Twin Cities Software Symposium

April 13 - 15, 2007



Event Details

Location

Minneapolis Airport Marriott
2020 American Blvd East
Minneapolis, MN 55435
View Map
NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in Minneapolis April 13 - 15, 2007. You may view the event details here ».

Session Highlights

Don't miss your chance to attend more than forty education and solutions sessions:

  • Seating is Limited
  • In-depth Discussions
  • Peer Exchange
  • Access to Speakers
  • Expert Panel Discussions
  • Hands-on Code Examples
  • Best Practices
  • Birds of a Feather Session
  • Insight on Cutting-Edge Tools

Featured Sessions

By Ben Hale

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.

By Ben Hale

Security is one of the major requirements in modern day enterprise applications and yet it is also one of the weakest parts of most developers toolboxes. The problem is of course that security is HARD! It turns out that rather than reinventing the wheel for each application, developers can turn to a great security framework out there already; Acegi.

By Brian Pontarelli

The Java NIO packages that were added in JDK 1.4 and these packages allow Java applications to perform true non-blocking IO operations. This presentation will cover the basics of the standard IO packages, which date back to the beginning of Java, and some of the shortcomings they have. This will be followed by coverage of the newer NIO packages and how they address these issues.

By Brian Pontarelli

This talk will cover many of the different types of SOA topologies from EJBs and WebServices all the way to message queues and tuple spaces. SOA has many different meanings but it never dictates a single implementation and this talk covers many of the most common implementations of a service oriented architecture.

By Brian Pontarelli

This talk will cover many of the different types of SOA topologies from EJBs and WebServices all the way to message queues and tuple spaces. SOA has many different meanings but it never dictates a single implementation and this talk covers many of the most common implementations of a service oriented architecture.

By Charles Nutter

The explosion of popularity for dynamic languages on the JVM has changed the way we look at development. No longer is the Java platform tied to a single language, and no longer do you only have a single tool in your toolbox. Dynamic languages like Groovy, Python, Ruby, and others enable entirely new ways of solving our software problems. This session will explore one of those languages, Ruby, and show how it will make even complicated development tasks manageable and even fun.


By Charles Nutter

The Ruby programming language has exploded in popularity, spurred in part by the agility of the Rails web framework. Rails has in turn changed the way we look at web development. The two together are forcing developers to rethink how applications should be written. The world is changing. With JRuby you're now able to run Rails apps alongside your existing Java applications, calling the same services and leveraging the same infrastructure. All the scalability, reliability, and performance of Enterprise Java is now available to Rails developers.

By David Bock

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.

By David Bock

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.

By David Geary

JavaServer Faces is a perfect platform for implementing Web 2.0 interfaces with Ajax. This session explores how you can use these two potent technologies--JSF and Ajax--together to create applications that look and behave like desktop applications but run in the browser.

By David Geary

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.

By David Geary

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

By David Geary

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.

By David Geary

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

By David Hussman

Why is so much documentation worthless? Wouldn't is be nice if your documentation actually reflected what your system does? One way to do this is to create what is being called executable documentation or executable specifications. If you are struggling with ambiguous requirements, lack of contact with the business, or a chasm between development and testing, this session is for you.

By Howard Lewis Ship

An introduction to the Apache Tapestry web application framework, which will explain the concepts and features of the framework with some simple applications. We'll discsuss Tapestry forms, request cycle, component object model. The use of several important components, including BeanForm and Table will be highlighted, along with meta-programming using the Trails framework.

By Jared Richardson

How do you keep a team scattered across time zones in sync?

By Jared Richardson

A great team builds great software, but how do you build a great team?

By Jim White

Studies have suggested that somewhere between 30-70 percent of an application?s code and an equal percentage of a developer?s time is spent working with JDBC and SQL elements! It?s no wonder that software development teams looking to boost productivity are looking to persistence frameworks, but which one to choose? Options for a Java persistent framework include Hibernate, iBatis, Castor, JDO, the new Java Persistence API along with some proprietary frameworks. This presentation explains, demonstrates, and compares each of the viable options to one another. Attendees will learn how a graph of related Java objects can be persisted with each framework and they will gain an appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. The talk will try to answer questions such as: how easy/difficult is it to setup each framework, which framework takes the most/least amount of time to learn, which framework works best on top of an existing database, which framework is the most flexible, and which framework provides the best performance with minimal tuning?

By Mark Kirby

In today?s enterprise many individual applications are sewn together in a federated conglomeration to implement enterprise business processes; processes that are driven by the dynamic nature of sales, manufacturing, shipping, and human workflow intricacies. SOA & EDA are ideally suited to address these dynamic, large, and often times cross application and divisional problem domains.

By Nathaniel Schutta

So you've convinced the boss that your new web application just has to have Ajax...but now what? With dozens of libraries making even the most blinkish of interactions trivial, how do you decided where to sprinkle the magic Ajax dust? This talk will give a plain old boring "web 1.0" an Ajax facelift with a focus on improving the user experience providing you with a game plan for introducing Ajax to your world.

By Nathaniel Schutta

Ajax might not be the most complex thing the average web developer has ever encountered but that doesn't mean building Ajax applications is without some quirks. While you can certainly use the raw technologies beneath Ajax or even roll your own framework, there are a number of well-designed open source libraries that you can take advantage of. After providing a quick survey of the field, this talk will feature live coding examples comparing and contrasting some of the more mature Ajax toolkits including Dojo, Prototype, script.aculo.us and YUI. We'll show you what these various libraries do and do not provide and give you some ideas about which ones make the most sense for your needs.

By Neal Ford

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.

By Neal Ford

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.

By Neal Ford

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.

By Neal Ford

This session discusses advanced Selenium techniques for testing web applications. It discusses techniques for both TestRunner and Remote Control Selenium, including data driven tests, creating branch points, testing Ajax applications, creating flexible tests, integration with continuous integration, and tons more.

By Neal Ford

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.

By Neal Ford

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.

By Scott Davis

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.

By Scott Davis

In this talk, we'll survey the web services exposed by leading websites (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay) and discuss how they can be easily mocked up for testing purposes and to aid offline development. You'll see working examples of RESTful, SOAP, and JSON web services, as well as strategies for unit and functional testing your asynchronous, service-oriented architecture.

By Scott Davis

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.

By Scott Davis

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.

By Ted Neward

If you've never used Reflection (java.lang.reflect), you don't know what you're missing. In this presentation, we'll take a code-first, soup-to-nuts look at the Java Reflection APIs, from how to examine the class metadata that Reflection provides, to using annotations to enhance that metadata with your own information, even through the use of Java Dynamic Proxies to create flexible object "interceptors" that can layer services in front of ordinary method calls with nothing more complicated and an interface and a factory.

By Ted Neward

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.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Object-oriented scripting languages, or agile dynamic languages, as some like to call those, are gaining programmers' attention. Groovy bring this excitement to
the Java platform with its ability to generate byte code. You can use Groovy instead of Java for some parts of your application. By learning it, you can switch between the languages where you consider fit.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Domain Driven Design (DDD) is an approach that places emphasis on the domain model and carrying it into implementation. DDD is mostly repackaging of fundamental OO Design. It brings new emphasis to what we should be already doing, but often find it hard and confusing given the realities and complexities of our real world. In this presentation we will take a close look at what DDD is and how to use it for agile development. We will discuss several design options, and also look at some examples of good modeling and layering.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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

By Venkat Subramaniam

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.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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.