Twin Cities Software Symposium

October 10 - 12, 2008



Event Details

Location

Hilton Minneapolis/Bloomington Hotel
3900 American Boulevard West
Bloomington, MN 55437
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Fees

Early Bird Registration
Thru 9/22/08 $825
Regular Registration
9/23/08 - 10/10/08 $925
Group Registration
Valid until 09/22/2008
5 - 9 attendees $725
10 - 14 attendees $700
15 - 24 attendees $675
25+ attendees $650
At the Door
10/10/08 $995
Register Now »

Registration Includes

  • 1). Three Day All Access Pass
  • 2). 1-Year IntelliJ License
        - compliments of JetBrains
  • 3). All Meals/Snacks
        - duration of the symposium
  • 4). Custom Laptop Bag
       - Best in the Industry ($150 Value)
  • 5). One Gig USB Drive
       - All Symposium Content included
  • 6). Custom NFJS Binder

Registration Options

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 Brian Sam-Bodden

Hibernate is an open source Object-Relational Mapping Framework that mostly automates the tedious and time-consuming task of persisting Java objects to a relational database.
Hibernate is quickly becoming the preferred way for enterprise developers to overcome the object-relational impedance mismatch and a good alternative to the coarse-grained Entity EJBs, low-level raw JDBC, and by-committee specifications like JDO. Learn what your choices in the ORM arena, what to look for in an ORM tool, and how to get started with Hibernate for your next J2SE or J2EE project.

By Brian Sam-Bodden

Learn 10 tried and true ways to improve the way you use Hibernate today. In this session you would learn about a collection of 10 tips, tricks, practices and tools that will make you more effective at designing, implementing, testing and tuning your application's Hibernate-powered object-relational layer.

By David Geary

Have you ever stopped to think that you need to learn two frameworks to develop a non-trivial, database-backed, web application? Struts and iBatis; JSF and Hibernate; Tapestry and EJB3.0.

By David Geary

The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is truly a revolutionary framework that lets you develop Ajaxified web applications without knowing anything about Ajax or JavaScript. But the GWT goes way beyond basic Ajax by letting you implement desktop-like applications that run in the ubiquitous browser.

By David Hussman

Management and agility are not mutually exclusive. Many managers are already working in an agile manner as a means to improve, produce, or simply survive. Other managers hear about projects using agile methods and struggle to find a place in the project community.

This session provides a new way to think about managing projects. Some managers will find that their existing practices and skills are supported and enhanced by the forums and metrics provided within an agile project while others will be challenged by some of the principles and practices.

By David Hussman

Why should the value of test driven development (TDD) stay stuck in the realm of coding? The ideas behind TDD are now being successfully applied to the automation of business value. While this has been going on for some time within the agile community, it is not starting to spread to main stream development.

There are more tools are coming available everyday which allow developers, testers, and customers (or product owners) to work together to automate acceptance tests. This process helps clarify the needs of the end user before development begins and removes more of the wasteful work based on incorrect assumptions from vague requirements.

By Jared Richardson

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.

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.

By Jeff Brown

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.

By Jeff Brown

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.

By Ken Sipe

Scale... what is scale... how do you applications which are scalable. How do you know if the application scales?

By Ken Sipe

Spring 2.5 is brand spanking new, with a number of fantastic features. With growth of large and complex Spring applications which struggle with xml manageability and with the added pressure of Guice and SEAM there is a push for less XML, with solution leaning towards annotations. Spring 2.5 adds to the toolset provided in Spring 2.0 to provide a development environment where XML is greatly reduced... or eliminated if you so choose.

By Ken Sipe

You are using Java, whew!!! No need to worry about memory, the garbage collector will handle that. Those who have had a memory issue in Java are not so naive any more. Often memory utilization and heap sizes are an after thought and are not recognized until the application is in production, often caused by application uptime, production request volume or production sets of data. When the OutOfMemory Error occurs, often the science of development seems to brake down and knobs are turned. First the (-mx) maximum heap space gets adjusted... More is better right. The next OutOfMemory, heads start scratching, code reviews start in earnest, and Google gets several new hits. Did you know that it is possible to get an OutOfMemory error without running out of heap space?


By Ken Sipe

Thoughts lead to words, words lead to action, actions lead to habits. In this session we'll sharpen the development saw in the process of understanding what makes a hyper-productive programmer. The focus will consist of developer habits and development processes.

By Michael Nygard

Servers, storage, networking, backups... they're all vanishing into the "clouds". Cloud Computing is the emerging architecture for massive, scalable infrastructure that your company doesn't have to own or operate.

From the "zero servers" web startup to the corporate IT department battling server-sprawl, cloud computing has many manifestations. This session will differentiate among the various types of cloud computing and describe applicable use cases.

By Michael Nygard

Cloud computing is taking the world by storm. Amazon's Web Services, EC2, and S3 provide completely virtual infrastructure, letting startup and existing companies create sites and web applications faster than ever before.

In this session, Michael will use cloud computing to create and deploy a fully-functional web site. You will learn how to create and run your own virtual infrastructure in the clouds.

By Nathaniel Schutta

While your project might have nearly 100% code coverage on the server tier, many projects ignore testing the web layer. With more and more code being pushed to the browser, a lack of tests for the client code begs for trouble.


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 Scott Davis

This talk focuses on integrating Groovy with your legacy Java codebase in a way that wouldn't raise an eyebrow in the most conservative of organizations. We'll look at the dramatic reduction in line of code you can achieve by simply flipping your POJOs to POGOs (Plain Old Groovy Objects). We'll talk about calling Java classes from Groovy, and calling Groovy classes from Java. We'll look at Groovyc, the integrated compiler that manages Groovy/Java dependencies without a hiccup.

By Scott Davis

Everyone has their favorite excuses for not writing unit tests: "It
takes too much time", "It's not my job", "But it compiles!" In this
presentation we talk about the importance of testing, and how the act of
writing your own unit tests leads to better architected code.

By Stuart Halloway

The rise of Ajax and Rich Web Applications, plus the success of dynamic languages, has caused people to revisit the JavaScript language. Now that we take JavaScript seriously as a language, it is time to get serious about the quality of JavaScript code, through refactoring. In this talk, we will approach refactoring JavaScript in three phases:

Test first, then refactor. Bring JavaScript code under test, so that you can refactor with confidence.
Refactoring 101. Explore some important refactorings: composed method, extract method, introduce named parameter, and extract object
Common problems. Work through three problems endemic to legacy JavaScript code: making JavaScript unobtrusive, refactoring to prototype-based inheritance, and refactoring to functional style.


By Stuart Halloway

Over the last few years, we have taken dozens of projects to 100% coverage, and there are still plenty of things that can go wrong. We will look at examples the various problems, and show how to prevent them from infecting your project.

By Ted Neward

Want to get the soup-to-nuts story on Java annotations? In this presentation, we'll first talk about what annotations provide to the Java language. After setting ourselves a conceptual basis to operate from, we'll look at the language definition for Java annotations, from how to use them to how to define them. Finally, we'll take a look at the other side of annotations, consuming them at source-level (using "apt", the annotation processing tool), class-level (using a bytecode toolkit such as BCEL), and at runtime (using enhancements to the Reflection API made in Java5).

By Ted Neward

Google has done it again, surprising the industry with another open-source project; this time, they've chosen to tackle the message format corner of the industry, releasing their "Protocol Buffers" implementation for the world to use and examine, one that is, in their words, "XML, but smaller, faster, and more efficient".

By Ted Neward

Ever since its 1.1 release, the Java Virtual Machine steadily becomes a more and more "hackable" (configurable, pluggable, customizable, choose your own adjective here) platform for Java developers, yet few, if any, Java developers take advantage of it. Time to take the kid gloves off, crack open the platform, and see what's there. Time to play.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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.

By Venkat Subramaniam

How do you ensure your applications meet the expectations of your key customers? In this session we will explore using the FIT tool and Behavior Driven Design tools to do exactly this.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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.