Northern Virginia Software Symposium

Apr 30 - May 2, 2010 - Reston, VA


Sheraton Reston
11810 Sunrise Valley Drive
Reston, VA   20191
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Session Descriptions

Craig Walls - Author of Spring in Action

Building Web Applications with Spring MVC

In this session, we'll start with the basics of Spring MVC development, focusing on how to leverage the new annotation-driven model. With that foundation set, we'll continue by exploring the new features in Spring 3.0 and 3.1 to build RESTful web applications that can serve both human-facing content as well as resources that are consumed by machine clients.

Introducing Spring Roo: From Zero to Working Spring Application in Record Time

In this example-driven session we'll see how to swiftly develop Spring applications using Spring Roo. We'll start with an empty directory and quickly work our way up to a fully functioning web application. You'll see how Roo handles a lot of heavy-lifting that you'd normally have to do yourself when working with Spring. And we'll stop at a few scenic points along the way to see how Roo accomplishes some of its magic.

Modular Java: An Introduction to OSGi

Contrary to what you may have heard, OSGi is neither complex, nor heavyweight. In this session, I'll show you how OSGi can actually simplify application development rather than complicate it. We'll look at the benefits of modularity, the fundamentals of OSGi, and see how to develop basic OSGi bundles. We'll also see how a few gadgets in the OSGi toolbox can ease the development of OSGi bundles.

That old Spring magic has me in its SpEL: DI Wizardy with the Spring Expression Language

Spring 3.0 introduced the Spring Expression Language (SpEL), an extremely powerful yet succinct way to wire non-trivial values into Spring beans. In this presentation, we'll explore SpEL in great detail and see how SpEL opens up a whole new realm of bean wiring possibilities.

What's new in Spring

In this session, I'll lead a guided tour through the latest that Spring has to offer. Whether you're a Spring veteran or a Spring newbie, there will be something new for nearly everyone.



Matt Stine - Enterprise Java/Cloud Consultant

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 Agile Guerilla

So you discovered agile software development this weekend. You've finally found the tools that you're going to use to fix your team. Do you rush in to work Monday morning with a slide deck in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, ready to bludgeon the first person who checks in untested code? How do you think that's going to work out for you? I can tell you from personal experience that it doesn't play out too well. There is a better way.



Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Engineer

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.

Semantic SOA : Meaningful Service Strategies

The goal for web services was always to reduce our burden by increasing the potential for reuse of business functionality. Somehow, we got lost along the way in a morass of confusing, unfulfilling and downright broken technologies.

While we are interested in pursuing REST-based systems for managing information, we need some strategies for tying it all together sensibly. If we abandon WSDL, SOAP and UDDI, what do we replace them with? This talk will walk you through combining resource-oriented strategies with technologies from the Semantic Web to describe, find, and bind to services in dynamic, flexible and extensible ways.

We will start to blur the distinction between data, documents, services and focus on information and how it is connected to what we already know.

Prerequisite: The Semantic Web: The Future Now, Give it a REST and SPARQL : Querying the Data Web would all be helpful talks to have attended



Ken Sipe - Architect, Web Security Expert

Agile Velocity

The agile development process is all about early and often feedback. One aspect of feedback is how is the team doing... Are we accurate in our estimates? Are we consistent in our velocity? As velocity varies, what is it telling me?

Debugging your Production JVM

So your server is having issues? memory? Connections? Limited response? Is the first solution to bounce the server? Perhaps change some VM flags or add some logging? In todays Java 6 world, with its superior runtime monitoring and management capabilities the reasons to the bounce the server have been greatly reduced.

Enter The Gradle

This presentation introduces the audience to the power of Gradle through many real-world examples that are demonstrated live. By the end of the presentation, you'll understand how Gradle helps to elegantly solve the challenges that we face in our daily enterprise builds.

Enterprise Security API library from OWASP

When it comes to cross cutting software concerns, we expect to have or build a common framework or utility to solve this problem. This concept is represented well in the Java world with the loj4j framework, which abstracts the concern of logging, where it logs and the management of logging. The one cross cutting software concern which seems for most applications to be piecemeal is that of security. Security concerns include certification generation, SSL, protection from SQL Injection, protection from XSS, user authorization and authentication. Each of these separate concerns tend to have there own standards and libraries and leaves it as an exercise for the development team to cobble together a solution which includes multiple needs.... until now... Enterprise Security API library from OWASP.



Michael Nygard - Agile technology leader and dynamicist

Architect for Scale

Is your system small, medium, large, or super-size? Is traffic on it's way up?

Architecture patterns and structures that work at one scale seldom work across all of them. A communication style that's appropriate for small websites will probably fail badly if you apply it to world-wide networks of computers. Likewise, structures that work for large-scale systems are probably too complex and expensive to be worth it for small sites.

Design for Operations

If your software fails in production, nobody will care how great the development project was, or how well the system passed QA. Production operations, the domain of your systems' least-appreciated stakeholders, is where the rubber meets the road. Come learn how to build your systems to thrive in Operations.

High Performance Persistence with Redis

Redis is one of the fresh crop of "NoSQL" storage solutions. It's a distributed key-value store that knows how to deal with data structures. Oh, and it happens to also be incredibly fast. Like, microseconds per write.

Software Architecture for the Cloud

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

In this session, Michael will discuss the ingredients of real cloud computing and how you can apply it to your applications. He will show several architectures and discuss applications that fit each of these models. Finally, he will also talk about some of the pitfalls and problems that cloud computing customers can encounter.



Ted Neward - Enterprise, Virtual Machine and Language Wonk

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

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.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Scala: Basics

Scala is a new programming language incorporating the most important concepts of object-oriented and functional languages and running on top of the Java Virtual Machine as standard "dot-class" files. Sporting the usual object-oriented concepts as classes and inheritance, Scala also offers a number of powerful functional features, such as algebraic data types, immutable objects by default, pattern matching, closures, anonymous functions and currying, and more. Combined with some deep support for XML generation and consumption, Scala offers Java programmers an opportunity to write powerful programs with concise syntax for a new decade of Java programming.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Scala: Patterns

Scala is a new programming language incorporating the most important concepts of object-oriented and functional languages and running on top of the Java Virtual Machine as standard "dot-class" files. Sporting the usual object-oriented concepts as classes and inheritance, Scala also offers a number of powerful functional features, such as algebraic data types, immutable objects by default, pattern matching, closures, anonymous functions and currying, and more. Combined with some deep support for XML generation and consumption, Scala offers Java programmers an opportunity to write powerful programs with concise syntax for a new decade of Java programming.

Prerequisite: The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Scala (Basics, Objects, Functions)



Matthew McCullough - Open Source Architect, Ambient Ideas

Cryptography on the JVM: Boot Camp

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

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.

Migrating to Maven 3.0

Explore what's new on the cutting edge release of Maven, version 3.0. We'll explore the performance improvements, features that make debugging Maven issues easier, and changes to POMs that may require modifications to your build, but will result in more determinate build outputs.

iBeans: The Simplest Service Integrations You've Ever Implemented

No app is an island nowadays and your bleeding edge Java & JavaScript apps demand that you integrate with Facebook, Amazon, Gmail, Google Search, Twitter or S3 just to name a few. Make your next integration project a breeze by leveraging the successful work of others from the iBeans Central repository, or if necessary, simply author a new iBean and contribute it back for the benefit of all.

iBeans a new ultra-light service integration framework written in Java, but targeting both Java and JavaScript. It provides a centralized mechanism for community contributions of beans to the most commonly used services such as Twitter, Flickr, Gmail and more.



Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.

Agile Engineering Practices

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

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

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



Jeff Brown - Core Member of the Grails Development Team

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.)

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.

Polyglot Web Programming With Grails

Grails is one of the most flexible and most powerful frameworks on The Java Platform. Grails leverages the flexibility offered by the platform in a way that other web frameworks do not. Grails is a fantastic platform for polglot web programming.

Prerequisite: Advanced Grails



Rohit Bhardwaj - Principal Software Engineer, Kronos Inc Expert in agile development

Android mobile application development: Cool apps that surprise and delight mobile users—built by developers like you

Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. Cool apps that surprise and delight mobile users—built by developers like you—are a huge part of the Android vision. In this presentation we will explore many examples of android.

Prerequisite: none

Cloud computing deep dive for Google App Engine and Amazon EC2

In this session we will take a deep dive at few cloud computing examples from real world and participants will be able to know how to use cloud computing for Google App Engine, Amazon EC2 and few others.

Enterprise Security, Privacy and Data compliance

Data integrity, security, recovery, privacy and regulatory compliance are most important attributes for enterprise implementation. Enterprise customers ask for transparency in how the vendors will provide security programs. Many question need to be asked for any cloud implementation to policy makers, architects, coders and testers.

In this presentation we will explore data security and storage, privacy and data compliance issues. We will explore the security management in cloud. Presentation is useful for anyone starting from Executives to developers who are going to implement the enterprise Applications in both private and public cloud.

SoapUI for testing SOAP and Restful web services

SoapUI is an Open Source Web Service Testing Tool for Service Oriented Architecture made for the Software Developers and Testers. Its functionality mainly covers Web Service Inspection, Invoking, Development, Simulation and Mocking, Functional testing, Load and Compliance testing. Productivity enhancement features can be found in the soapUI pro version.

SoapUI is the premiere open-source web service testing tool with over 50000 users worldwide. We will explore few online services like Amazon Web Services. This presentation will show you how to supercharge your web service development and testing efforts:

• fast inspection and invocation of web services • validation of contracts, messages and message-exchanges • tool-integrations for all major web service frameworks • powerful functional testing with extensive groovy support • instant simulation/mocking of any web service with groovy support • requirements-driven load-testing

Prerequisite: none



Tim Berglund - Developer, Consultant, Author

Decision Making in Software Teams

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.

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)

Practical Agile Database Development

Do your team's agile practices extend to the database? Agile methods are fairly well-understood as they apply to code, but these principles are not commonly understood or practiced on the databases that typically accompany enterprise software projects. Learn the tools, techniques, and mindset your team needs to make incremental improvements to the database’s design over time with confidence.



David Hussman - Agility Coach/Instructor/Practioner

Agility as a Tool: Getting Ready to Iterate

Many people simplistically apply agile recipes, assuming a one size fits all approach. This may lead to naive use beliefs like collocation breeds instant success. While sitting together always helps, it does not mean that people spontaneously collaborate to create sustainable value.

Instead of approaching agile methods like a recipe, this session will teach you to design agility that is a useful tool for your project community. We will cover practice selection ideas, tools for creating healthy development eco-systems and product discover tools. If you would like to improve the stickiness of your agility, stop in learn a pile of techniques to use before holding your first planning session.

Coaching Agility into Organizations: Success over Dogma

If you want to introduce meaningful agility in your company, real change takes more than a few certification courses or one successful pilot project. Process that produces tangible results sticks while dogmatic preaching is short lived. If you are planning to grow agility that helps you produce better products and better code in meaningful timeframes, stop in and learn how to succeed and how to avoid common failures.

Redesigning Agility: Incorporating Design Thinking

Design tends to mean one thing to developers and another thing to designers. The later group are product designers and are not aware of the structure of the code.

The hipsters in the agile community are trying to blend product design into the process of coding and delivering software. This session discusses what to do after your agility is flowing, or post agilism: imagine you using agile methods successfully, what's next?

What Stops You From Delivering? : Flow and the Theory of Constraints

What stops you from delivering to your customers and what truly prevents incremental learning in your project community? How much of it lies in coding issues? Do you even need to write code to learn where to go or how to get there?

For many companies, being agile means producing working code from an iteration. While working code is a measure of progress, and provides a tool to validate success, it is not always your best investment. Your best investment lies in combining 1) what helps you learn about your product and your market and 2) what you need to do to deliver it, and what is constraining either of these.



Brian Goetz - Author of Java Concurrency in Practice

Are All Web Applications Broken?

Many developers believe that web frameworks "take care of" the details of concurrency, but this is only because most web applications make limited use of state. Stateful web applications also need to be careful about hazards like races. This talk will use the Java Memory Model to analyze common patterns of state management in web applications.

Prerequisite: The Java Memory Model

Concurrency Revolution: The Hardware Story

Do software developers need to know anything about CPU architecture? They do if they aspire to be performance experts. Modern CPUs behave almost nothing like the sequential Von Neumann machine model we know and love.

This session provides an overview of the architecture of modern CPUs, how this has changed in recent years, and what the implications are for software development and performance management.

Stupid JIT Tricks

Ever wondered what happens to your bytecodes when they're executed by a Java Virtual Machine? This talk provides a peek "under the hood" of modern JVMs, exploring dynamic compilation, speculative optimization, garbage collection, and some hardware-specific optimizations.

The Java Memory Model

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.

Towards a Universal VM

The success of the Java platform is powered by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which many people assume is tied to the Java programming language. In fact, 100+ programming languages are hosted on the JVM, including JavaFX, JRuby, Jython, Groovy, Clojure, and Scala. A key implementation challenge is to make code written in non-Java languages run as fast as code written in the Java language.



David Bock - Principal Consultant, CodeSherpas Inc.

Maintaining Source Code Quality (The Project Integrity Series)

How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a big ball of code you have to plod through to try to get anything done? Have you ever been the 'new guy' on a project where it seems like the code grew more like weeds and brambles than a well-tended garden? With a few good tools to help analyze the code, we can keep our project from turning into that big ball of mud, and we can salvage a project that is already headed down that path.

Managing Complexity (The Project Integrity Series)

How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a build process that mysteriously fails, a bunch of 'TODO' and 'FIXME' comments in the source, and problems that come and go because "it works on my machine"? Does your project have a little bit of 'folk wisdom' that isn't well-known, but is necessary to get things done? How easily could you recreate your development environment if you got a new machine today?



Aaron Bedra - Principal at Relevance, Member Clojure/core

JRuby in Practice

Ruby has made an significant upward trend in the past few years. Alongside this trend Charles Nutter and the fantastic JRuby team have implemented a version of Ruby that runs on the JVM giving you the power of Ruby coupled with the advantages of running on the JVM. Come see for yourself how you can harness the power of rapid development in Ruby and still maintain all the Java interoperability you need to help you build on top of your existing systems.

Programming Clojure

Find out why Clojure is Java.next

  • Clojure provides clean, fast access to all Java libraries
  • Clojure provides all the low-ceremony goodness you know and love from dynamic languages
  • Clojure includes Lisp's signature feature: Treating code as data through macros.
  • Clojure's emphasis on immutability and support for software transactional memory make it a viable option for taking advantage of massively parallel hardware.

The Art of the Spike

Exploring new technologies can be both challenging and rewarding. A good spike can make or break a new feature for your application. Have you ever thought that a technology or practice your company isn't currently using is the perfect fit for your next iteration? This is your time to shine! In this session you will learn how to treat new technologies as first class citizens and prove that they fit your needs. You will also learn how to provide concrete evidence supporting your decision. By the end of this session your fear of introducing new technology will simply melt away.



Dan Allen - Principal Software Engineer - JBoss by Red Hat, Author, Open Source Advocate

CDI (JSR-299), Weld and the future of Seam

This talk introduces JSR-299: Contexts and Dependency Injection for the Java EE platform (CDI), the new Java standard for dependency injection and contextual lifecycle management. The talk covers the core programming model, explains its relationship to EJB 3.1 and JSF 2.0, and clarifies how it unifies and enhances the Java EE platform as a whole (extending to JPA, JAX-RS and JMS). You are then introduced to Weld, the JSR-299 reference implementation, and its servlet container extension. Finally, we look ahead at how a modularized Seam 3 ties into this new foundation as a set of portable CDI extensions, previewing several examples.

Reducing Java enterprise testing to child's play

This talk unveils the missing link in enterprise Java development: simple, portable integration tests. For many, working in enterprise Java has long been an arduous undertaking because of this void. While development life is simple with unit tests and mocks, they only take you so far. Eventually, you need to validate how your components interact and operate in their intended environment--you real need integration tests. Yet, writing integration tests has meant assuming the burden of bootstrapping all or part of your infrastructure. That's time lost and it places a mental barrier on testing. Arquillian and ShrinkWrap, two new projects from the JBoss Community, partner to tear down this barrier and reduce Java enterprise testing to child's play. Come experience how.

Seam & RESTEasy: You haven't seen REST yet

JSR-311 (JAX-RS) is one of the simplest, most elegant of all the Java EE specifications and is showing early signs of becoming an overwhelming success. It lets you to create RESTful web services from existing Java EE components by sprinkling a handful of annotations over it. But the downside is that the resource must be a Java EE component. Seam's RESTEasy module allows you to use JAX-RS annotations on your existing Seam components, giving your web services access to the Seam container and, dually, an alternate interface to your Seam application.