The power of multicore machines and cloud computing is all dependent on an application's ability to successfully leverage concurrency. Although concurrency has traditionally been considered fatally difficult in Java, a few simple architecture principles can make all the difference. This session will review some of those principles in both theory and practice.

This session will review the theory of concurrency and the different levels that concurrency will act on. With that basis, it explores the theoretical reasons behind the difficulties in writing concurrent code, and then some practical application architecture techniques to cope with those difficulties.

JConch is a library that provides a few high-level tools for high-concurrency environments on the JVM. The java.util.concurrent package in the Java standard library provides low-level structures for managing concurrent communication. Learn here how to use both of them in order to produce clean, highly-concurrent, and highly-tunable code.

Programming in a concurrent fashion is quickly becoming mandatory for applications. This session will explore the best ways to do that on the JVM.

The Groovy language now provides substantial concurrency capabilities via the GPars library, including the ability to work with actors and dataflow concurrency. This talk shows how you can integrate these Groovy concurrency structures into your Java applications.

The GPars project offers developers new intuitive and safe ways to handle tasks concurrently, asynchronously, and distributed by utilizing the power of the Java platform and the flexibility of the Groovy language. With GPars, Java programs can transparently leverage multiple cores and even multiple systems by moving through a layer of Groovy code.

Increasingly, people are adopting Agile practices a la carte, and some are even talking about "post-Agile" methodologies. If things are going to be changing, let's take a moment to review Agile development practices, the problems they were trying to solve, what worked, and what difficulties these new methodologies are responding to. With this information in hand, we can make an intelligent decision about the development methodology for our team.

This interactive session will review the why's, wherefore's, and why not's of test-driven development, continuous integration, iterations, "point"-based estimation, retrospectives, scrums, and other Agile practices.