Northern Virginia Software Symposium
November 6 - 8, 2009 - Reston, VA
Scott Leberknight
Chief Architect at Near Infinity
Scott is Chief Architect at Near Infinity Corporation, an enterprise software development and consulting services company based in Reston, Virginia. He has been developing enterprise and web applications for 14 years professionally, and has developed applications using Java, Ruby, Groovy, and even an iPhone application with Objective-C. His main areas of interest include alternative persistence technologies, object-oriented design, system architecture, testing, and frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, and Ruby on Rails. In addition, Scott enjoys learning new languages to make himself a better and more well-rounded developer a la The Pragmatic Programmers' advice to "learn one language per year."
Scott holds a B.S. in Engineering Science and Mechanics from Virginia Tech, and an M. Eng. in Systems Engineering from the University of Maryland. Scott speaks at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposiums and various other conferences. In his (sparse) spare time, Scott enjoys spending time with his wife, three children, and cat. He also tries to find time to play soccer, go snowboarding, and mountain bike whenever he can.
Presentations
Spring 3.0 Overview
The Spring framework has simplified Java enterprise and web development since 2003, and has been a major innovator in improving and simplifying Java server-side programming since its inception. This session will look at the new features in Spring 3.0.
Spring 3.0 refactored much of the Spring core so it will no longer run on Java 1.4 and earlier, meaning it is optimized for Java 5 and beyond. Spring 3.0 includes several notable new features like the expression language (EL), support for REST, Spring MVC improvements including @PathParam and URI templates, and much more. In addition, Spring 3.0 will deprecate and remove from the Spring core several APIs like the original Spring MVC controller hierarchy and JUnit 3.8 support. There is also new support to make scheduling jobs cleaner and easier.
Groovier Spring (More Flexible Applications With Spring and Groovy)
Spring provides a solid foundation for web and enterprise applications. Its support for dynamic languages like Groovy adds interesting capabilities that can make your application architecture more flexible and dynamic.
This presentation will look at how Spring's support for dynamic languages, and Groovy in particular, can enhance your application.
Real World Hibernate Tips (Reloaded)
Hibernate is a very powerful object/relational mapping framework. This session contains a new set of Hibernate tips, tricks, and pitfalls.
In this session we'll look at a collection of tips, tricks, and pitfalls for using Hibernate effectively. Some topics we'll cover include: optimistic locking pitfalls with object versioning; using StatelessSession for bulk operations; extending Hibernate dialects to register native functions; using contextual sessions; pitfalls when using "all-delete-orphan" cascades; "shared" objects using unidirectional mappings; detached objects; and more.
Polyglot Persistence
Polyglot persistence is all about considering your persistence requirements and selecting a persistence mechanism that best mets those requirements, as opposed to selecting an RDBMS as the default choice. In this session we'll look at some of the persistence alternatives that are available like Amazon SimpleDB, CouchDB, Google Bigtable, and more.
In late 2006 Neal Ford wrote about Polyglot Programming and predicted the wave of language choice we are now seeing in the industry to use the right language for the specific job at hand. Instead of assuming a "default" language like Java or C# and then warring over the many different available frameworks, polyglot programming is all about using the right language for the job rather than just the right framework(s). Paralleling Neal's description of polyglot programming, a relational database is often the accepted and default choice for persistence. Sometimes this is due to the fact that organizations have standardized on RDBMS systems and there isn't even any other choice. Other times it is simply what we're used to doing, and possibly we don't even consider alternatives. But now, with things like Amazon SimpleDB, Google Bigtable, Microsoft SQL Server Data Services (SSDS), CouchDB, and lots more, we're now seeing the beginning of Polyglot Persistence in addition to polyglot programming.
