Domain Driven Design: Building Complex Software

DDD is a proven approach for modeling and building sophisticated software that deals with complex domains. Learn what it does, what kinds of projects it is best for, and how to start to implement DDD in your organization.

Engineering your DSLs

The easy part of implementing Domain Specific Languages is coding them. The hard part comes when you have to think about testing, documenting, evolving and providing appropriate editing interfaces for them.

NoSQL? No Problems

There are a wide range of NoSQL options, most of which solve very different problems. In the first part of this session we'll look beyond the hype to understand some real world use cases where NoSQL options can either replace or enhance a relational solution. You might be surprised at some of the reasons companies have chosen to successfully develop NoSQL based solutions.

In the second part of the session we'll look through a range of the common NoSQL offerings like CouchDB, MongoDB, Redis, Neo, Cassandra, Riak and hosted solutions like Googles BigTable and Amazons SimpleDB.

Tooling for External DSLs

Eventually if you do a lot of work with DSLs, you'll need to consider using external DSLs to make your languages more flexible and powerful.

Complexity Theory and Software Development

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Some systems are too large to be understood entirely by any one human mind. They are composed of a diverse array of individual components capable of interacting with each other and adapting to a changing environment. As systems, they produce behavior that differs in kind from the behavior of their components. Complexity Theory is an emerging discipline that seeks to describe such phenomena previously encountered in biology, sociology, economics, and other disciplines.

Decision Making in Software Teams

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Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.

Gaelyk: Lightweight Groovy on the Google App Engine

You love Groovy and you're a believer in cloud computing. For a larger project you might choose Grails and hosting on Amazon EC2, but what if you want to take advantage of the nearly massless deployments of a cloud provider like the Google App Engine? You could make Grails work, but it's not always the best fit. Enter Gaelyk.

Learning Open Source Business Intelligence

Traditionally, business intelligence tools have been a high-cost part of any enterprise's software inventory. Recently, options have emerged that allow architects to build a credible business intelligence stack out of entirely open-source components. In this brief overview, we will demonstrate ETL, reporting, and analytics tool that can be deployed free or at low cost. Learn how to turn your company's transactional database into a rich data asset with a business-friendly user interface that integrates into your existing software infrastructure.

Open Source Business Intelligence Workshop

Once you're familiar with the concepts of data warehousing, star schemas, cubes, and pivot tables, then it's time to dive in and look at how the tools really work. Continuing from the quick demos in Part I, this workshop session will have you building an actual ETL process with Talend Open Studio. This hands-on exercise will acquaint you with the tooling and solidify the concepts you've learned.

Prerequisite: Learning Open Source Business Intelligence (or a solid grasp of BI concepts)

Aspect Oriented Programming With Spring AOP

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) complements Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) by providing another way of thinking about program structure. The key unit of modularity in OOP is the class, whereas in AOP the unit of modularity is the aspect. Aspects enable the modularization of concerns such as transaction management that cut across multiple types and objects. (Such concerns are often termed crosscutting concerns in AOP literature.)

Building Twitter With Grails In 90 Minutes

This live coding session will demonstrate how the basics of Twitter can be built using Grails and JMS in less than 90 minutes. The fast paced and code-driven presentation will build a Twitter-like application from scratch using Grails and its rapid application development capability.

Compile Time and Runtime Metaprogramming With Groovy

The dynamic nature of Groovy makes it a fantastic language for building dynamic applications for the Java Platform. The metaprogramming capabilities offered by the language provide everything that an application development team needs to build systems that are far more capable than their all Java counterparts. Taking advantage of Groovy's metaprogramming capabilities brings great new possibilities that would be very difficult or just plain impossible to write with Java alone. Building Domain Specific Languages in Groovy is easy to do once a team has a good understanding of the Metaobject-Protocol (MOP) and the method dispatch mechanisms used by the Groovy runtime environment.

GORM Inside And Out

GORM is a super powerful ORM tool that makes ORM simple by leveraging the flexibility and expressiveness of a dynamic language like Groovy. With GORM developers get access to all of the power and flexibility of an ORM tool like Hibernate without any of the complexity.

Prerequisite: Advanced Grails

Grails - How to Build Enterprise Apps

Grails represents technology that offers great flexibility and power without the complexity introduced by other Java web application frameworks. Custom tag libraries are a snap. GSP Templates provide a simple mechanism for reusing UI elements. Sitemesh is integrated to help provide a consistent presentation across the entire application. GORM is super powerful ORM. Grails provides simple mechanisms for leveraging the power of Ajax.

Agile Engineering Practices

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Most of the time when people talk about agile software development, they talk about project and planning practices and never mention actual development practices. This talk delves into best development practices for agile projects, covering all of its aspects.

Prerequisite: Having worked in an organization that values bureaucracy more than individuals

Emergent Design

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Emergent design is a big topic in the agile architecture and design community. This session covers the theory behind emergent design and shows examples of how you can implement this important concept.

Prerequisite: understanding of architectural and design concepts

Evolving towards REST-based Enterprise Integration

This talk describes an agile approach to architecture, and merges the current state-of-the-art thinking in both service oriented architectures(SOA) and web-based architectures like HTTP, REST, and hypermedia.

Testing the Entire Stack

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This talk covers testing the entire stack: unit, integration, functional, behavior-driven, databases, user acceptance, mocking & stubbing, and other topics and strategies.

Prerequisite: Confusion about what to test when and where

Products and People over Process and Dogma

The time has come to shift our focus away from process to products and people. 10 years into the agile movement, the fresh, lightweight process once created are gaining weight and often calcifying to a dangerous degree. Where meaningful and lasting agility thrives, agile practices are powerful tools but not the focus of daily discussion.

Tuning Your Agility

If you consider yourself an experienced agile practitioner and you’re looking to improve your skills, this session is for you. We will cover tools for evaluating your team’s agility and the use of various agile practices. We will examine your agility from four perspectives: growing community, planning products, incremental delivery of value, and the deeper challenges of continuous improvement.

Cryptography on the JVM: Boot Camp

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Does your application transmit customer information? Are there fields of sensitive customer data stored in your DB? Can your application be used on insecure networks? If so, you need a working knowledge of encryption and how to leverage Open Source APIs and libraries to make securing your data as easy as possible. Cryptography is quickly becoming a developer's new frontier of responsibility in many data-centric applications.

Encryption on the JVM: Advanced Techniques

Now that you have the basics of encryption under your belt, we'll advance to talking about where it is sensible and performant to add this level of security to your application. Symmetric key and public key encryption have various levels of processing overhead, so you can't blindly just use the "best" encryption out there. What about password hashes? Did you know they are vulnerable with our "salt"?

Prerequisite: Encryption Bootcamp on the JVM

Git Going with Distributed Version Control

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Many development shops have made the leap from RCS, Perforce, ClearCase, PVCS, CVS, BitKeeper or SourceSafe to the modern Subversion (SVN) version control system. But why not take the next massive stride in productivity and get on board with Git, a distributed version control system (DVCS). Jump ahead of the masses staying on Subversion, and increase your team's productivity, debugging effectiveness, flexibility in cutting releases, and repository redundancy at $0 cost. Understand how distributed version control systems are game-changers and pick up the lingo that will become standard in the next few years.

Prerequisite: Basic understanding of Subversion or similar version control system

Hadoop: Divide and Conquer Gigantic Datasets (Advanced)

With the basics of Hadoop under your belt, we'll dig into the depths of this amazing framework by writing our own reducer in Java and deploying it to the cluster. Next, we'll dig deeper into DSLs like Pig and its log-file processing cousin, Chukwa. Since grid topology is intentionally very opaque in Hadoop, we'll look at the benefits and how to achieve a properly tuned cluster with replication. Specific to HDFS, we'll tune the configurable parameters for storage redundancy and bucket sizes.

Prerequisite: Hadoop: Divide and Conquer Gigantic Datasets (Intro)

Hadoop: Divide and Conquer Gigantic Datasets (Intro)

Moore's law has finally hit the wall and CPU speeds have actually decreased in the last few years. The industry is reacting with hardware with an ever-growing number of cores and software that can leverage "grids" of distributed, often commodity, computing resources. But how is a traditional Java developer supposed to easily take advantage of this revolution? The answer is the Apache Hadoop family of projects. Hadoop is a suite of Open Source APIs at the forefront of this grid computing revolution and is considered the absolute gold standard for the divide-and-conquer model of distributed problem crunching. The well-travelled Apache Hadoop framework is curently being leveraged in production by prominent names such as Yahoo, IBM, Amazon, Adobe, AOL, Facebook and Hulu just to name a few.

Architectural Kata Workshop

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Fred Brooks said, "How do we get great designers? Great designers design, of course." So how do we get great architects? Great architects architect. But architecting a software system is a rare opportunity for the non-architect.

The kata is an ancient tradition, born of the martial arts, designed to give the student the opportunity to practice more than basics in a semi-realistic way. The coding kata, created by Dave Thomas, is an opportunity for the developer to try a language or tool to solve a problem slightly more complex than "Hello world". The architectural kata, like the coding kata, is an opportunity for the student-architect to practice architecting a software system.

Busy Java Developer's Guide to Advanced Collections

Once you've learned the core Collections clases, you're done, right? You know everything there is to know about Collections, and you can "check that off" your list of Java packages you have to learn and know, right?

Prerequisite: Busy Java Developer's Guide to Collections

Pragmatic Architecture

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Building an application is not the straightforward exercise it used to be. Decisions regarding which architectural approaches to take (n-tier, client/server), which user interface approaches to take (Smart/rich client, thin client, Ajax), even how to communicate between processes (Web services, distributed objects, REST)... it's enough to drive the most dedicated designer nuts. This talk discusses the goals of an application architecture and why developers should concern themselves with architecture in the first place. Then, it dives into the meat of the various architectural considerations available; the pros and cons of JavaWebStart, ClickOnce, SWT, Swing, JavaFX, GWT, Ajax, RMI, JAX-WS, , JMS, MSMQ, transactional processing, and more.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Collections

For so many Java developers, the java.util.* package consists of List, ArrayList, and maybe Map and HashMap. But the Collections classes are so much more powerful than many of us are led to believe, and all it requires is a small amount of digging and some simple exploration to begin to "get" the real power of the Collection classes.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Functional Java

Much noise has been made in recent years about functional languages, like Scala or Haskell, and their benefits relative to object-oriented languages, most notably Java. Unfortunately, as wonderful as many of those benefits are, the fact remains that most Java developers will either not want or not be able to adopt those languages for writing day-to-day code. Which leaves us with a basic question: if I can't use these functional languages to write production code, is there any advantage to learning about them? The short answer is yes, for the fundamental premise--"I can't use functional code on my Java project"--is flawed. Java developers can, in fact, make use of functional ideas, and what's better, they don't even have to reinvent them for Java--thanks to the FunctionalJava library, many of the core primitives--interfaces that serve as base types for creating function values, for example--already exist, ready to be used.

Agile Program Management: Collaborating Across the Organization

Have you ever waited weeks for one piece of functionality so you could release a large project? Have you been in the situation where the software is waiting for the hardware? Or, where the database admin held up the entire release because his work wasn’t coordinated with the feature-based teams?

Program management is the art of coordinating several sub-projects to a common objective. Until the parts are assembled into the whole, the parts have no value to the organization.

Manage Your Project Portfolio: A Lean and Agile Approach

Feel as if you can't get anything done? More projects than time to do them? Crises out the wazoo? Then it's time to consider another approach: managing your project portfolio. You can organize your projects and and evaluate them without getting buried under a mountain of statistics.

Overcoming Several Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile

If you've been trying to change your organization so that your projects are more agile, you may have noticed several problems: it's difficult to have people such as product management, senior management, even functional managers work and manage in a way that makes sense for your agile project; you're working with other parts of a large program that isn't agile; you have a geographically distributed team; your management wants to know at the beginning when the project will end; or even that the project team does not share a common vision of what "done" means.

Successful Software Management: 17 Lessons Learned

Many software managers came to management through the technical ranks. Although they may have had plenty of technical training and mentoring, they frequently have to learn management skills the hard way, through trial and error. Johanna will describe some technical management tips and tricks learned through trial and error, focusing on software managers and their particular issues.

You'll learn about a manager's job, how to create an effective work environment, and how you can help people do their best work.

Code Craft

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Despite what some developers think, we spend a lot more of our time reading code, code that was often written by someone that isn't around anymore. How do we deal with this common scenario without resorting to burning our predecessor in effigy? Better, how can we write code in such a way that our successors will heap effusive praise upon us at the mere mention of our name? During this talk, we'll read actual code discussing ways it could be improved. As we work through real examples, we'll explore the importance of patterns, principles like SOLID and SLAP and essential practices like unit testing and continuous integration.

JavaScript Beyond the Basics

JavaScript is one of the most widely used languages around and yet its also one of the most misunderstood. With Ajaxified UIs becoming the norm, this humble language is once again at the forefront.

jQuery: Ajax Made Easy

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Sure, Ajax might not be the hardest thing you'll have to do on your current project, but that doesn't mean we can't use a little help here and there. While there are a plethora of excellent choices in the Ajax library space, jQuery is fast becoming one of the most popular. In this talk, we'll see why. In addition to it's outstanding support for CSS selectors, dirt simple DOM manipulation, event handling and animations, jQuery also supports a rich ecosystem of plugins that provide an abundance of top notch widgets. Using various examples, this talk will help you understand what jQuery can do so you can see if it's right for your next project.

Groovy + The Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is Tim Berners-Lee's full vision of what the Web can and will be. This HTML stuff we are all so enamored with is just the tip of the iceberg. "Web 2.0" is a kindergarten plaything (and a stupid name). Webs of linked data will allow us unprecedented flexibility in how we produce and consume information. While many people have been waiting on the sideline for the Semantic Web to get here, others have been making it happen.

HTML 5 ... and the Kitchen Sink

HTML 5 is an adventurous and confusing prospect that will help change the Web as we know it. It is being finalized as a standard but won't be fully supported by most browsers for quite some time. Companies like Apple and Google have already committed to it as the future of Web application development, however. There are a huge number of new features, updates and gotchas coming at us (including the proverbial kitchen sink!) so it is time to get prepared. This talk will walk you through the new bits and try to put it all into perspective.

RDFA : Weaving Richness and Meaning in the Web

The human web is reasonably well in hand by now. We are getting pretty good at building systems that people find valuable and entertaining. We have not spent as much time concerned about our software friends. There is a ton a rich content available on the web that is too difficult to extract in automated ways using just XHTML, the meta tag and microformats. This talk will introduce you to some emerging technologies from the Semantic Web camp to enrich your web pages with useful information for both automated extraction and improved browsing experiences.

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.

SPARQL : Querying the Web of Data

The human-friendly Web is about nicely-formatted, accessible content for users to browse. There are emerging Data Webs (both public and private) that rely on technologies from the Semantic Web stack to link increasingly rich connections between various data sources. SPARQL and RDF are the main tools for expressing and using this connectivity. This talk will introduce you to one of these topics and the practical and accessible aspects of employing them on the Web and in the Enterprise.

Getting people to come to consensus on common models and schemas is usually the hardest part of any data integration strategies. These technologies help lower the bar on both the technical and social costs of stepping up your integration strategies.

Agile Development with OSGi

There isn't much said in typical Agile conversation about architecture and modularity. We will attempt to redress this omission by examining an agile approach to logical system architecture coupled with a potential implementation for the Java platform.

Tracer Bullet Development (TBD) is a technique that allows you to prove out the proposed architecture of your system by firing a "tracer bullet" through a vertical slice of your system that exercises all of its horizontal components. It has multiple benefits, including encapsulation, decoupled code, parallel code development, and more.

OSGi is a specification for a dynamic module system for Java with multiple open source implementations. It allows you to modularize your system into "bundles" which essentially firewall their own classloader space. Objects running within a bundle can only see types that they explicitly import and only expose types that they explicitly export. They interact with other bundles by expose and consuming services which are registered under a public interface.

At face value it seems that Tracer Bullet Development and OSGi are a match made in heaven!

Polyglot OSGi

One of the greatest benefits of OSGi is its firewall-esque encapsulation of implementation details. The only traffic that gets in or out is the traffic that you explicitly specify; otherwise, all bets are off. The aspiring polyglot can bring in the right tool for the right job by hiding it behind OSGi services as an “implementation detail,” provided that only Java language types are exported.

The Seven Wastes of Software Development

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One of the first principles of lean software development is the elimination of waste. Shigeo Shingo identified seven types of manufacturing waste in his "A Study of the Toyota Production System." Later, the Poppendieck's translated these to seven wastes of software development.

Keynote: It could be heaven or hell (being a polyglot programmer)

Keynote discussing the benefits and challenges of being a polyglot programmer.

Scala Tricks

Scala is a very powerful hybrid functional pure object oriented language on the JVM. Scala is known for its conciseness and expressiveness. In this presentation we will look at some common tasks you do everyday in developing applications and see how they manifest in Scala.

Tackling Concurrency on the JVM

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In this presentation we will take a quick walk though the issues with concurrency and how the solutions provided in Scala and Clojure help address those.

Test Driving Multithreaded Code

Once I got convinced about the benefits of TDD, I used it pretty extensively and consistently to drive the design and development of my code. So, it came as a surprise when I was trying to convince myself that those practices do not apply on a highly multithreaded code I was creating on a project. Thankfully, I set out to prove that TDD does not apply, but ended up proving myself wrong.

Transforming to Groovy

Groovy is a elegant, dynamic, agile, OO language. I like to program in Groovy because it is fun and the code is concise and highly expressive. Writing code in a language is hardly about using its syntax, however. It is about using the right idioms. Come to this section to pick up some nice Groovy idioms.

Prerequisite: Some knowledge of Groovy is helpful but not required.

What's Brewing in Java

Java has come a long way, and yet there is so much that's happening in this space. In this presentation we will take a look at the exciting additions and changes coming up in the next version of Java.

Prerequisite: Good programming knowledge of Java