Clean scalable builds with Maven

Our build systems have migrated from make to Ant. While Ant does a good job in many ways, is it the right tool for the job? This session talks about taking builds to the next level, looking at tools such as Maven to make your life easier.

Give the DB a break!: Performance and Scalability

What do we really mean by "performance" and "scalability"? This talk gets into the meat of problems which cause our applications to degrade. We will focus on issues such as problems caused by the database being a bottleneck for our application, and see how we can architect our solutions to bypass the issues, resulting in a solid system which scales with the increased load.

Not only will we look at the factors, but I will delve into a couple of case studies to show how real world problems were solved!

How to be Groovy

What? Another programming language? Are you kidding me? That is what we often feel when something new comes around, and is something you may be feeling about Groovy. However, Groovy could fit a niche for you in your daily toil. It is the swiss army nice that Perl/Ruby are, yet lets you work in a more structured way, and plays nice with the millions of lines of code already written on top of the Java Virtual Machine.

Rules Engines

Rules engines are powerful beasts which allow you to program in a way in which you specific rules and facts, rather than a linear set of instructions.

Learn about how you can use Rules Engines in Java development to take care of complicated problems.

Guerrilla Web Techniques

Frameworks? We don't need no stinkin' web frameworks. OK, so maybe that's overstating the case. Web frameworks do plenty of good things, but sometimes they can also be golden handcuffs. Too many web developers fall into the trap of thinking, "If it can't be done by my web framework, then it simply can't be done."

Real World Web Mapping

In this presentation, we'll explore the top four mapping sites and show you how to take advantage of their free services. MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, Google Maps, and MSN Virtual Earth all bring slightly different capabilities to the table. These sites allow you to create your own interactive maps with minimum effort and no previous mapping experience. They take care of hosting the mapping data and making it easy to manipulate -- all you have to do is bring a little bit of know-how to the party.

Testing the Web Tier

Hopefully your test plan involves more than, "Well, it compiled..." JUnit is fast becoming a required part of the modern Java developer's toolkit. Unit testing your Java classes is a great start, but your test plan shouldn't stop there.

This talk will introduce several additional testing tools for the web developer -- HttpUnit, Canoo WebTest, and JMeter. These tools allow you to test a live website with no changes to the production code. Even better, you can test sites that have been implemented in technologies other than Java.

Testing the Web Tier, Part 2

JUnit is more than a Java testing tool -- it is a testing framework that can be extended to test non-Java resources as well. In the first presentation in this series, we examined three JUnit extensions that allow you to functionally test your website. In this talk, we'll look at three more tools that web developers should have in their toolkit: JsUnit, DbUnit, and the W3C Markup Validation Service.

Advanced Enterprise Debugging Techniques

This session discusses techniques and tools for debugging enterprise applications (without using System.out.println()!)

Language-oriented Programming and Language Workbenches: Building Domain Languages atop Java

This session shows how to use Java as the building block for domain-specific languages. It discusses the next revolution in programming: language-oriented programming and the nascent tools that support it.

Pragmatic Extreme Programming

This session talks about how to actually get XP done in the real world (and what to tell your boss).

Regular Expressions in Java

Regular expressions should be an integral part of every developer?s toolbox, but most don?t realize what an important topic it is. Regular expressions have existed for decades, but many developers don't understand how to take full advantage of this powerful mechanism, either through command line tools and editors or in their development.

Web Application Security Vulnerabilities

This session highlights common mistakes made by web programmers, stating the problems and avoidance techniques.

AJAX: Creating Next-Generation, Highly Dynamic, Off-line Capable Web Applications with HTML and JavaScript

As recent high-profile web apps such as Google's GMail have shown, modern browsers are capable of natively rendering web apps with highly dynamic and compelling UIs - fetching server data without page refreshes, animating and manipulating page contents on-the-fly, even offline use. The line between web and "desktop" apps is blurring.

Advanced SWT and JFace

This session picks up where SWT Fundamentals leaves off. Among the advanced topics I discuss are creating custom SWT widgets and exploring tight native integration. I combine another compelling topic with the advanced SWT material: JFace. SWT is a more akin to AWT than Swing; its concerned more with wrapping native functionality than providing any high-level abstractions. JFace is an API on top of SWT that provides such abstractions. The combination of SWT and JFace is comparable to Swing. My coverage of JFace includes an introduction to several of its frameworks, such as the Viewer and Window frameworks, along with many examples. Learning JFace will enable you to write complex SWT applications much faster.

Advanced Swing: Architecture and Frameworks

Are you spending more time plumbing your Swing applications than solving business problems? Has your Swing application grown out of control? This session is for you.

Creating Killer Graphics and Professional PDFs with XML

You can do some pretty cool things with XML these days (despite what some curmudgeons in the technology world may claim). In the past few years, XML has solidified its place as the lingua franca of data sharing and data manipulation. But XML as a data transfer language is only marginally interesting. Things get really exciting when XML is dynamically transformed into other formats. In this session, I focus on two XML formats which can be readily transformed into high-quality presentation-centric output formats. XSL-FO is a typesetting format for XML that can be readily converted into PDF (or Postscript and some other formats). SVG is a vector graphics language in XML -- a sort of open-source version of the popular Macromedia Flash format. SVG files can be converted into beautiful, completely scalable -- and interactive - - images.

Creating Polished Swing Applications

Too often, Swing applications are slow, ugly, and hard-to-maintain. It turns out that it doesn't have to be this way. Swing can be used to create highly-responsive, beautiful applications that are very maintainable. If this isn't consistent with your own experience, don't feel bad; its not very obvious how to make Swing sing.

Making the Most of XML

For many of us, XML has become a ubiquitous presence in application development, whether parsing, validating, or manipulating it. For many of us, all that XML is coupled with pain, in the form of tedious APIs (like, say, the W3C DOM API) and confusing technologies (oh, I don't know, W3C XML Schema?).

SWT Fundamentals

The Eclipse project's SWT GUI toolkit provides one of the only viable alternatives to Swing for creating so-called rich client applications in Java. Whereas Swing paints its own widgets and has distinguished itself with a complex (and often obtuse) API, SWT relies on the host operating system for widget rendering and sports a simple, clean API. If your goal is to create a Java application that "looks" like a normal Windows application (or OS X, or Linux), SWT will revolutionize your world. In this session, I introduce SWT from the ground up. I start at a high-level, but quickly move into the details of SWT's API. By the presentation's end, attendees will have a solid understanding of SWT.

Felix: A bag of Tricks for Java Server Faces

Okay, so you know a little about JSF. You understand managed beans, action outcomes and how to attach standard JSF validators to components in a JSP page.

But there is a great deal of functionality that the average web application supports that JSF doesn't provide out of the box. For example, wouldn't you like to have JSF automatically place asteriks in front of labels for required fields? You are going to implement client-side validation, which JSF does not support out of the box, aren't you? Of course, you're going to test your application, right? And don't forget to trap unauthorized use of the back button.

Killer Web UIs

User interfaces are usually the most turbulent aspect of an application during development. Constant tinkering with the UI means constant changes to your code, so as a UI developer, you want to minimize the scope and effects of those code changes.

Open-source Java provides two powerful software packages that help you manage UI complexity: Tiles and Sitemesh. Tiles composes webpages from discrete regions of your user interface known as tiles. A tile contains a JSP page for layout and one or more JSP pages for content. Sitemesh decorates webpages with decorators that can be associated with URL patterns. Once you set up your decorators, you can decorate pages that match a decorator's URL pattern.

Shale: Turbo-charge your JSF Apps

JavaServer Faces is a well designed user interface framework, but it lacks a number of features you might otherwise expect out of the box; for example, JSF does not explicitly provide support for client-side validation.

So, from the folks that brought you Struts, comes Shale, a collection of useful enhancements to JSF. A top-level Apache Software Foundation project, Shale adds some really cool features to vanilla JSF, including:

Web flow: script dialog flow Remote Method Calls: easily call JavaBean methods from JavaScript Tapestry-like views: code views in pure HTML Use Apache Commons Validator validators on the client or server, or both JSF testing framework: mocks for easy JSF testing

There's a lot of cool stuff in Shale that makes JSF a much more compelling proposition. Come see what it's all about.

Garbage Collection in the HotSpot JVM

Pop quiz: which is faster, Java or C++? If you are talking about allocation performance, the answer is Java, hands-down.

Squashing bugs with FindBugs

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.

Structuring concurrent applications in JDK 5.0

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.

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.

Cryptography for Programmers

For centuries people have used crypto to build (and break) secure systems. Computers have only raised the pitch of conflict, providing enormous cryptographic power at commodity prices. Most programmers do not write their own crypto libraries, instead relying on the services of an operating system or virtual machine. But even with all this support, building secure systems is a daunting task.

Design Patterns Revisited: Taking advantage of dynamic, reflective languages

(3 Hour Session) Attendees should attend the Introduction to Reflection talk, or have some experience using reflection or metaprogamming in a reflective language such as Java, Objective-C, Smalltalk, Python, or Ruby. Familiarity with the GOF book is helpful but not required.

Design patterns are recurring solutions to problems that consistently appear in software development. However, this does not mean that design patterns cannot be "solved", i.e. converted into language or library features. In fact, most of the original design patterns can be solved using dynamic language features such as reflection.

Introduction to Java Reflection

Reflection is writing code that manipulates itself. Well-written reflective code automates a broad class of repetitive, error-prone programming tasks. Poorly-written reflective code obfuscates programs and destroys the benefits of the type system. We'll focus on the former.

Java Platform Security and JAAS

The Java platform is built from the ground up with security in mind. This talk will introduce the security features of the J2SE, building quickly from the basic classes to realistic examples.

Unit Testing Java with Jython and JRuby

JUnit is great. Jython and JRuby are even better. Unit testing libraries look the same everywhere, so why not use the one that lets you get your job done faster?

Introduction to Aspect-oriented Programming with AspectJ

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) enables modularizing implementation of crosscutting concerns that abound in practice: logging, tracing, dynamic profiling, error handling, service-level agreement, policy enforcement, pooling, caching, concurrency control, security, transaction management, business rules, and so forth. Traditional implementation of these concerns requires you to fuse their implementation with the core concern of a module. With AOP, you can implement each of the concerns in a separate module called aspect. The result of such modular implementation is simplified design, improved understandability, improved quality, reduced time to market, and expedited response to system requirement changes. Come to this session and learn all about how AOP can help you simplify developing complex systems.

Performance Monitoring in J2EE Applications

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.

AOP Applied, lessons from a J2EE project

Aspect Oriented Programming offers enhanced modularity and cleaner separation of crosscutting concerns. That's all fine and well for architecture geeks. But can it help your project today? Has anyone applied it in the real world? The answer is "yes," and in this session, an AOP expert and early adopter will demonstrate how his team used aspect oriented programming to implement non-trivial business concerns. Along the way attendees will learn about advantages of AOP and understand some of the problems encountered adopting it.

Enhance Design Patterns with AOP

Design patterns have long been part of the experienced developer's tool chest. However, design patterns can affect multiple classes and this makes them invasive and hard to (re)use. This presentation will discuss how AOP solves this problem by fundamentally transforming pattern implementation. The class will examine examples of various traditional design patterns (including some of the famous GoF patterns) and discuss the practical and design benefits of implementing them with aspect-oriented techniques. This session will be of interest to anyone who has struggled with design patterns. It is also the perfect session for a programmer interested non-trivial applications of AOP, or who wishes to see aspect-oriented design in action.

Effective Enterprise Architecture

Bring all of your enterprise Java questions to this open forum discussion hosted by the author of “Effective Enterprise Java”, Ted Neward.

Effective Enterprise Java: Security

Security's become a hot topic among enterprise developers in recent years, but to many developers, security is still the white elephant in the middle of the room. Discussions about security usually begin with, "Uh, we'll worry about that later", or, "Start with two really large prime numbers.....". Security isn't as hard as developers make it out to be, but it is something that developers need to face and recognize.

The Fallacies of Enterprise Systems

There's a set of fallacies that every enterprise developer has fallen for at some point in their enterprise development lives, and unless they've come to realize it early enough, all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences in the long run.

Beyond Java

All programming languages have a limited life span, and Java is no different. This is a philosophical session rather than a programming session. Sooner or later, Java will lose its leadership position. This session will explore Java's strengths and weaknesses. We'll try to understand whether conditions are ripe for alternatives to emerge, and what those alternatives may be.

Introduction to Spring

This session, for the Spring beginner, helps you: • Understand dependency injection and inversion of control • Know the meaning of lightweight containers and Spring • Understand the basic pieces of Spring • See core Spring modules in action, including Persistence, AOP, transactions.

Attendees need not know anything about Spring. This session does talk about integration with core J2EE frameworks like JDBC and transactions.

Politics of Persistence

This session will help a Java developer choose a persistence framework. After the session, you will • Understand the core strengths and weaknesses of the main persistence frameworks in the Java space • Understand where marketing influences can impact persistence • Know what’s going on behind the scenes to impact the persistence pictures • Answer questions about persistence frameworks that might not be mainstream

Where Agile meets Argyle: New processes in established companies

Agile programming is a collection of core principles and techniques that allow software developers to create lighter, more responsive applications, and to have fun doing it. Many established organizations are either openly or sub-conciously hostile to many of the principles of Agile development.