Twin Cities Software Symposium

April 13 - 15, 2007



Event Details

Location

Minneapolis Airport Marriott
2020 American Blvd East
Minneapolis, MN 55435
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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 Schedule

About the Session Schedule
Download Agenda PDF We are committed to hype-free technical training for software architects, programmers, developers, and technical managers. This year's symposium places increased emphasis on the role of XML, J2EE, Web Services, Agile Methodologies, and Open Source. We offer over 50 sessions in the span of one weekend. Featuring leading industry experts, who share their practical and real-world experiences; we offer intensive speaker interaction time during sessions and breaks.

About Sessions
Our sessions are designed to cover the latest in trends, best practices, and latest developments in Java application development. Each session lasts 90 minutes unless otherwise noted.

Friday - April 13


  1 2 3 4 5 6
12:00 - 1:00 PM REGISTRATION
1:00 - 1:15 PM WELCOME
1:15 - 2:45 PM
2:45 - 3:15 PM BREAK
3:15 - 4:45 PM
4:45 - 5:00 PM BREAK
5:00 - 6:30 PM
6:30 - 7:15 PM DINNER
7:15 - 8:00 PM Keynote: Scott Davis

Sunday - April 15


  1 2 3 4 5 6
8:00 - 9:00 AM BREAKFAST
9:00 - 10:30 AM
10:30 - 11:00 AM BREAK
11:00 - 12:30 PM
12:30 - 1:15 PM LUNCH
1:15 - 2:15 PM EXPERT PANEL DISCUSSION
2:15 - 3:45 PM
3:45 - 4:00 PM BREAK
4:00 - 5:30 PM

Spring 2.0: New and Noteworthy

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Ben Hale 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.

In this session we'll provide a practical tour of what's new in Spring 2.0. Spring 1.x users who are looking to upgrade to Spring 2.0 will love this session. If you're not using Spring already, this talk will give a great overview of the things you're missing out by not using Spring 2.0.

The talk will highlight new configuration strategies, Spring AOP, bean scoping, JPA support, JMS improvements, new Spring MVC features, VM languages, and much more.

Spring and Hibernate in the Middle Tier

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Ben Hale By Ben Hale
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.

In this session, we'll start by addressing the basic design of an application using Spring and Hibernate. Once we've established some baseline best practices, we'll focus on how to best use Hibernate (both 2 and 3) in the persistence tier. We'll take a look at the use of Spring's HibernateTemplate and some new strategies in Spring 2.0. To finish with a look to the future, we'll explore use of JPA (Hibernate implementation) with Spring 2.0.

Acegi Security: The security framework with the funny name

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Ben Hale 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.

In this session we'll discuss a little known but widely used Spring sub-project called Acegi Security. Acegi is a great tool for implementing security at the URL, method, and domain object layers and can greatly simplify security requirement fulfillment for enterprise applications. The first part of the session will focus primarily on some basic security concepts and where Acegi fits into the equation. The second part of the session will focus on basic design and usage principals of Acegi. The final segment will be a live coding example where we actually take an application and add all three levels of Acegi security to it. As a bonus, I'll even tell you the story of how the Acegi name came about :)

AOP and JMX: A match made in heaven

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Ben Hale By Ben Hale
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.

In this session, we explore the technologies of AOP and JMX and how they can be used together to transparently add management and monitoring in a completely non-invasive way. We'll explore some of the various AOP packages including Spring AOP and AspectJ and how they can be used to apply management and monitoring inline to an application. Once we've added this functionality we'll how to expose it using JMX using Spring's JMX support and consume it using JConsole or Spring.

If you're tentative about introducing AOP or JMX into your application, come take a look at some of the cool things you can do with them and how easy it can be.

Java NIO

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Brian Pontarelli 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.

The NIO packages aren't simple to use and have a few dangerous pitfalls that many encounter when they first start using NIO. These pitfalls will be covered as well as solutions to each.

SOA Topologies

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Brian Pontarelli 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.

During the course of this talk we'll cover EJBs, JMS and general message queues, Jini, JavaSpaces, WebServices and ESBs. We'll discuss the pros and cons of each topology and what makes each a better or worse solution for various problems. We'll also cover the fundamentals of network computing and why it is important to understand that SOA is distributed and the impact distribution has on the selection and implementation of the topology of an application.

Attendees should walk away with a more broad understanding of SOA and the numerous ways of implementing this architecture. They should also understand how to go about selecting the correct topology or mix of topologies to meet the needs of their applications.

The ACEGI Framework

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Brian Pontarelli By Brian Pontarelli
The ACEGI framework is a comprehensive security library built on top of the popular Spring Framework. This talk will cover the basics of using the ACEGI framework within a Java web application.

This talk will cover the details of getting started using ACEGI. We'll cover the ACEGI filter chain and how it works, login, logout, roles, authorization via access control lists, password encryption, and touch on annotation based security.

Attendees should walk away with the ability to start using ACEGI in their web applications and understand how all the ACEGI configuration work together to build custom security models.

Writing Good APIs

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Brian Pontarelli By Brian Pontarelli
Writing APIs is fairly easy but writing an API that is usable and lives longer than a few days is hard. This talk discusses methodologies, tips and tricks for writing good APIs.

During the course of this talk we'll cover many of the common forms of APIs including base types, domains, services and toolkits and how to approach writing each type. We'll also cover the different between internal and external APIs and how to protect your code from your clients.

Attendees should take away a base set of tactics that assist in writing solid APIs.

Bullet Proof Builds

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Brian Pontarelli By Brian Pontarelli
Learn how to create software builds that will stand the test of time and make the world a better place - okay perhaps just your development environment a better place. Builds are usually the tedious work that we all leave to the last minute or sometimes throw together as we build an application. But in most applications, builds contain complex logic and many dependencies, just as the application does. This presentation covers how to make a manageable and enjoyable build system using Apache Ant and a new Ant framework that is part of the JCatapult platform called JCatapult-Ant.

Most companies use the Apache Ant build system either for technical or political reasons. Many developers often wish they could use Maven 1 or 2 because of the plugin structure, dependency management and standardization it provides to applications. Ant sometimes gets a bad rap because it isn't the most simple tool to extend and build files often become large and unmanageable. Plus, Ant extensions are not simple to test and Ant lacks any concept of versioning. Even with all these problems, Ant can still be a great build environment and when used correctly can make creating builds a pleasure.

This presentation covers these topics:

- JCatapult's Ant framework
- Setting up a project
- Adding plugins
- Ant plugins - the what, how and why
- Plugin versioning
- Writing a new plugin
- Using Groovy inside plugins

If you are using Ant for your builds, but want a better solution that includes reusable plugins, dependency management and much more, this presentation will show you how to use JCatapult-Ant to accomplish just that. However, if you aren't able to use JCatapult-Ant, but still want to understand how to create better builds using Apache Ant, this presentation will show you the methodology behind JCatapult-Ant's plugins and allow you to create your own custom plugin system.

Attendees must have a good working knowledge of the Ant build system in order to understand the material in this talk. No other knowledge is required.

Become Super Powerful with JRuby

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Charles Nutter 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.



JRuby is finally coming of age, presenting a viable new Ruby platform for both old and new Ruby developers. we'll first cover some basics about JRuby:

- History, including past design
- Current and future design plans
- Performance and compatibility metrics
- Where we go from here

JRuby also enables new ways of looking at programming on the Java platform. We'll look at some of the most popular:

- Calling Java APIs from Ruby code and implementing Java interfaces in Ruby
- Creating domain-specific languages to ease API use
- Metaprogramming in Ruby: fun and easy
- Interactive Java with the IRB console

Bringing Ruby & Rails to the JVM

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Charles Nutter 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.

JRuby aims to bring Ruby on Rails to Java developers and provide an alternative platform for Ruby developers. In this session we'll explain Ruby and show what makes it great, demonstrate how JRuby brings Ruby to Java and Java to Ruby, explore how JRuby on Rails brings agile web development to Java EE and Java EE's best features to Rails, and discuss the future of Ruby, Rails, and dynamic languages on the JVM.

We'll also talk about the status of JRuby on Rails, the current promise and perils of Rails on the JVM, and demonstrate bringing up a simple Rails app using JDBC for database access and calling into legacy services and APIs.

Internationalization and Localization in Java

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David Bock 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.

This presenter spent 9 years developing applications for the U.S. State Department that have been deployed in dozens of countries and languages. While some aspects of internationalization and localization are trivial, there are plenty of issues that are not. If you have an application that you expect to localize into other locales, there will be information here that is invaluable to you. This talk is entertaining for the war-stories alone! No other no-fluff presentation will feature pictures of the presenter waiting in line behind a herd of sheep to cross a pontoon bridge into Bosnia.

Introducing Agility to Large Organizations

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David Bock By David Bock
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.

Introducing change into a large organization can be difficult, even when everyone is in agreement. By starting with 'the quick win' and fixing some real pain in your organization, you can begin to get people moving in the right direction. In this talk we will look at the kinds of quick process wins that are possible, and how to introduce new ideas into a large organization.

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

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David Bock 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.

This talk will talk about everything from build processes, teamwork, and project structure through versioning, release plans, upgrde strategies, package dependencies, and more. Using real-world scenarios from two projects with 12-15 people working together over a 5-year time span, this presentation will offer advice based on multiple successful deliveries of real software.

JavaServer Faces: A Whirlwind Tour

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David Geary By David Geary
In April 2005, annual growth rates for jobs in JavaServer Faces, Struts, and Ruby on Rails were all at about 0%. Today, Struts' growth rate still hovers around 0%, but JSF and Rails have taken off. At the end of 2007, both JSF and Rails were growing at a rate of between 400-500% annually (according to indeed.com).

JSF has passed the adoption tipping point, and is now the Java-based framework of choice, as is evidenced by its ecosystem. From vendors such as MyEclipse and RedHat to open source projects such as Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4JSF, JSF is where the action is.

Come see why JSF is so popular. In this code- and demo-intensive session, I'll show you the fundamentals of JSF.

This session is taught by a member of the JSF Expert Group for JSF 1.0 and 2.0., and co-author of the best-selling book on JSF: Core JavaServer Faces. David will take you through a whirlwind introduction to JSF including what JSF is, how it was developed, and how you can best take advantage of the technology. Here is a list of topics:

Components, managed beans, value expressions, and static navigation
i18n, CSS, and actions
The Faces Context and Faces messages
The JSF Event Model
Using JavaScript with JSF

This introduction to JSF also contains 5 live-code demos, where David will develop a simple, but robust application during the course of the session.

Prerequisite: Some knowledge of Java-based web applications, such as Struts, is a plus, but is not required. If you have a significant experience with JSF, you probably already know most of what's covered in this session.


Killer JavaScript Frameworks: Prototype, Scriptaculous, and Rico

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David Geary By David Geary
An introduction to the popular Prototype JavaScript framework, and two frameworks built on top of Prototype: Scriptaculous and Rico.

Web2.0 is all about rich, interactive user interfaces (UIs), and these three frameworks provide the capabilities that you need to develop those UIs.

Prototype (prototype.conio.net) is a low-level JavaScript framework that adds significant features to JavaScript that make it easier for you to use the language and to incorporate Ajax calls in your applications.

Scriptaculous is a framework (script.aculo.us) built on top of Prototype that adds some pizazz to Prototype with features such as a wide array of special effects, animation, and drag and drop.

Rico is another framework (openrico.org) built on top of Prototype that, among other things, provides something known as behaviours, where you adorn plain-vanilla HTML with seemingly magical behaviours.

Come to this session and learn how to harness the power of these three frameworks.

Ajaxian Faces

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David Geary 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.

JavaServer Faces, with a mature component model and flexible lifecyle, is a perfect platform for implementing Web 2.0 user interfaces with Ajax. This session explores using JSF and Ajax to create applications that act like desktop applications but run in a browser.

We'll start with a quick look at implementing basic Ajax in a JSF application. Then, once your bloodthirst has been slaked, we'll dive deeper into Ajaxian Faces dynamics with a form completion demo that requires its implementor to understand two simple, but vital facts about JSF.

If you're savvy, you probably use client-side validation to augment your server side validation logic, which parenthetically, is no no-brainer in either of the leading web application frameworks, JSF or Rails. But anyway, client-side validation is old school. All the cool developers nowadays use Ajax to implement realtime validation, where you sneak a trip to the server as an unwary user types into your input fields. But to accomplish that, we'll have to dive even deeper into JSF, with concerns such as accessing view state and accounting for client-side state saving.

All of this Ajax development is great fun, but most of it is best relegated to components and frameworks, which are the topics that will wrap up our session. We'll see how to keep your JavaScript separate from your JSF components and how to pass JSP tag attributes all the way through to JavaScript. Finally, we'll take a look at Ajax4jsf, a JSF component library with a tag library that blends Ajax into JSF in a natural, intuitive way without having to write JavaScript.

As web developers, we've been handcuffed long enough by the shackles of Web 1.0 development. Come to this session and see the brave new world of Web 2.0 development with one of the hottest web application frameworks.

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

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David Geary 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.

JSF has been out for nearly three years now, and in many respects, the JSF specification has become a bit long in the tooth. Fortunately, the open source community has picked up the ball in a big way. In this 2-session presentation, we will explore three open source projects based on JSF--Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4jsf-- that will propel you into the stratosphere of productivity.

Seam is a framework from JBoss that combines the JSF and EJB3.0/Hibernate 3.0 frameworks into one component model. That means you only have to learn one framework to build compelling web applications.

This is the first of a two-part session, where we'll focus mostly on the Seam framework.

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

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

In the second part of this 2-session presentation, we'll turn our attention to Facelets and how you can use this compelling display technology with Seam.

We will also discuss Ajax4jsf and demonstrate how you can use that framework to create rich, interactive user interfaces for your JSF-based web applications.

The Google Web Toolkit, Part One

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David Geary 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.

In the early days of Java, application development with the AWT was relatively simple. You had to have a decent understanding of Java and AWT fundamentals, but once equipped with such knowledge, you could dive in and develop some impressive applications.

Ten years later, we have, in so many respects, gone significantly backwards. We've shoehorned technologies such as HTML into shoes for which they were never intended, and for our efforts, we have a mismatch of disparate technologies that one needs to knit together for a truly interactive web application.

This is the first session of a two-part presentation on the GWT, where I'll concentrate on GWT basics: implementing Ajax-enabled applications in Java, internationalization, testing, and remote procedure calls.

The Google Web Toolkit, Part Two

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

In this session, we'll dive deeper into the GWT and explore some of it's more advanced aspects, such as implementing custom widgets, deploying your application in a servlet container, and implementing drag and drop.

Agile Immersion

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David Hussman By David Hussman
Have you heard about SCRUM or XP but never done it? If you want to give it a try, this session will allow you to participate in planning and executing several agile iterations. A working knowledge of either XP or SCRUM will be helpful but not mandatory.

After a brief introduction, we will assume roles, create a simple backlog, roadmap, and complete several iterations, finishing with a short retrospective.

Creating Agile Requirements

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David Hussman By David Hussman
Successful project communities balance written requirements with a healthy amount of discussion. This is at the core of requirements that could be deemed "agile". Many agile projects choose to use user stories, but others may be using use cases or other forms of written requirements. This session is for anyone wanting to improve their requirements, including the creation of good requirement and the presentation styles that help people focus on creating great software products, and stop focusing on documents.

The session will focus on finding the people who are best suited to create and communicate agile requirements. We will examine how to ensure agility for user stories, use cases, and several other common forms of requirements. Without regard to the document type, we will show how to smoke out what needs to be captured in written form when, challenging the age old notion that more detail in requirements produces better software.

Executable Documentation

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David Hussman 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.

What is executable documentation? Simply put, instead of adding more details to requirements, capture the desired system behavior in acceptance testing tools which are accessible to the entire project community. The session will focus on FIT, but it may include other tools for creating ED. History has shown me that ED - requirements that have two states (green and red) - helps project communities consistently create better software, faster!

Getting Agile Planning and Tracking Up and Running

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David Hussman By David Hussman
If your company is using agile or thinking about it, this session will show you how to plan and tracking an agile project. Examples projects will be discussed, including the glory and horrors. Various planning tools that help distributed teams will be presented as well as a collection of lo-fi tools which truly help find and address the issue that plagues so many projects: "when are we going to complete this project".

From using markers and post it notes to go faster tools, this session will examine ways to get agile going in various situations (e.g. small projects, large projects, or distributed projects). A variety of techniques and tools will be shown and discussed along with the pros and cons of each. Most importantly, you will come away with a variety of ways to start planning and tracking agile projects, so you can choose a path which fits best within your company.

Cutting an Agile Groove: Transition Tips

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David Hussman By David Hussman
If you are thinking about, just starting, or in the midst of transitioning to agile, this session is overflowing with practices, tip, techniques, and experiences. Stop talking about whether or not you are doing agile and come learn how to setup and maintain agility that extends beyond a single project.

From your first agile steps to keeping the agile groove alive, this session will provide a guide for making agile work for you. Adopting agile without understanding (or showing) how it will help your project is a recipe for failure. From planning to tracking to coaching to coding, this session is filled with pragmatic experiences from a wide variety of projects and industries.

Pragmatic Unit Testing with TestNG and EasyMock

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Howard Lewis Ship By Howard Lewis Ship
You've heard about unit testing but were daunted when it came time to put the pedal to the metal. That's because JUnit is just one tool and there's others you need to learn about, including the wonderful and wierd EasyMock and the easy and powerful TestNG.

Unit testing with JUnit 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 wierd 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 also leave JUnit behind and investigate using TestNG, a modern and improved test framework. We'll then learn how to tame EasyMock's awkward API with some modest refactoring and naming conventions.

Introduction to Tapestry 4

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Howard Lewis Ship 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.

Tapestry is a powerful open-source Java web application framework that stands apart from most other technologies used for creating web applications ? it is based on highly reusable components, which are assembled to form complete pages. This session will get you started with Tapestry, showing how to build a simple form-based application. Along the way, we'll see how Tapestry simplifies your job: We'll see how Tapestry HTML templates are easier to create and maintain than JavaServer pages (JSPs). We'll see how Tapestry's built in error reporting lets you find and correct errors with startling speed. We'll see how Tapestry takes over responsibility for building and interpreting application URLs, eliminating large amounts of boring, error-prone, manual coding. Most importantly, we'll see how Tapestry bridges from the stateless world of HTTP and servlets into a more natural, more productive world of actual object oriented engineering ? allowing you to build applications in terms of objects with methods and properties (a true revolution if you are used to traditional servlets).

We'll also take a peek into more advanced aspects of Tapestry, such as its input validation subsystem that provides server- and client-side validation, as well as more advanced Tapestry components such as Table (a powerful data grid), and the Trails meta-framework that creates complete applications without almost no coding. Once you've learned a little bit about Tapestry, you might find it hard to go back to your old approach!

Introduction to Tapestry 5

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Howard Lewis Ship By Howard Lewis Ship
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.

Distributed Teams: Remote Agility

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

It's difficult to keep a local team coordinated. When we add geographical distance to the equation, problems are immediately magnified. We'll talk about techniques that you can use to be sure everyone is sharing information and on the same page whether they're in the same office or in different time zones.

Agile Software Testing Strategies

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Jared Richardson By Jared Richardson
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.

We'll examine these strategies and then look at scenarios for using them next week. This presentation will get you started whether you're starting a new project or trying to clean up an existing one.

Software Development Techniques

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Jared Richardson By Jared Richardson
Throughout our software careers we learn habits from our coworkers, from books we've read, and occasionally, from conferences we attend. Much of our competence comes from the tips and tricks we pick up as we go.


In this session, learn five of the techniques I've borrowed along the way. We'll discuss The List, code reviews, code change notifications, daily meetings, and tech leads. These techniques are often abused, but when used properly they can make a huge difference in how you develop software. Take this opportunity to add these practices to your toolkit.

Shippers Unite!

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

This book provides a comprehensive look at the software life cycle and can be used to retool the way you, and your team, builds software. While we can't cover the entire book in nintey minutes, we can look how a holistic view of the software life cycle helps you improve your projects and makes your life easier.

Build Teams, Not Products

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

Let's move beyond getting lucky and look at some key practices that will help you build your scattered cats into a well-oiled machine.

Persist This(); Comparing Java Persistent Frameworks

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Jim White 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?

The talk will also compare the framework solutions to straight JDBC/SQL code to see how much real savings can be accomplished with a persistence framework. Using a medium sized example graph of objects that contains inheritance, various object-to-object associations and attributes of many different data types, attendees will be shown a demonstration of the setup, API and mapping facilities of each framework. Statistics on the footprint, performance and amount of code using each framework will be shared along with guidance on how the statistics might be affected in other graphs and application environments.

Attendees of this presentation should be familiar with Java, JDBC and relational database concepts.


SOA & Event Driven Architectures (EDA) ? Lessons from the field?

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Mark Kirby 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.

This talk will explore the processes leading up to the creation of an EDA, the effort involved in designing an EDA in the SOA space, and real world examples illustrating implementation details. Specifically how an EDA is manifested with respect to its messaging infrastructure. We will explore the implementation of messaging patterns and see them in action as they help facilitate the dynamic nature of today?s businesses.

Designing for Ajax, part 1

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Nathaniel Schutta 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.

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.

Ajax Libraries

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Nathaniel Schutta 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.

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.

Dynamic Languages and the JVM

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Nathaniel Schutta By Nathaniel Schutta
With all the attention being paid to Ruby and it's hip cousin Rails, many in the Java camp may be feeling like their party invitation is "lost in the mail". Fear not loyal Java lovers, the dynamic language meme is alive and well in your space! Between numerous JSRs and various languages, the JVM is becoming quite the dynamic disco. After an overview of what it means to be dynamic, this talk will look at JRuby, Groovy, and Rhino.

With all the attention being paid to Ruby and it's hip cousin Rails, many in the Java camp may be feeling like their party invitation is "lost in the mail". Fear not loyal Java lovers, the dynamic language meme is alive and well in your space! Between numerous JSRs and various languages, the JVM is becoming quite the dynamic disco. After an overview of what it means to be dynamic, this talk will look at JRuby, Groovy, and Rhino.

Test Infecting the Legacy Organization

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Nathaniel Schutta By Nathaniel Schutta
When starting a new project, most developers make sure that testing is a priority. However, only the lucky few live in the idyllic world of greenfield development; the vast majority of us must contend with code written when "test" was a four letter word and testing was the sole responsibility of that "other" organization. We'll examine some techniques for introducing testing - not just to your code but to the rest of your development organization.

When starting a new project, most developers make sure that testing is a priority. However, only the lucky few live in the idyllic world of greenfield development; the vast majority of us must contend with code written when "test" was a