By Mark Fisher

Spring 2.0 introduced support for Message-Driven POJOs meaning that it is now possible to receive JMS messages asynchronously and delegate the handling of those messages to simple objects even within a lightweight application running outside of any application server. If your POJO has a return value, it will automatically be sent to a response destination.

After a quick overview of Spring's JMS support, we will build a Message-Driven POJO sample application from the ground up. This will include sending a Message as a request and receiving a reply across separate JVMs. You will learn how to configure the Message-Driven POJO without writing a single line of messaging code. You will also learn how to configure the pool of concurrent consumers and integrate with Spring's transaction management. We will use the JMS namespace available as of Spring 2.5, and we will even explore the possibility of delegating to a Groovy-scripted object.

By Mark Fisher

Spring's Portlet MVC framework is one of the major new additions in Spring 2.0, bringing the proven benefits of the servlet-based Spring MVC framework to JSR-168 Portlet development.

In this presentation, you will learn how to use Portlet MVC to develop enterprise portlet applications. It will cover the framework's architecture and API in a direct comparison with Spring MVC. It will also include a walkthrough of a sample portlet application with a detailed review of the implementation and configuration. Mark will highlight a number of the framework's compelling features as well as its integration with Spring Web Flow.

By Neal Ford

This session delivers 10 techniques for improving your code, whether you are freshly graduated or a grizzled veteran.

Even the most competent programmer falls into habits and coding ruts. This session delivers 10 techniques for improving your code, whether you are freshly graduated or a grizzled veteran. It is derived from many sources, including other languages (Smalltalk, Lisp, Java, and others), and techniques and idioms we have developed teaching developers. It also consolidates information from books that delve into the craft of writing good software. The goal is to create code that is easier to read, maintain, debug, and enhance.
Key Session Points:

1. Names of Things
2. Composed Method
3. Apply the Unix Philosophies
4. Syntactic Stuff
• Constants
• Enumerations
• Common Methods: equals() && hashcode()
5. Orthogonality
6. Compactness
7. The Pragmatic Rules
8. Template Method
9. Bad Inheritance
10. Decoupling with Interfaces

By Neal Ford

This session describes the use and workings of Selenium, the open source web user interface testing tool.

Selenium is one of the most powerful functional testing frameworks to come from the open source world in a long time. This session covers all aspects of Selenium, starting from its origins as an internal user-acceptance testing tool through testing Ajax applications. This session covers Selenium functionality, syntax of the test scripts (both HTML and the scripting language), keywords, testing techniques, recording tests, creating extensions, and testing Ajax applications. Selenium is the premiere testing tool for Ajax, so I show several examples of the power of Selenium combined with Ajax.

Key Session Points

• Selenium origins and background
• Installation
• Building tests
• API overview
• The Selenium IDE
• Testing Ajax Applications
• Future directions

By Neal Ford

This session begins a detailed discussion about how to actually get XP done in the real world (and what to tell your boss). This session includes artifacts (project tracking sheets, code coverage reports, etc.) from real XP projects.

Extreme programming sounds a little too “ESPN2” for most managers, but there is a lot of sound engineering behind its principles. My employer, ThoughtWorks, has been extremely successful using the full XP stack and we have developed lots of experience with it. This session talks about how to do XP in the real world. XP is all about feedback loops, so I discuss how to replace the radical sounding ones with more palatable ones. I talk about the parts of XP that are absolutely vital (unit testing, collective ownership, continuous integration, etc) and the ones that you can introduce a little more slowly (pair programming, only a 40 hour work week). This session focuses on the practicality of XP and how you can adopt it at your organization. I also talk about political battles with managers, other departments, and barriers that pop up anytime you try to introduce change in a large enterprise. Discussion is encouraged (required) in this session.

Key Session Points: XP and Feedback Loops A pragmatic look at the XP practices     The planning game     Small releases     Metaphor     Simple design     Testing     Refactoring     Pair programming     Collective ownership     Continuous integration     40-hour week     On-site customer     Coding standards Sample Project Tracking Sheets Code Coverage Overcoming objections What to say to your boss and his boss XP in the real world

By Neal Ford

Continues the discussion from Part 1, focusing on how to keep the benefits of XP without sacrficing it's effectiveness. This session shows real artifacts of XP in action.

Extreme programming sounds a little too “ESPN2” for most managers, but there is a lot of sound engineering behind its principles. My employer, ThoughtWorks, has been extremely successful using the full XP stack and we have developed lots of experience with it. This session talks about how to actually get XP done in the real world. XP is all about feedback loops, so I discuss how to replace the radical sounding ones with more palatable ones. I talk about the parts of XP that are absolutely vital (unit testing, collective ownership, continuous integration, etc) and the ones that you can introduce a little more slowly (pair programming, only a 40 hour work week). This session focuses on the practicality of XP and how you can adopt it at your organization. I also talk about political battles with managers, other departments, and barriers that pop up anytime you try to introduce change in a large enterprise. Discussion is encouraged (required) in this session.

Key Session Points: XP and Feedback Loops Continuing the pragmatic look at the XP practices Tools to support agility Overcoming objections What to say to your boss and his boss XP in the real world

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.

For a beginning to intermediate Java audience.

By Ted Neward

Tired of writing object-table mappings? For years, Java developers have wrestled with the problems of storing objects into relational format and retrieving them back again; for all that Hibernate and JDO and other O/R tools make it easier (though not easy) to do, isn't there another way? In this presentation, we'll explore an alternative approach, real object persistence, using the db4o toolkit (www.db4objects.com).

We'll build a small object model, store a few objects, retrieve them using the different retrieval APIs db4o provides, and talk about the implications of object (as opposed to object/relational) persistence. We'll also talk about its applicability (and the drawbacks) in the larger world of enterprise applications, as well as its suitability for agile apps and mobile device apps.

By Ted Neward

There's a lot of talk about web services, and most of it falls into one of two categories: lots of low-level talk about vendor-specific tools and extensions, or lots of high-level talk that never shows you a line of code. XML services aren't that hard, and in this talk, we'll see how, why and when to do one.

We'll talk about XML (and why it's the format used), Schema (and the core subset of Schema to focus on using, along with tools to help work with Schema more easily), SOAP (and why it's really crucial to making XML services work), and more.

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).

For an intermediate Java audience.

By Ted Neward

Ever wished you could just put parts of your program in end-users' hands and let them build the infinite little changes they want? Ever thought about how you might make your application more robust by writing less code, not more? Embed a scripting engine into your application--complete with the safeguards necessary to ensure that users can't do anything they shouldn't be able to--and release yourself from the Principle of Perpetual Enslavement.

This presentation will describe how to embed a scripting engine using BSF and/or Java6, discuss the pros and cons of the various ones available, and how to put enough safeguards around the scripts to make sure that your application can't be hijacked by bad users' scripts. (For any intermediate Java audience, as a 90-minute presentation. Ask about the possibility of delivering it as a half-day or full-day tutorial.)

By Ted Neward

Mustang, the Java6 release, is out, and even if you're not looking to adopt the new platform right away, it's important to know what's there so you can start to plan for it. In this presentation, we'll go over the major new features of the Java6 platform, including the new integrated XML services capabilities (JAX-WS and JAXB), dynamic/scripting language support (javax.script), new JVM "attach" capabilities, new annotations supported by the javac compiler, and more.

For an audience comfortable with some prior Java experience, preferably familiar with Java5.

By Mark Richards

As companies continue to change the way they do business, so must the IT systems that support the business. Changes due to regulatory requirements, competitive advantage, mergers, acquisitions, and industry trends require flexible IT systems to meet the demands of the business. Software Architects must therefore make their architectures more agile to meet the flexible demands of today's business. Through real-world examples and scenarios we will explore some of the challenges facing Software Architecture and discuss several concrete techniques for applying agility to both the architecture process and the technical architecture itself. We will also look at various architecture refactoring techniques, and discuss the pros and cons of each. By attending this session you will learn how to apply various agile techniques to improve your architectures and overcome some of the challenges facing software architecture in today's ever-changing market.

Agenda: - Introduction - Part One: Applying Agility to Architecture (Interactive) - Part Two: Agile Methodologies - FDD - Part Three: Agility and Architectural Refactoring

By Mark Richards

Hibernate has evolved as the de facto standard for persistence in most Java-based applications. However, many people are turning to iBATIS as an open source persistence alternative. iBATIS is a powerful open source persistence framework that is rapidly gaining in popularity, particularly within the Spring community. In this session you will learn why iBATIS is becoming so popular, how iBATIS differs from Hibernate and JPA (JSR-220), and how to use iBATIS. Through interactive coding examples I will demonstrate how to configure iBATIS within Spring and also as standalone, how to map SQL statements, and how to map Stored Procedures. I will also discuss and demonstrate techniques for dynamic SQL using iBATIS, using XML with iBATIS, and finally the various caching strategies available within iBATIS. We will end this session by discussing various techniques and best practices for using iBATIS in small and large-scale applications.

Agenda - Introduction - iBATIS Architecture, Structure, and Components - Configuring iBATIS - Using iBATIS (Interactive Coding) - iBATIS Caching Strategies - Using XML with iBATIS - Dynamic Query Support - Pragmatic Usage and Best Practices - Summary and Discussion

By Mark Richards

EJB3 (JSR-220) offers some great improvements over the prior EJB specs in terms of development simplicity and new features. In this session we will explore in detail some of the new features of the core EJB 3 specification. Included in this session will be a hands-on discussion and demonstration of session beans, dependency injection, interceptors (aop), and Message-Driven Beans (MDB). For the interceptors discussion I will be showing how to define interceptors for enabling a method trace, mocking objects, and sending JMS message notifications to be later picked up by the MDBs I will be creating. During the session I will demonstrate the new features of EJB 3 through interactive coding examples. Note: this session does not cover the new Java Persistence API (JPA) - only the core specification.

Agenda - Introduction - Constructing and Accessing EJB 3 Session Beans - Dependency Injection - Interceptors (AOP) - Method Trace - Mock Objects - Sending JMS Message Notifications - Message-Driven Beans (MDB) - Using XML over Annotations - Summary and Discussion

By Mark Richards

In addition to providing a simplified API, the new EJB3 specification (JSR-220) defines a standard ORM Java Persistence API (JPA) that is rapidly gaining in popularity. As you will see in this session, JPA bears a striking resemblance to popular ORM solutions like Hibernate and Toplink. In this session we will explore in detail the new Java Persistence API offered by JSR-220. We will start by discussing the overall design and architecture of the JPA and how the major components within JPA interact. We will then look at defining mapping objects (entities) and how to use the EntityManager to manage these entities. Through interactive coding examples we will investigate the pros and cons of detached entities and merging, how to map and use entity relationships (1-1, 1-N, N-1, and N-N), discuss Lazy Loading, and finally see how to use XML mappings rather than annotations. More advanced features of JPA will be covered in a separate session.

Agenda - Introduction - JPA Framework Overview - Defining and Mapping Entity Objects - Managing Entity Objects (EntityManager) - Detached Entities and Merging - Entity Relationships - Lazy Loading - Using XML Mappings - Summary

By Brian Sletten

REST sounds like such a simple thing. But, what is it really? How do you convince your boss to let you try it when she has been sold on the equation SOAP = SOA + P(rofit)? How do you go about building, deploying, publishing and orchestrating web services without the (Un)Holy Trinity of SOAP, WSDL and UDDI?

This talk will thoroughly examine this REST phenomenon in terms of its history, its goals, its consequences and where it fits into the Big Picture of SOA. We will also look at exposing existing tools/APIs through RESTful APIs.

If you find yourself interested in talking about REST without people dismissing it as trivial (yeah, but what is it?!?!), unsaleable (yeah, but I am trying to solve problems, not buy tools!) or not SOA (<insert your own joke here -- that one leaves me speechless>), come on by.

By Brian Sletten

Imagine the simplicity of REST married to the power of Unix pipes with the benefits of a loosely-coupled, logically-layered architecture. If that is hard to imagine, it may because the architectures available to you today are convoluted accretions of mismatched technologies, languages, abstractions and data models.

NetKernel is a disruptive technology that changes the game. It has been quietly gaining mind share in the past several years; people who are exposed to it don't want to go back to the tired and blue conventions of J2EE and .NET. Not only does it make building the kinds of systems you are building today easier, it does it more efficiently, with less code and a far more scalable runway to allow you to take advantage of the emerging multi-core, multi-CPU hardware that is coming our way.

Come see how this open source / commercial product can change the way you think about building software.

NetKernel makes the things you are doing now easier, but also makes new types of systems possible.

A wise man once said, "XML is like lye. It is very useful, but humans shouldn't touch it." If you've had to incorporate XML into your project by hand, you have probably been burned by getting too close. NetKernel turns this wisdom on its head and encourages you to use XML like the liquid data stream you want it to be.

But, XML is only part of the story. Resource-oriented computing is a generalized and revolutionary approach to modern, flexible systems. There is less code to write, but it is more fun to do. Orchestration of existing services and data sources is faster, easier and more encompassing than with more conventional technologies.

This talk will help explain what NetKernel is (app server? pipeline tool? embedded SOA?) and, through a comprehensive set of examples, give you a glimpse at a deeper software reality than you might have thought possible.

Disclaimer: There will be no blue pills given to you to make you forget what you have seen. Come with an open mind.

By Venkat Subramaniam

As a Java developer, you have taken the time to learn the basics of the language and relevant parts of its rich API. However, you need more than that to develop serious industrial strength applications. In this presentation, the speaker will introduce you to a number of open source tools which you can use to improve your application quality and your development process.

Instead of simply going through a laundry list of tools available, the speaker will engage you with motivation to use these tools, and show examples of their practical use.

We will start by looking at tools for unit testing and creating mock objects. We will then take a look at tools that will help you to ensure certain performance of your critical code.

You know writing good code is more than simply using an OO language. We will look at tools that will help you with code metrics, so you can analyze, and refactor your code to reduce coupling and undesirable dependencies.

But, what about hidden critical errors in your code, like synchronization problems that may potentially lead to deadlocks? We will look at how you can use open source tools to proactively eliminate these from your code.

Finally, we will look at tools available for automating your project and getting extreme feedback though out the development cycle.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Test Driving Development is a valuable technique that has several benefits. However, unit testing is hard when your code has dependencies-this often becomes a quick excuse to give up on TDD. This example driven Zero Powerpoint (ZePo) presentation will help you spring into unit test your Spring applications. We will look at techniques to realize good unit testing, and focus on effective use of mock objects and frameworks to help you toss mock objects for your spring application.

TDD Benefits Pragmatics of Unit Testing Mock Objects Hand tossing Mock Framework to create mock objects Unit Testing Spring Applications

By Venkat Subramaniam

Rule based programming allows us to develop applications using declarative rules. These can simplify development in applications where such rules based knowledge is used for decision making.

In this presentation we will take a look at the tools and techniques for developing rule based applications. We will take a look at open source tools, discuss their strengths, capabilities, and limitations.

By Venkat Subramaniam

You are convinced that Test Driven Development is good for you and your project. You realize the benefits it has to offer. What's holding you back? All the code and components that your code so heavily depends on is most likely making you wonder if TDD is really for you. We will start out by looking at dependency and dependency inversion. Then we will discuss how mock objects can help separate our code from its dependencies.

In this presentation, we will take an examples oriented approach to utilizing mock objects. We will first hand toss a mock and see how our code benefits from it. Then we will take a look at using frameworks that can assist with the creation of mocks.

By Venkat Subramaniam

You have worked on software projects with varying degree of success. What were the reasons for the success of your last project? What were the reasons for those that failed? A number of issues contribute to project success - some non-technical in nature. In this presentation the speaker will share with you practices in a number of areas including coding, developer attitude, debugging, and feedback. The discussions are based on the book with the same title as the talk.

In this session you will learn about practices beyond what well know methodologies prescribe. While we reemphasize some popular practices, we will also discuss other often overlooked, but important practices - practices that contribute to success of projects.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Inspired by the Ruby on Rails project, Grails brings the ease of web development and "convention over configuration" to the Java platform. We will learn how to create web applications using Grails, how to integrate it with Hibernate, and how to Ajax it, all using the built in features of Grails. This section assumes that you are familiar with Groovy or you have attended the “Groovy for Java Programmers” session. The session will be example driven with live coding where we will build a web application from scratch.

In this session you will learn *How to create web application using Grails * Understand Grails Conventions * Learn how to use the code generators and how to manual create domain models, controllers, and view * AJAX your application * Integrate with database

By Pete Behrens

User Stories, a key practice from Extreme Programming, provide a right-sized solution to more efficiently identify, track and implement product requirements. Learn how identify, write and decompose "good" user stories that drive agile behavior and business value.

Gartner has predicted that by 2007, most companies will adopt, in some IT projects, methodologies that are labeled “agile”. However, at least 25% of these projects will actually be following, implicitly or explicitly, “waterfall” style development.

Why? Because companies do not understand agile requirements gathering techniques. Learn how to leverage User Stories to align development to the business, drive value to the business and drive agile behaviors within the development team.

NOTE: Pete Behrens spent 7 years developing the leading requirements management solution - IBM Rational RequisitePro. Come find out why he switched.

By Pete Behrens

Business leaders and stakeholders require accountability and accuracy in our software release projections and yet, as an industry, we have failed. However, many of these same leaders are not convinced that agile is any more than an excuse to avoid projections at all. While it is true that agility provides the framework to support change, it doesn't mean you can't provide accurate projections. In fact, a well-executed agile process actually provides more accurate results with less time investment than traditional methods. This session will demonstrate these agile project management techniques to manage 6-12 month projects.

This session focuses on the release level, followed by Part II which focuses on the sprint level.

In this session we will demonstrate an engaging agile team estimation technique to drive more accurate projections than traditional estimation techniques provide. Then we will explore multi-level planning and tracking practices to guide your understanding of how to use those estimates to manage your release goals.

By Pete Behrens

"YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It)" and "Doing the simplest thing possible" are mantras of agile development. A white board, sticky notes, and flip chart paper are by far the best tools for individual teams. However, when coordinating work across 10 - 50 teams across 12 time zones, more tooling is required. Learn how agile enterprises are leveraging tooling to manage their portfolios, projects and products.

Teams are often distributed, offshore and dependent on other teams which require assistance to effectively manage. Furthermore, IT governance requires additional oversight in project and portfolio management for tracking investments, return on investments and reporting status to the business and other executive stakeholders.

This session walks through various phases of the agile software lifecycle and provides tooling examples used to help facilitate each phase. Examples from two 300+ agile development organizations will be referenced to provide a context for the discussion. Specific agile project management tools discussed include VersionOne, Rally and Microsoft Team System, ScrumWorks, Conchango ScrumVSTS, XPlanner, ExtremePlanner as well as traditional workflow tools and manual tools.

UPDATE: With over 500 responses to our recent tooling survey, we have incorporated the tooling results from companies across the world are using to enable, manage and scale their agile processes.

NOTE: While there are many agile tools available for code refactoring, automated tests, automated builds, and test-driven development; this session focuses on agile project management tools for managing portfolios, projects, iterations, teams, tasks, and other project artifacts.

By Pete Behrens

Are you overrunning your architectural runway? Many companies struggle with their ability to retain their architectural integrity when they transition to agile methods. Emergent Architecture (the other EA) can lead to cowboy coding and ad-hoc design decisions that emerge into a poor overall architecture.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been a tried and true approach to address these architectural needs throughout the organization, yet this approach often leads to a heavy-handed, document-rich, control-oriented culture lacking ability to keep pace with today's dynamic business environment.

Attempting to integrate an agile process with an Enterprise Architecture approach can be like mixing oil and water - they just don't work together. This session evaluates alternatives in balancing Agility and EA and proposes an architectural approach to build an Agile Enterprise Architecture into your organization.

This session begins with an evaluation of the strengths of Enterprise Architecture and Agility and various approaches in the industry today that are attempting to balance the two. Enterprise Architecture (EA) means more than technology - it includes business architecture, information architecture, operational architecture, organizational architecture, technical architecture and infrastructure architecture.

There are many EA models available today including the Zachmann Framework, McGovern/Stevens Model, and the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) framework just to name a few. Each of these frameworks provides a valuable perspective on EA, but all of them depend on your organization to execute them effectively and require adjustments to increase their agility.

We will look specifically at the architect's role in an agile process to retain application integrity and enable organizational agility to meet the changing business needs.

By David Bock

Capistrano (formerly Switchtower) is a tool originally written to help automate application deployment for Ruby on Rails. It does this well, but it has grown up into a tool capable of much, much more. It can be used for deploying Java applications, updating server configurations acrtoss an enterprise, administering netwoeks, backing up files, and all sorts of other activities. Any activity you might do from the command line, you can now do simultaneously across large numbers of machines, with all machines succeeding (or rolling back in case of failure) together.

In this talk I discuss the fundamentals of capistrano, use the built-in tasks to deploy a rails application, demonstrate the capability of performing custom tasks across several computers simultaneously (thanks to several virtual machines), and show how applications can be rolled back in case of problems. Capistrano isn't perfect though; we will also discuss best practices, limitations, and lessons learned.

Capistrano requires a POSIX-compatible shell and SSH on the machines it is going to control; as a side-benefit, we will also learn about CYGWIN, an open source tool that provides these capabilities (and lots lots more) to Windows environments.

By Ed Burns

In this 90 minute session, Ed Burns will clear up the fog that sometimes surrounds people's understanding of this Web Application Development Framework. Ed is well suited to the task, having helped shape the design of JSF from its inception up to the present day. Upon leaving this session, the participant will know what JSF is good for, why it is good for these things, and how to be productive using it.

In this 90 minute session, Ed Burns will clear up the fog that sometimes surrounds people's understanding of this Web Application Development Framework. Ed is well suited to the task, having helped shape the design of JSF from its inception up to the present day. Upon leaving this session, the participant will know what JSF is good for, why it is good for these things, and how to be productive using it.

Everyone already knows what a web-application is and when it's appropriate to use them. Therefore, the session skips the small stuff and starts out by building a strong foundation by exploring the four pillars of JSF: the View, Model interaction, the Lifecycle, and the Navigation Model.

With these concepts firmly understood, we cover some JSF design principals and patterns used all over JSF. Patterns discussed include decorator, singleton, strategy, template method, and observer. For each pattern, its use in JSF will be covered in detail, with emphasis on how the pattern is used to enable developer customizations.

The participant then learns about Type Conversion, Validation, Events, and the flexible rendering model.

A running example will be constructed throughout the presentation.

By Ed Burns

This presentation will demonstrate how JSF and AJAX are perfect together. We begin with an insight into the design heritage of JSF, and how that heritage puts JSF in good stead to be productive in the AJAX world.

Building on that foundation we dive into the code from the page author and component developer's perspective. We close with a look to the future and show how JSF is being used for mobile and disconnected applications.

By Scott Davis

Mark Twain once said, "Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Do you feel the same way about Unit Testing? Are you actively testing your code, or are you just thinking about testing your code... some day... once you get some more free time...

Unit testing offers benefits beyond the obvious. A happy side effect of writing unit tests is that your code ends up being better architected. By forcing you to be a consumer of your own code outside of the context of the main application, you end up seeing your code in a different light. Hidden dependencies get flushed out early. Good unit tests force your code to be more loosely coupled and highly cohesive.

This presentation is a survey of the testing ecosystem. A good testing infrastructure should include more than just JUnit. Cobertura, a test coverage tool, shows you how much of your code base is being tested. Writing test cases in Groovy adds a measure of flexibility that makes working with XML (and string data in general) a piece of cake. EasyMock allows you to test interfaces instead of implementations (and also avoid having to hand-code and maintain your own mock objects). We'll also look at functional testing libraries like HttpUnit, DbUnit, and JUnitPerf that allow you to test how your code behaves out in the wild, interacting with real subsystems instead of just mocks.

Most importantly, you'll see these tools live in action -- real code examples instead a simple slideware overview. Rather than looking at each tool in isolation, you'll see how they interact and complement each other. Rather than just talking about testing, we'll (finally) do something about it.

By Scott Davis

This is the year of the dynamic scripting language. Ruby (and Rails) has won the hearts and minds of many independent software developers. JavaScript is experiencing a renaissance thanks to the wild success of AJAX and websites like Google Maps. And Groovy (JSR-241) brings the same level of excitement and "scripting goodness" to the Java platform.

In this presentation, we take a very pragmatic "prove it in code" approach to learning Groovy. Since the syntax is (almost) identical to Java, we can dive right in from the very beginning, learning the "syntactic sugar" as we solve real world problems.

You'll learn how easy it is to install Groovy and get started working with it. You'll tackle file I/O, reading and creating text files. You'll create and parse XML and HTML. You'll interact with databases. You'll create Groovlets (servlets sprinkled with Groovy-dust). And finally, you'll get a brief introduction to Grails (hint: the 'G' is silent).

By Scott Davis

How do you get started with an Agile development methodology? Everyone has been talking about eXtreme Programming for years, but how do you get it introduced to your team? Many times, you're not simply transitioning from from one methodology to another -- you're introducing a methodology for the first time. Adding structure to a previously unstructured endeavor. Adding a touch of discipline where programmers once roamed free.

This presentation talks about how to introduce Agile practices slowly. Think of it as refactoring your team iteratively. If you drop 25 new "best practices" on developers all at once, the chances of getting any of them to stick is slim. If you start with one practice and get buy-in on it, sneaking in the next one (especially if it is complementary) is far easier.

• starting with source control
• easing into iterations with XPlanner
• is your team ready for pair programming?
• writing your first unit tests
• evaluating your code base for unit test coverage

By Scott Davis

In this talk, we'll survey the web services exposed by leading websites (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay) and discuss how they are driving the AJAX revolution. You'll see examples of RESTful, SOAP, and JSON web services, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Everyone seems to be talking about AJAX and Web 2.0 these days. While the UIs of AJAX-enabled websites such as Google Maps and Flickr are undeniably cool, they wouldn't exist without a strong SOA/Web Services infrastructure behind the scenes.

"Web Services" is an overloaded term. While SOAP is a mainstay in the web services world, there are other equally valid flavors (REST, JSON) that accomplish the same goal -- decoupling the data from the presentation layer, the platform, and even the programming language used.

Rather than talking about web services in the abstract, this talk shows examples of each flavor of web services as it is used in the wild by leading web companies. They have all taken slightly different approaches to the same problem. We'll compare and contrast their public-facing offerings.

There is no one "right way" to expose your API via web services. After this talk, you should have a better idea of the relative strengths and weaknesses of each variant.

By Scott Davis

The release of Google Maps was a "Wizard of Oz / Technicolor" moment for web developers everywhere. It didn't just change the way we look at mapping sites; it forever changed the way we look at all web sites. It put AJAX on the map, both figuratively and literally.

Based on the book Pragmatic GIS, we deconstruct the mechanics behind Google Maps, showing you the magical combination of JavaScript and CSS that allows it to work. In 12 easy-to-follow steps, we take you from static HTML all the way to your own "slippy map", complete with zooming and different map types.

Even if you don't have immediate plans to add maps to your website, come look at "the man behind the curtain". The hands-on, practical approach to learning AJAX in this talk will pay you dividends. The pretty map you get at the end is just the icing on the cake.

By Andrew Glover

No one will argue that JUnit has positively affected the quality of thousands of Java applications around the world. JUnit’s simplicity and ease of use ushered in a whole new era of code quality; however, as many developers have found, its simplicity has also limited its use. TestNG was designed from the ground up to overcome some of JUnit’s limitations; moreover, TestNG’s features make it a great tool to complement your JUnit tests.

In this session we’ll learn about TestNG’s flexible fixture model, its test categorization capability, dependent methods, and TestNG’s powerful parametric testing facility. We’ll also see how both TestNG and JUnit can play together in a build process.

By Brian Goetz

Performance myths about the Java platform abound, from the general "Java is slow", to the more specific "reflection is slow", "allocation is slow", "synchronization is slow", "garbage collection is slow", etc. Many of these myths have their root in fact (in JDK 1.0, everything was slow); today, not only are many of these statements not true, but Java performance has surpassed that of C in many areas, such as memory management.

In this class, we'll look at some common Java performance myths, identify where they came from, and explore the platform changes that have rendered them no longer true. Many common performance hacks don't actually help, and some can seriously hurt performance. The result is that clean code that follows common usage patterns generally shows far better behavior on modern JVMs than code laden with tweaks designed to "help" the JIT or garbage collector. More often than not, this well-intentioned assistance has the unfortunate effect of undermining many common JIT optimizations, resulting in slower -- not faster -- code.

By Brian Goetz

The Java language included support for threads and concurrency from day 1, but writing correct multithreaded programs is not easy. This session will cover the how and why of using threads in Java.

Programming is hard, but concurrent programming is harder. Concurrent programs are at risk for all the safety, liveness, and performance hazards that sequential programs are. But there are also many hazards that apply exclusively to multithreaded programs, such as race conditions, stale data, and deadlock.

If an object is going to be accessed from multiple threads, it should be thread-safe. The requirement for thread-safety is often introduced into Java programs not by explicit use of threads within the program, but by the use of frameworks, such as Servlets and Swing, which create threads and call application components from those threads.

This class will cover what is thread safety, how to create thread-safe classes, and what costs and benefits you can expect to encounter by using threads in your programs.

By Brian Goetz

JDK 5.0 is a huge step forward in developing concurrent Java classes and applications, providing a rich set of high-level concurrency building blocks.

Prior to the release of JDK 5.0, the Java platform provided basic primitives for writing concurrent programs, but they were just that -- primitive -- and difficult to use properly. Building multithreaded applications on the Java platform's low-level concurrency primitives posed many traps for the unwary, and many developers were forced to reinvent the wheel by writing their own classes for thread pools, semaphores, and task schedulers.

To help users create robust, scalable, and (most importantly) correct multithreaded applications, JDK 5.0 includes a rich set of high-level concurrency constructs, such as thread pools, semaphores, mutexes, barriers, and high-performance concurrent collection classes. Using these concurrency utilities will, in most cases, make your programs clearer, shorter, faster, easier to write, and more reliable. This session provides you with an overview of the new high-level concurrency utilities in the new java.util.concurrent package in JDK 5.0.

By Brian Goetz

Does your program have bugs, despite unit tests, integration tests, and code reviews? You bet. Are you using static analysis as part of your QA process? If not, you're probably missing out on some bugs that can be caught before they bite your customers.

The cost of finding a bug increases dramatically the longer it lurks without being discovered. Fortunately, today?s development tools (IDEs and compilers) can identify many potential bugs within a few seconds of their creation, resulting in higher quality code and more productive programmers. However, even the best programmers can create bugs that are very hard to spot if they make it through their first few minutes of their existence.

Until recently, automated code analyzers have not been very useful for mainstream developers. Most code analysis packages focused either on stylistic issues (such as indenting and variable naming), or on formal correctness proofs (which require an investment in specification that few developers can afford to make.)

FindBugs, an open-source tool developed by Bill Pugh and David Hovermeyer of the University of Maryland, has raised the bar for ease-of-use and effectiveness of automated code analysis for finding bugs. FindBugs has been able to find many serious bugs in production software, including Eclipse, JBoss, Apache Tomcat and Sun's JDK implementation, with an impressively low false-positive rate compared to other approaches.

This session will explore how static code auditing tools work, how it is easy to write bug-detector plugins to find new bug patterns, presents some common bug patterns and fun "find the bug" puzzles, and shows how code auditing tools can easily identify them.

Every developer will want to have these tools in their toolbox.

By Brian Goetz

What's the worst thing that can happen when you fail to synchronize in a concurrent Java program? Its probably worse than you think -- modern shared-memory processors can do some pretty weird things when left to their own devices.

Java was the first mainstream programming language to incorporate a formal, cross-platform memory model, which is what enabled the development of write-once, run-anywhere concurrent classes. It is the Java Memory model that defines the semantics of synchronized, volatile, and final.

However, because the most commonly used processors (Intel and Sparc) offer stronger memory models than is required by the JMM, many developers frequently use synchronization and volatile incorrectly, but have been insulated from failure by the stronger memory guarantees offered by the processor architecture they happen to be deploying on. (The infamous "double checked locking" idiom is an example of this sort of error.)

Understanding the Java Memory model is key to using the core concurrency primitives (synchronized and volatile) to develop thread-safe, efficient concurrent classes. We?ll cover what a memory model is (and why we should care), what synchronization really means, and what can really go wrong when we fail to synchronized correctly.

By Stuart Halloway

Ajax applications have unique architectural challenges and opportunities. This presentation will show you how to take advantage of the Ajax's strengths, and work around its quirks.

We'll start with an overview of Ajax, and then dive right into an extended example where we add Ajax to an existing web application. Along the way we'll cover several tools that we use to aid in Ajax development: The JavaScript Shell, Firebug, and the Web Developer's Toolbar. We'll also look at two popular JavaScript Ajax libraries: Prototype and Scriptaculous.

With the example application under our belts, we'll move to a discussion of Ajax architectural questions, including:

• How do I select an Ajax library?
• What format data should my Ajax calls use: XML, JSON, HTML, or other?
• How do I handle the back button and deep linking in Ajax?

By Stuart Halloway

This presentation covers JavaScript from the perspective of a Java programmer. We assume that you may be using an Ajax toolkit, but still need to be able to read, modify, and test the JavaScript code in your application. You will learn the common idioms of JavaScript by looking at working code from Prototype and Scriptaculous.

All Ajax programmers need to know JavaScript. Toolkits will do some of the work for you, but your own JavaScript will differentiate your applications from others. A reading knowledge of JavaScript is also necessary when selecting an Ajax framework, and for testing and debugging applications.

We'll go straight to the interesting parts of JavaScript programming:

• Prototype-based inheritance
• Functional style
• Dynamic evaluation
• In-browser testing

We'll demonstrate these concepts using the popular Ajax frameworks Prototype and script.aculo.us.

By Stuart Halloway

Dependency Injection (DI) is the cornerstone of Spring. The core concept is quite simple, but (surprise!) actual practice can become complex. To take full advantage of Spring DI, you need to understand not only the basics on configuration, but also the container lifecycle model and the various hooks provided by the framework.

Topics will include

• The difference between DI and Continuous Integration
• Setter Injection
• Constructor Injection
• Factory Injection
• Bean lifecycle
• Method Injection
• Using the ApplicationContext
• Custom PropertyEditors

By Stuart Halloway

JRuby is not one, but two great technologies: the Ruby language, and the Java Virtual Machine and libraries. In this talk you will learn the basics of programming JRuby, and how to integrate JRuby code into existing Java projects.

JRuby provides a very powerful development platform: the expressiveness and beauty of the Ruby language, with full access to the huge and powerful world of Java libraries. In this talk you will learn to use JRuby as your glue to assemble applications from Java components.

We'll start with how to call Java from Ruby. You will see how to use the high-level API, which provides proxies for Java objects. You will also see how to use the low-level API, where you can get total control via Java reflection.

Next, we'll look at some things you might want to do with JRuby: testing Java code with Test::Unit, automating development processes with Rake, and wrapping useful Java APIs. Oh, and of course, we'll build a Ruby on Rails on Java application.

Finally, we will look at the architecture of JRuby. This is useful so that you can understand what capabilities (and limitations) JRuby has today, and how these are likely to change in the future.

By Stuart Halloway

Learn to simplify Ajax development with Prototype through a series of real-world examples. Along the way, learn to code in Prototype's modern JavaScript style, taking advantage of Prototype's extensions to JavaScript's object model

Prototype deserves its fame for Ajax support, and for easy integration with the Rails platform. In this presentation, you will learn to simplify Ajax development with Prototype as we work through a series of examples that demonstrate:

• using Ajax.Request to manage XMLHTTPRequest
• automatically updating pages with Ajax.Updater
• polling with PeriodicalExecuter
• managing forms with Form.serialize
• responding to inputs with Event.observe
• simplifying DOM updates with Insertion

But there's more! Prototype exemplifies modern JavaScript coding style. You will see how to take advantage of "Prototype as JavaScript++" by

• using JSON for parameter passing
• defining classes with Class.create and Object.extend
• using Ruby-inspired extensions to the JavaScript object model, such as Array.each

By Stuart Halloway

Spring offers developers a simpler, more robust method for configuring applications. These benefits extend to security through the ACEGI framework. ACEGI makes the otherwise daunting task of securing your application logical and straightforward. More importantly, through its support for single sign-on provision through Yale's CAS system and its ability to provide instance-level authorization, Spring extends the common security model of most J2EE apps beyond what they are traditionally capable of.

In this session, we'll explore:

• configuring ACEGI to authorize against an in-memory user list, a database, and a JAAS login module • page level authorization • method level authorization • instance level authorization • forcing HTTPS connections to secured sites • impersonation using the RunAsManager

By Stuart Halloway

Rails 1.1 is a major new release, with features in every area. We'll cover the most powerful new features, showing the strenghts of Rails and of Ruby itself. You' see not only how to use the new features, but implementation details that you can use to add your own new features.

The Rails 1.1 is packed with new features in every area. The presentation will cover five major groups of enhancments:

1. Enhancements to Ruby's function model
2. Enhancements to Ruby's object model
3. Enhancements to ActiveRecord
4. Enhancements to ActionPack
5. Enhancements to the development process

The power of these enhancements demonstrates the rapid maturing of Rails as a development platform. Equally important, the elegance of some of the enhancements demonstrates the power of the Ruby language itself, and the commitment of the Rails team to use this power to make our jobs easier. We'll look not only at how to use all these new features, but also at how some of the features will implemented, so that you can use similar idioms in your own application development.

By Andy Hunt

Does creating software have to be so hard?

Join Pragmatic Programmer Andy Hunt as he searches for answers in accidental and essential complexity, the modern horrors of "inconvenient" complexity, and sees why there is no future in history. Or is there?

By Andy Hunt

Software development happans in your head; not in an editor, IDE, or design tool. We're well educated on how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware -- our own brains?

Join Andy Hunt for a look at how the brain really works (hint: it's a dual-processor, shared bus design) and how to use the best tool for the job by learning to think differently about thinking.

By Andy Hunt

How you learn new technology and acquire new skills is key to your personal success. But how do you learn how to learn? What tricks tips can you use to learn more faster, and retain more of what you learn?

Join Andy Hunt for a presentation that includes a brief recap of The Dreyfus Model (from his popular talk "Herding Raceshorses and Racing Sheep") and see how to Accelerate Learning and Manage the Torrent of new information using methods ranging from the tried-and-true to the truly exotic.

By Jason Hunter

The new Java 5 release introduces a number of significant Java language enhancements: generics, typesafe enums, autoboxing, an enhanced "for" loop, a static import facility, and a general-purpose metadata facility. This talk gives an overview of the changes and helps you understand what all the funny new syntax means.

The main new language topics covered:

• Generics, also called "parameterized types", which let you specify the type of objects used in a collection, among many other things.

• Autoboxing, that lets you implicitly convert from primitives to reference types, and vice-versa.

• An Enhanced For Loop, that lets you iterate over arrays or collections with half the code as before.

• Typesafe Enums, to create object-oriented, extensible enumerated values.

• Static Imports, to put into scope static methods and fields.

• Varargs, that allows methods to accept an arbitrary number of parameters.

• A Metadata Facility, allowing decoration to classes and methods for later tool consumption. Covered in more depth in the "Java Metadata" talk.

• Random new Library Features, like the ability to control external process launching, output formatting, and input scanning.

This talk describes the proposed changes and shows how they work together to improve the Java language. We also take breaks to see how closely Java matches the C# designs!

Attendees are assumed to be competent Java programmers.

By Jason Hunter

Java's new Metadata facility introduced in J2SE 5.0 defines a way to attach decorations to classes, fields, methods, and even packages that can be extracted by the compiler or runtime tools to provide advanced functionality. Think of metadata as an extended @deprecated flag, or think of XDoclet++. In this tutorial session you'll learn how Metadata fits in the Java platform (and how it compares to the C# platform). We'll cover how to use the metadata attributes provided in the core J2SE libraries and how to write your own. We'll also show a bit of what's coming in JSR-181, tasked to define standard metadata attributes for web services.

Attendees should be skilled Java programmers ready to see what's possible in the latest release and learn to make the most of it.

By Jason Hunter

Web Caching is very important for high traffic, high performance web site but few people know all the professional-level strategies. In this talk I'll share some of the tricks of the trade, including advanced tips from Yahoo's Mike Radwin.

We'll start with the basics: using client-side caches, conditional get, and proxies. Then we'll talk about more advanced features: how best to handle personalized content, setting up an image caching server, using a cookie-free domain for static content, and using randomization in URLs for accurate hit metering or sensitive content.

Attendees should have experience or interest in how the web works and in cajoling the web into doing their bidding.

By Jason Hunter

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension with a hook to let you run your own JavaScript after each page loads. People have written hundreds of Greasemonkey scripts, each using Ajax techniques, to do everything from making a static page dynamic to changing a page's style to integrating comparison pricing on Amazon pages and giving Google search results easy keyboard shortcuts. Greasemonkey lets you take back control of the web browsing experience -- and teaches you Ajax while you're at it.

In this talk we'll look at about a dozen useful Greasemonkey scripts. Each script provides a benefit in its own right, but like good engineers we'll dissect them to see what makes them tick.

Some scripts we'll cover:

• Tracing XMLHttpRequest activity on a page
• Avoiding the Slashdot effect with auto-links to mirrors
• Replacing a page's CSS design
• Making hidden form fields visible in the page
• Auto refreshing pages
• Browsing the web through Google's cache
• Adding keyboard shortcuts to Google's search results
• Auto-selecting ad-free print versions of online articles
• Working around Google's protection of Google Book Search images
• Comparing book prices inline
• Downloading all the images behind thumbnails
• Using Platypus for graphical page editing of pages you don't own!

Attendees leave this talk having more power over their web browsing and a great tool to get going with Ajax for one.

By Jason Hunter

There are many interesting and useful algorithms that people just don't remember or never learned. The Boyer-Moore string search algorithm is one prime example. The randomized skip list is another. Both solve common problems with wonderful flair and finesse -- and performance-wise they blow the pants off brute force solutions. This session covers these two algorithms plus several others. It's like your college algorithms course but with a practical bent and absolutely zero proofs. Extra bonus: The Google PageRank algorithm.

This session covers these two algorithms plus several others. It's like your college algorithms course but with a practical bent and absolutely zero proofs. Extra bonus: The Google PageRank algorithm.

By Ramnivas Laddad

A lot is happening in the field of Aspect-oriented programming (AOP). AspectJ and AspectWerkz, the two leading AOP implementations, have merged, bringing in their respective strengths. The merged version, AspectJ 5, adds many new features aimed at simplifying writing and deploying aspects. The new features include an annotation-based and XML-based syntax to define aspects, support for new Java 5 concepts, and load-time weaving. The tools support for AOP continues to improve, as well. Further, the most popular IOC framework, Spring, enables integrating aspects written in AspectJ. There is also serious discussion and preliminary work going on to support AOP right into the VM itself. All in all, there is a lot to learn about the changes in the exciting field of AOP. This session is designed to help you get up to date with all these changes.

This session provides a guided tour of the new things in the AOP world. It explains new features in AspectJ along with the practical considerations in utilizing each of them. The presentation explores the fundamental synergy between AOP and metadata to understand right (and wrong) utilization of metadata-based crosscutting. Load-time weaving (LTW) enables adding aspects to your existing applications deployed in any application server with a minimal effort. The presentation shows how to utilize LTW to improve your productivity considerably, even if you don't yet subscribe to the AOP philosophy and don't want to use AOP in production. The presentation also demos the latest AspectJ Development Tool (AJDT) in Eclipse (that has improved a lot) to make Java developers feel home when developing with aspects. The presentation includes many demos to reinforce the concepts learned, as well as give a feel for what it would be like to apply aspects written using new features.

This session is particularly targeted at developers with good familiarity with AOP concepts and the AspectJ language. It is recommended to attend the “Introduction to Aspect-oriented programming with AspectJ” session or read articles and/or books that introduce AOP and AspectJ to obtain the prerequisite.

By Ramnivas Laddad

Support for aspect-oriented programming is an important part of the Spring framework. It is the AOP support that allows keeping implementation of functionality such as transaction management and security out of your POJOs. While many developers only use aspects provided with Spring, once you understand how it all works, you can make a better use of those aspects, extend them, and write brand new aspects.

This session focuses on Spring AOP implementation. We cover topics such as Advice, Pointcuts, Advisors, proxy configuration, proxy factory bean, the autoproxy mechanisms, and the introduction mechanism. We will also examine many aspects shipped with the framework itself. While Spring’s AOP solution is sufficient in a typical enterprise application, there are situations where we need more full-fledged AOP support. Therefore, we will discuss using AspectJ with Spring and how to leverage the dependency injection mechanism with AspectJ aspects.

This session is targeted for enterprise application developers who want to gain in-depth understanding of Spring's AOP feature. After attending this session you will gain a solid understanding of Spring AOP, standard aspects shipped with the framework itself, and how to write new aspects. Some familiarity with the Spring framework, gained by attending other Spring talks or reading about Spring, is recommended.

By Ramnivas Laddad

Domain Driven Design (DDD) suggests dealing with complex software system using a domain model and preserving the model in implementation. Since domain model entities have rich behavior, so should their software implementation artifacts. A direct mapping between domain model and software artifacts create simple-to- understand, inexpensive-to-implement, and easy-to-evolve systems.

While the idea behind DDD isn't new and the value is easily understood, many implementations do not adhere to its principles. This disconnection may be due to many obstacles in implementing it. Combining Dependency Injection (DI) with a full-fledged aspect-oriented programming (AOP) system such as AspectJ help overcome many obstacles.

The traditional DI mechanism allows injecting dependencies into coarse-grained objects such as services exposed to the application level. However, it cannot do the same for fine-grained domain objects, which are not exposed in the same manner. The DI and AOP combination overcomes this limitation allowing creation a web of domain objects mirroring the model. Now domain classes can implement rich behavior by collaborating with dependent objects, instead of acting as mere data carriers. Further, domain concepts such as security, change tracking, and business rules are crosscutting in nature. AOP allows expressing these concepts directly using aspects.

In this session, we will examine the need for domain driven design, obstacles in achieving it, the basics of enabling behavior-richness for domain objects, and patterns of usages. This session will also present several examples that show the power behind the techniques. The knowledge gained through this session will enable you to readily apply domain driven design in your systems.

By Ramnivas Laddad

J2EE has become the main new platform for enterprise application deployment. Good performance is an important business requirement. Supporting this requirement needs application profiling during the development phases and performance monitoring after application deployment. Come to this session to understand challenges and choices in monitoring J2EE applications.

Performance monitoring solutions must work under constraints imposed by the environment. Further, they must balance conflicting requirements such as overhead vs. richness of information. All of these need careful understanding of both requirements and solutions as well as the costs of any tradeoff decisions.

This session presents various tools and techniques available for monitoring J2EE applications. We will consider requirements of performance monitoring solutions in different scenarios. We will also discuss underlying enabling technologies such as Java Virtual Machine Profiling Interface (JVMPI), Java Virtual Machine Tool Interface (JVMTI), JFluid, JMX, design patterns, and aspect-oriented programming (AOP). During the session, we will demonstrate many of the tools and technologies discussed.

By Scott Leberknight

Hibernate seems simple on the surface yet when you go beyond very simple use cases it can become much more complex. Intended for beginner to intermediate-level Hibernate developers, come see how to put Hibernate to effective use on your projects.

Hibernate is only part of an overall application architecture. This session shows ways to use Hibernate effectively including creating rich domain models, managing sessions and transactions, querying for objects, using interceptors and the event model, and handling lazy-loading. We'll also cover using Hibernate annotations instead of XML mapping files and the notion of application transactions.

By Scott Leberknight

Hibernate is a very popular Java transparent persistence framework, but you often need to create additional infrastructure to manage sessions, transactions, and lazy-loading in a clean and elegant manner. See how Spring can help.

This session shows you the benefits of using Spring's integration with Hibernate to simplify and in many cases remove the need to write repetitive and tedious code for tasks like setting up session factories, creating sessions, committing or rolling back transactions, handling exceptions, and lazy-loading. You also learn how Spring makes your data access code much simpler and easier to unit test. Intended for developers who have used Hibernate and want to know what benefits the Spring integration provides.

By Steve Metsker

Learn the basics of refactoring –- improving the internal health of your code –- and start honing your skills immediately in this hands-on session.

Most great developers don’t write great code. They write code that works, and then they refactor that code to make it great. Refactoring doesn’t usually change what code does. It changes the internal health of code, making the code easy to understand, maintain, and extend.

You can learn about refactoring by reading, but it’s really something you have to get a feel for. This session introductions the concepts behind refactoring, and delves into several refactorings from Martin Fowler’s book on the topic. During the session you’ll get the chance to refactor some ugly code into code you’ll be proud of, applying these specific refactoring techniques.

If you can, bring a laptop with 90 minutes of battery life and a working development environment, ready to code in Java. You can install JUnit in advance, or at the tutorial. If you don't have a laptop, that's Ok—we'll get you paired you with someone who does.

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.

By Brian Pontarelli

This presentation covers all the basics of the Jini platform, which has recently been transitioned from Sun to Apache. This presentation will show how to construct a service based application using Jini as well as how the Jini network is structured and deployed. In addition, a demonstration of the cool Jini features such as dynamic discovery, recovery and provisioning will be given.

Attendees are encouraged to bring laptops which will be able to participate in the demonstration Jini network. JDK 1.5 is required to run the demonstration application.

By Brian Pontarelli

Learn how to use ACEGI in an AJAX friendly way so that when you user's sessions expire, they can quickly log back into the application and continue where they left off. This will cover in detail the changes that were made to the ACEGI framework to support AJAX authentication, why ACEGI needed to be changed and how to implement this solution in a new or existing application that uses the ACEGI framework for authentication.

Attendees should take away all the information required to implement an AJAX authentication using ACEGI in a Java web application.