Session Descriptions

Cutting-edge productivity with RIFE and Web Continuations

RIFE is a full-stack, open-source Java web application framework, offering fast results with the promise of maintainability and code clarity. This session will review the novel ideas in Java web application development that RIFE has introduced to the development community.

Exploring Terracotta : JVM clustering in the real world

Terracotta provides open-source clustering for Java and removes the burden from the developer by providing you with Network Attached Memory. This is however so generic that it's sometimes difficult realize which use-cases can benefit from it. This presentation introduces the basic principles of Terracotta and explains how to configure and integrate it into your application. Afterwards, we'll go through a collection of real-world examples that all benefit from JVM-level clustering so that you can get a feel for the possibilities.

Ajax development with the Yahoo! UI Library and Grails

Yahoo! is a company that eats its own dog food. They open sourced the Ajax code that drives many of their own websites, including their eponymous homepage, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! News. Come see first hand how the various pieces of the library work together as a seamless whole.

GIS for Web Developers

Based on the book GIS for Web Developers, this talk demonstrates how you can build your own Google Maps in-house using nothing but open source software. We also discuss integrating free, public domain data from sources like the US Census Bureau and the USGS. If you're looking for real-world examples of AJAX in use, you'll find it here. If you're looking for real-world examples of web services in use, you'll find it here.

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..."

Test Driven Development, Take 2

More and more developers are being drawn to Test Driven Development (TDD). It doesn?t take much time or effort to get going, especially after you have passed that first hurdle of approaching development using the mantra of ?red-green-refactor? instead of ?code for days and then debug and test?. But after a while you discover that TDD has more to it than just basic state-based testing.

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.

Building DSLs in Static and Dynamic Languages

This session discusses building Domain Specific Languages and DSL-style code in Java, Groovy, and Ruby. It discusses the different types of DSLs, details on how to implement them in Java, Groovy, and Ruby, and example problem domains where DSLs make sense.

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.

Introduction to JRuby

This session describes JRuby, the 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. It covers the basics of programming with JRuby and examples of how to integrate it into existing Java projects.

Keynote: Software "Engineering" & Polyglot Programming

About bridges, languages, engineering, polyglot programming, and the near future.

Rails for JRuby

This session explains all the hype surrounding Ruby on Rails, in a context familiar to Java developers. It covers convention over configuration, ActiveRecord, controllers, views, Ajax, scaffolding, testing, and deployment...on the JVM, using JRuby.

Regular Expressions in Java

Regular expressions should be an integral part of every developer?s toolbox, but most don?t realize what an important topic it is. Regular expressions have existed for decades, but many developers don't understand how to take full advantage of this powerful mechanism, either through command line tools and editors or in their development.

The Productive Programmer: Practice (10 Ways to Improve Your Code)

No one writes perfect code: even the best developers fall into bad habits and traps. These topics from The Productive Programmer illustrate blind spots and helps you write better code.

Apache Axis2 for Developers

Apache Axis2 is a framework for Web Services that supports SOAP and XML/HTTP interactions, as well as enhanced standards such as ReliableMessaging and Security.

Building a lightweight ESB with Apache Synapse

Apache Synapse (http://ws.apache.org/synapse) is a lightweight mediation framework for XML and messaging. In this session, Paul Fremantle, a committer and release manager on the project, will show how Synapse works and what can you do with it. One of the main areas of interest in Apache Synapse is for users to build an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). In this session, we will define the concept of an ESB and look at how to build a pragmatic ESB that allows you to manage, connect and transform service interactions.

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.

Flooring the flaws: The top ten bottomed out

Research shows that over 80% of web applications are at risk of attack due to serious security issues. This session takes a look at the ten most serious vulnerabilities (as defined by OWASP), the anatomy of common attacks and techniques for mitigation.

Raising the game: Top ten techniques for secure design

Want your software to be secure but don't know where to start? You're not alone. Learn about black, grey and white box security testing.

AOP and JMX: A match made in heaven

You're winding down a project and you get that dreaded email from your project manager, "How hard would it be to add some performance monitoring to the system?" Well, after this session, you'll be able to respond, "No problem at all!" It turns out that with a pinch of AOP and a dash of JMX, you can introduce amazing management and monitoring capabilities without changing your mainline code one bit.

Spring 2.0: New and Noteworthy

Spring 2.0 has marked a major advance in the Spring Framework. While still maintaining backwards compatibility, this release adds quite a few new features. What are those features and how do they add value? Come by and see.

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 and Hibernate in the Middle Tier

To today's JEE developer, there are two indispensable tools for creating applications; Spring and Hibernate. Together these two frameworks comprise one of the most powerful and often used stacks in the industry. While it is possible to do amazing things it's not always obvious how best to use them to maximize value. This session aims to correct that.

Domain Driven Development using Naked Objects 3.0

Are you using Hibernate or EJB3 in your application? If so then you probably believe that putting a domain object model in the center of your application is worthwhile. But just how good is that domain object model ... how well does it capture the complexity of the domain in question? A domain expert can tell us, of course, but to get their views we need a way to show the domain model to them.

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 Concurrency (Part 1: Threads)

Java's threading capabilities took a serious turn for the better with the release of Java5, thanks to the incorporation of the java.util.concurrent packages, a set of pre-built components for thread pooling and execution, synchronization, and more.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Concurrency (Part 2: Concurrency)

Java's threading capabilities have been a part of the Java platform since its inception, yet for many Java developers, using Threads still remain a dark and mysterious art, and synchronization beyond the use of the "synchronized" keyword is almost unknown.

Prerequisite: The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Concurrency (Part 1: Threads)

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 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?

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Rules and Rules Engines Using JESS

If you've been keeping your ear to the ground, you may have heard some talk recently about "rules", "business rules" and "rules engines", but not necessarily any clear discussion on what they are, how to use or design them, or why they might be useful or important.

JavaFX

The demand continues to grow for secure, interactive content, applications, and services that run on a variety of clients. To simplify and speed the creation and deployment of high-impact content for a wide range of devices, Sun is introducing JavaFX, a new family of products based on Java technology designed to enable consistent user experiences, from desktop to mobile device to set-top box to Blu-ray Disc.

JavaFX allows you to:- * Build and Run Interactive Content Quickly and Easily * Create Visually Compelling and Dynamic Application * Increase Speed Time-to-Market with Technology Independence and Enhanced Consistency * Reduce Costs, Expand your market * Develop openly under the GPL license

GORM - Object Relational Mapping with Hibernate De-mystified

Hibernate is an immensely powerful ORM layer with an array of features and mapping options which comes at the cost of complexity. The web application framework Grails ships with an ORM layer that builds of top of Hibernate, but eliminates much of the complexity through clever use of convention and the dynamic features of the Groovy language. Known as GORM, it offers a convention-based mapping strategy that hooks into the Hibernate configuration model and provides an abstraction layer above Hibernate with powerful features like Groovy builders for Criteria, dynamic finders and transaction management through closures.

Grails: Spring & Hibernate Development Re-invented

Spring & Hibernate development, although hailed in the past as being "lightweight", is still an XML-centric, configuration heavy approach to web application development. In this talk, by Grails project lead Graeme Rocher, you will discover how you can leverage Spring & Hibernate without ever having to write a line of configuration!

The Grails Plug-in System: Plug into productivity

Grails is more than just a web framework, it is a complete platform and API for runtime configuration. This talk, by Grails project lead Graeme Rocher, will demonstrate Grails' modular architecture and how to hook into runtime configuration to adapt your application based on its environment and/or the presence of other plug-ins.

Abusing Maven For Fun and Profit : (Near) Zero-Admin Deployments

Ok, I can't promise you profit, but hopefully you'll have fun. Maven 2 introduces a number of new features (including that performance feature) that make it a swell project management tool for development.

Come hear about how we can abuse Maven to manage distributed deployment scenarios before the Modules JSR is done.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Drooling with Groovy and Rules

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.

FP for Java Programmers

Most interest around Functional Programming (FP) has been academic until recently. Recent commercial languages are beginning to exploit FP features. Knowing more about FP will not only help us make better use of these features, but to exploit those. In this session we will take a close look at FP.

Java 6 Features, what's in it for you?

What benefit do new Java 6 features offer you. Are there issues with using these features. The objective of this presentation is not simply to introduce you to the features, but to the effective use of these as well.

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.

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.

Programming with Mock objects

You are convinced that Test Driven Development is good for you and your project. You realize the benefits it has to offer. What's holding you back? All the code and components that your code so heavily depends on is most likely making you wonder if TDD is really for you. We will start out by looking at dependency and dependency inversion. Then we will discuss how mock objects can help separate our code from its dependencies.

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.

Advanced Web Application Security

The security landscape has changed dramatically in the past 12 months. Unless you are aware of CSRF, Javascript Highjacking, and the many ways to fool an XSS filter, it's likely that your web application will not be secure. Attackers used to concentrate on ActiveX, but now Javascript, CSS and even simple HTML elements have are used against websites.

Hands On DWR

This presentation digs into many advanced DWR features such as Reverse Ajax and the JavaScript proxy APIs. We start with a simple web-based multiplayer game, and illustrate how straightforward it is to create advanced effects with minimal coding. By demonstrating advanced page manipulation and server-based control of browsers, the game shows how to update any web application to react to server changes.