experiences, recommendations from others and a general sense of where the industry is going.

Web Services have been all the rage for several years now. We have been told time and again that we should be building systems around them; as an industry, we've never been more confused. Perhaps it is time to Give it a REST.

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: Give it a REST (unless you are very comfortable with REST)

The Semantic Web is Dead! Long Live 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 a vision of machine-processable documents and metadata to improve search, knowledge discovery and data integration and management. The only problem is that there is no such thing. There is no Semantic Web, just the Web we have that is increasingly semantics-enabled.

Forget the hype. Come learn how the technologies of this vision are being used today on the Web and in the Enterprise by more people than you might think.

Viva La Javolution!

You're a good Java programmer. You understand the JDK libraries and how to use them. The problem is that many fundamental APIs don't take the bigger performance picture in mind. Garbage collection can end up killing your app if you aren't careful. Concurrency problems and contention can keep your well-intentioned software from leveraging modern hardware architecture that support multi-core and multi-cpu systems.

Who knew that simply using the standard library code the way it was designed was opening you up for performance problems in your apps?

Don't worry, Javolution has your back.

What's Going On? : Complex Event Processing w/ Esper

How well do you understand the dynamics of your applications? In our systems, we detect when simple things happen. Customers log in, people buy things, a stock is sold at a particular price, inventory shifts locations... all of these events mean little things, but what about the larger picture? Complex events are particular patterns of simpler events that suggest something deeper is happening. Do you know how you'd discover these bigger picture occurrences? Come hear how the Esper open source software represents a new class of complex event processing (CEP) frameworks that can be added to even high volume, high transaction systems.


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

Jared Richardson

10 Tips for Getting Your Project Back on Track

Software projects fail over and over for many of the same reasons. We'll look at some of the more avoidable problems and some solid ways to fix them, or avoid them in the first place.

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.

Credit Card Software Development: Recognizing and Repaying Technical Debt

Technical debt has long been recognized in technical circles for years, but convincing your manager to budget time to repay "technical debt" has always been problematic. Let's couch the term technical debt concept in language more familiar to our managers: credit card debt.

Shippers Unite!

An overview of the Agile software approach from the book Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects.

Techniques 2008

There are a number of great techniques you can use across technologies and projects. Come hear some of my favorites and contribute a few of your own. We'll discuss topics from DRY to creating a zone defense for your product.


Jeff Brown - SpringSource Engineering And Professional Services - Groovy and Grails Developer

Jeff Brown

A Thorough Introduction To Groovy

Groovy is an agile dynamic language for the Java platform. The language and its libraries bring many things to the table to ease the process of building applications for the Java platform. This session provides a detailed run through Groovy with lots of code samples to drive home the power of the language.

Advanced Web Development With Grails

Grails makes web application development both fun and easy. This session dives beyond the basics to cover advanced details of Grails that bring the really exciting features to your applications.

Prerequisite: Grails - Agile Web 2.0 The Easy Way

Agile Test Driven Development With Groovy

Dynamic languages bring a lot of interesting elements to the table for teams interested in doing Test Driven Development (TDD). Groovy lends itself very well to TDD and this session demonstrates many features of the language and its libraries that help teams build more testable systems and build better tests.

Grails - Agile Web 2.0 The Easy Way

Grails is a full stack MVC framework for building web applications for the Java platform. Grails makes web application development both fun and easy. This session covers all of the fundamentals of building web applications with Grails.

Powerful Metaprogramming Techniques With Groovy

Metaprogramming is a key component in building truly dynamic and flexible applications with Groovy. Groovy's metaprogramming capabilities bring great new possibilities to the table that would be very difficult or just plain impossible to write with Java alone. This session will demystify a lot of the magic that seems to be going on inside of a Groovy application.

Prerequisite: A Thorough Introduction To Groovy



John Carnell - Manager - Platform Engineering w/Thrivent Financial

John Carnell

Limber Groovy: Making Your Everyday Code More Flexible with Groovy

Groovy is an extremely powerful and dynamic scripting language that can allow development teams to build extreme flexibility into their applications. However, leveraging this flexibility in Groovy requires developers to break many of the paradigms they have built over the years surrounding such things as object-oriented design and programming with static languages.



Racing with Rhinos: Using Springs and Grails to Achieve Competitive Velocity

One of the holy grails of an enterprise architecture team is to provide a light-weight development framework that can be used to quickly build first-to-market applications while still providing a migration path for these applications to a more robust corporate enterprise stack. (e.g. J2EE).

This talk will look at how you can leverage Grails, Groovy and Spring to build applications that can start small and grow to integrate with your enterprise systems.

The Art of Producing Software: Applying Lean Concepts to Transform Your Software Development Organization

Waste is an insidious beast that drains the productivity of development teams and the organizations they work in. Many organizations are now realizing that by turning their gaze inward they can streamline their overall development processes, deliver higher quality products faster and save significant amounts of money.


Mark Richards - SOA and Enterprise Architect, Author of Java Transaction Design Strategies

Mark Richards

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.

Enterprise Messaging Using JMS (Part 1)

The chances are good that at some point in your career you will need to use messaging to pass information between applications, subsystems, or external systems, particularly with service-oriented architecture on the rise. The Java Messaging Service (JMS) allows Java applications to implement messaging using a standard API, thereby removing the dependency on any particular messaging provider. In Part 1 of this session we will take a look at some of the basics of messaging, including sending and receiving messages, message types, and request/reply messaging. I will begin the session by going over the basics of messaging and the JMS API. Then, through interactive coding using OpenJMS I will demonstrate how to connect to JMS providers, send messages, receive messages, and use message properties. Please note that this is a two part session.

Enterprise Messaging With JMS (Part 2)

In Part 1 of the JMS session I covered messaging models, messaging basics, the JMS API, and point-to-point messaging. In this interactive code-intensive session I will cover some additional JMS topics such as browsing queues, load balancing, publishing and subscribing to messages within the pub/sub model, durable and non-durable subscribers, message selectors, and message filtering. I will also discuss and demonstrate message prioritization, persistent and non-persistent messages, and finally message expiration (expiry). Note that this is Part 2 of a two-part JMS session.

Prerequisite: Enterprise Messaging With JMS (Part 1) or some knowledge of JMS

Java Persistence: Approaching the Silver Bullet

Java Persistence has come along way since the days of straight JDBC coding and custom framework development. We have at our disposal several outstanding open source frameworks such as Hibernate, Toplink, iBatis, and OpenJPA (just to name a few), and we now have a promising and emerging standards-based solution called Java Persistence API (JPA). However, all to often we find in the Java persistence space that it is a world of one-size-does-not-fit-all. We continually struggle with traditional ORM solutions like Hibernate when it comes to reporting queries, complex queries, complex relationships, and stored procedures, and we also struggle with managing the enormous amount of SQL required for solutions such as iBATIS or JDBC-based frameworks. In this coding-intensive session we will take a detailed look at identifying and overcoming the challenges we face when using frameworks such as Hibernate, iBATIS, and JPA, and how to combine the various persistence frameworks to create an effective Java persistence solution that approaches (but of course does not reach) the silver bullet.

SOA Unplugged

Awareness about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has grown significantly in the past several years. Unfortunately, along with that growth has come a significant amount of confusion about what SOA really is. SOA has become such a ubiquitous buzzword that it now has many faces and means different things to different people. CIO's, managers, vendors, business users, architects, and developers all see SOA differently which creates a sea of confusion about what is and isn't SOA. In this highly interactive and thought provoking session we will look beyond the hype and marketure of SOA and explore SOA from an architecture and development point of view - in other words, SOA as an architecture pattern. During this session we will look at SOA use cases, services, integration, implementation, guiding architecture principles of SOA, and attempt to answer the following question: What is and isn't SOA?

Transaction Design Patterns

Most web-based applications rely solely on the database to manage transactions, thereby freeing the developer from having to worry about transaction management. While this works in some circumstances, there are times when the use of transactions is vital to the integrity and operations of an application and its corresponding data. In this session I will demonstrate through real-world coding examples why transactions are such a critical part of the application development process. I will review the basics of both programmatic and declarative transactions, then introduce three transaction design patterns and explain when they should be applied, how to use them, and what problems they solve. By the end of this session you will see that by using transaction design patterns you can build an effective transaction management strategy for your application with very little effort.


Venkat Subramaniam - Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.

Venkat Subramaniam

Caring about your Code Quality

We all have seen our share of bad code. We certainly have come across some good code as well.
What are the characteristics of good code? How can we identify those? What practices can promote
us to write and maintain more of those good quality code. This presentation will focus on this
topic that has a major impact on our ability to be agile and succeed.

DSL in Groovy

DSL or Domain Specific Languages focus on a domain or problem at hand. They're expressive, but their
restricted scope keeps them simple and small from the user point of view. However, designing them is not easy.
In this presentation we will explore the features of Groovy and show how they can be used to create DSLs.

Design Patterns in Java and Groovy

You're most likely familiar with the Gang-of-four design patterns and how to implement them in Java. However, you wouldn't want to implement those patterns in a similar way in Groovy. Furthermore, there are a number of other useful patterns that you can apply in Java and Groovy. In this presentation we'll look at two things: How to use patterns in Groovy and beyond Gang-of-four patterns in Groovy and Java.

FP on JVM

Functional Programming Languages (FPLs) have been around for a long time. A lot of features that we get excited about
in dynamic languages are common place in FPLs. FPLs are gaining importance due to various changes in our industry. What's exciting is that you can use them on the JVM. In this presentation we will dig into the details of what makes FPLs so interesting and look at ways to use them on the JVM?in your Java projects.

Know your Java?

Java has been around for well over a decade now. It started out with the goal of being simple.
Over the years, its picked up quite a bit of features and along comes complexity. In this presentation
we will take a look at some tricky features of Java, those that can trip you over, and also look at some
ways to improve your Java code.

MOPping Up Groovy

Groovy's dynamic capabilities makes it an attractive language for Meta Programming.
There are several facilities to intercept method calls to do AOP kind of operations.
You can also inject methods dynamically. You can also easily perform method synthesis as well.
In this presentation we will take a look at techniques that make Groovy pretty Hip for MOP.

Mocking to facilitate unit testing

Unit Testing is easy if the object you're testing has no dependencies. In reality, however, objects have dependencies,
often making it difficult, if not impossible, to automate tests. Mock objects can help deal with these dependencies
and allow you to automate your tests.

Tools to facilitate Agile Development

The first item in the Agile Manifesto reads that we must prefer "people and interaction over process and tools."
Given a choice between average people with superior tools and superior people with average tools, you are likely
to achieve greater success with the latter. However, it is important to be continuous and not be episodic?so you
want to get continuous feedback about the state, health, and quality of your code and application. Tools can
help us a great deal to realize this and make us productive.

Towards an Evolutionary Design

A good design is critical for success with agile development.
That does not mean a big up-front design. The design has to
be evolutionary. However, the design you evolve must be
extensible and maintainable. After all, you can't be agile
if your design sucks.




Brian Sletten

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Brian Sletten Forward Leaning Software Consultant
Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a mentor and a trainer. His experience has spanned defense, finance and commercial domains with security consulting, network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and currently lives in Fairfax, VA. He is the President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc., a professional services company focused on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.


Jared Richardson

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Jared Richardson Agile coach and co-author of Ship It
Jared Richardson, co-author of Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful
Software Projects
, is a speaker, consultant, and mentor with NFJS One. Jared has been in the industry for more than fifteen years as a consultant, developer, tester, and manager.

Jared can be found online at Agile Artisans.



Jeff Brown

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Jeff Brown SpringSource Engineering And Professional Services - Groovy and Grails Developer
Jeff Brown works with Engineering and Professional Services with SpringSource and is a member of the core Groovy and Grails development teams. For over 10 years Jeff has been involved in designing and building object oriented systems.

Jeff teaches a number of Java and object oriented training courses in addition to doing consulting and mentoring work for industries including Aerospace, Financial and Medical. Areas of expertise include Java, agile web development with Groovy and Grails, distributed computing, object database systems, object oriented analysis and design and agile development.


John Carnell

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John Carnell Manager - Platform Engineering w/Thrivent Financial
John Carnell is the manager of Platform Engineering for Thrivent Financial, a Fortune 500 financial services company. In addition, John is a prolific speaker and writer. He has spoken at national conferences, such as Internet Expo, the Data Warehousing Institute, and numerous No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums.

John has authored, coauthored, and been a technical reviewer for a number of technical books and industry publications. His latest book, Pro Apache Struts with Ajax, was published in late 2006.



Kito Mann

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Kito Mann Editor-in-chief of JSF Central and the author of JSF in Action
Kito D. Mann is editor-in-chief of JSF Central and the author of JavaServer Faces in Action (Manning). He is a member of several Java Community Process expert groups (including JSF and Portlets), and an internationally recognized speaker. Kito is also the Principal Consultant at Virtua specializing in enterprise application architecture, training, development, mentoring, and JSF product strategy. He holds a BA in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.


Mark Richards

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Mark Richards SOA and Enterprise Architect, Author of Java Transaction Design Strategies
Mark Richards is a Director and Sr. Solutions Architect at Collaborative Consulting, LLC, a Boston-based Business and Architecture Consulting Firm, where he is involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of Service Oriented Architectures in J2EE and other technologies. He has been involved in the software industry since 1984, and has significant experience and expertise in J2EE architecture and development, Object-oriented design and development, and systems integration. Mark served as the President of the Boston Java User Group in 1997 and 1998, and the President of the New England Java Users Group from 1999 thru 2003. Mark is currently working on the 2nd edition of the "Java Message Service" book from O'Reilly. He is also the author of "Java Transaction Design Strategies", contributing author of "NFJS Anthology Volume 1", contributing author of "NFJS Anthology Volume 2", and contributing author of the upcoming "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know" book from O'Reilly. Mark has many architect and developer certification, including ones from IBM. Sun, The Open Group, and BEA. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series and speaks at other conferences and user groups around the country. When he is not working Mark can usually be found hiking with his wife and two daughters in the White Mountains or along the Appalachian Trail.


Venkat Subramaniam

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Venkat Subramaniam Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. He is author of ".NET Gotchas" (O'Reilly), coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf), and author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).