By Neal Ford

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

Most of the time when people talk about agile software development, they talk about project and planning practices but never mention actual development, as if development where an afterthought when writing software. This talk bills into the real details of how to do agile development. I discuss best practices like continuous integration, pair programming, how developers should interact with story cards, how to handle enterprise concerns like integration with other software packages, and a slew of other topics related to agile software development.

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

By Neal Ford

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.

We're drowning in needless complexity in the enterprise architecture space: heavy, bloated tools, complex middleware, just-in-case architectural decisions, and vendor-itus. The side effect of all that complexity drives us further from our goals: architecture that is simple, free, supports business goals, loosely coupled, and evolvable. This session describes how to use web technologies (HTTP, REST, hypermedia, etc.) to implement robust, scalable enterprise architecture. This session shows a variety of different ways to attack this problem, with advantages and disadvantages for each, evolving towards the current state-of-the-art of REST-based architectures. This talk is based on original research and development done by ThoughtWorks, and represents the current state of the art in building truly scalable enterprise architectures. This topic combines the subjects of service oriented architecture with web technologies to create a hybrid providing you with the benefits of both approaches. You can build robust, scalable enterprise architecture that allows individual applications to evolve independently and rapidly. This talk describes how to make SOA suck less

By Neal Ford

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

Most talks you see about testing cover one particular tool, and rarely delve into the strategies around when you should use a particular tool for a particular kind of testing. This talk differs because it covers testing the entire stack: unit, integration, functional, behavior-driven, databases, user acceptance, mocking & stubbing, and other topics and strategies. I discuss the merits of "known good state" vs. "nuke & pave" for databases, discuss the differences between ClassicTDDers vs. Mockists and how they approach testing. Throughout, I provide strategies and heuristics to help guide you when making decisions about how, when, and why you are testing some part of your infrastructure.

Prerequisite: Confusion about what to test when and where

By Neal Ford

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

This session describes the current thinking about emergent design, discovering design in code. The hazard of Big Design Up Front in software is that you don't yet know what you don't know, and design decisions made too early are just speculations without facts. Emergent design techniques allow you to wait until the last responsible moment to make design decisions. This talk covers four areas: emergent design enablers, battling things that make emergent design hard, finding idiomatic patterns, and how to leverage the patterns you find. It includes both proactive (test-driven development) and reactive (refactoring, metrics, visualizations, tests) approaches to discovering design, and discusses the use of custom attributes, DSLs, and other techniques for utilizing them. The goal of this talk is to provide nomenclature, strategies, and techniques for allowing design to emerge from projects as they proceed, keeping you code in sync with the problem domain. This talk shows lots of examples of how to make this concept work in your environment.

Prerequisite: understanding of architectural and design concepts

By Neal Ford

Blacksmiths in 1900 and PowerBuilder developers in 1996 have something in common: they thought their job was safe forever. Yet circumstances proved them wrong. One of the nagging concerns for developers is how do you predict the Next Big Thing, preferably before you find yourself dinosaurized. This keynote discusses why people are bad at predicting the future, and why picking the Next Big Thing is hard. Then, it foolishly does just that: tries to predict the future. I also provide some guidelines on how to polish your crystal ball, giving you tools to help ferret out upcoming trends. Don't get caught by the rising tide of the next major coolness: nothing's sadder than an unemployed farrier watching cars drive by.

Blacksmiths in 1900 and PowerBuilder developers in 1996 have something in common: they thought their job was safe forever. Yet circumstances proved them wrong. One of the nagging concerns for developers is how do you predict the Next Big Thing, preferably before you find yourself dinosaurized. This keynote discusses why people are bad at predicting the future, and why picking the Next Big Thing is hard. Then, it foolishly does just that: tries to predict the future. I also provide some guidelines on how to polish your crystal ball, giving you tools to help ferret out upcoming trends. Don't get caught by the rising tide of the next major coolness: nothing's sadder than an unemployed farrier watching cars drive by.

By Neal Ford

Judicious use of metrics improves the quality of your code. But interpreting metrics presents a challenge. You have a list of numbers for a project - what does it mean? And what does it tell me about the health of the project overall? This sessions shows how to produce visualizations for software metrics, making them easier to understand and more valuable. It covers metrics at the individual method level all the way up to the overall architecture of the application. This isn't just a talk about how some tools produce visualizations: this session shows you how to generate your own visualizations, allowing you to customize it to the level in information density that shows real value on your project. I show how to produce projected graphs from dependencies, heat-maps for cyclomatic complexity and code coverage, using XSLT to extract visual information from XML configuration documents, and others. Metrics can't help you if you can't understand them. By creating visualizations, it helps leverage metrics to make your code better.

Judicious use of metrics improves the quality of your code. But interpreting metrics presents a challenge. You have a list of numbers for a project - what does it mean? And what does it tell me about the health of the project overall? This sessions shows how to produce visualizations for software metrics, making them easier to understand and more valuable. It covers metrics at the individual method level all the way up to the overall architecture of the application. This isn't just a talk about how some tools produce visualizations: this session shows you how to generate your own visualizations, allowing you to customize it to the level in information density that shows real value on your project. I show how to produce projected graphs from dependencies, heat-maps for cyclomatic complexity and code coverage, using XSLT to extract visual information from XML configuration documents, and others. Metrics can't help you if you can't understand them. By creating visualizations, it helps leverage metrics to make your code better.

By Matthew McCullough

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

In today's data-sensitive and news-sensationalizing world, don't become the next headline by an inadvertent release of private customer or company data. Secure your persisted, transmitted and in-memory data and learn the terminology you'll need to navigate the ecosystem of symmetric and public/private key cryptography.

By Matthew McCullough

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"?

We'll look at the performance metrics, security strength and weaknesses of various encryption algorithms. Given today's global economy, we'll also talk about what strength keys can and cannot be used across national borders. Lastly, we'll look at protocol-wrapping encryption techniques, such as VPNs, as a solution to abstracting away this difficult area of programming into a higher level service or device. We'll end with a brief peek at quantum and elliptic curve encryption.

Prerequisite: Encryption Bootcamp on the JVM

By Matthew McCullough

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.

iBeans encourages the higher level programming at the level of integrating such web based services without worrying about the underlying protocols or communication mechanisms. Services are beautifully abstracted in the form of JavaBeans, with JavaScript capabilities added like a cherry on top of a confectionary masterpiece.

This talk wil demonstrate iBeans usage in a real world Java application and explore how easy it is to write and contribute a new bean to iBeans Central for the benefit of the community in true Open Source style.

By Matthew McCullough

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.

In this session, you'll start by learning the vocabulary unique to the distributed computing space. Next, we'll discover how to shape a problem and processing to fit the Hadoop MapReduce framework. We'll then examine the incredible auto-replicating, redundant and self-healing HDFS filesystem. Finally, we'll fire up several Hadoop nodes and watch our calculation process get devoured live by our Hadoop cluster. At this talk's conclusion, you'll understand the suite of Hadoop tools and where each one fits in the aim of conquering large data sets.

By Matthew McCullough

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.

Maven 3.0 has undergone major refactorings, and correspondingly, a battery of backwards compatibility tests to ensure a smooth transition from Maven 2.0. These refactorings prepare Maven for the next several years of development, including the separation of the POM file language from from the POM in-memory processor, which is already leading to Groovy, Ruby and YAML based POM file parsers.

By Ted Neward

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.

In this presentation, Java developers will see the basic breakdown of the Collection API designs, the relationship of the interfaces to the implementations, how to create a new Collection implementation, and how the new Collections introduced as part of JSR-166 (the concurrency JSR) and Java6 make their programming lives easier.

By Ted Neward

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.

In this presentation, we'll go over some basic functional concepts, then start seeing how they apply in the FJ library, and show how to use FJ and functional ideas on common Java programming tasks. Let the excuse "I can only use Java" finally be consigned to the rubbish bin, once and for all.

By Ted Neward

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?

In this presentation, we'll go over what's missing from the Java Collections library, what is provided via other sources (Google and Apache, among others), and what you can provide for yourself, including a brief foray into the world of functional programing, and how it can make your Java code more elegant.

Prerequisite: Busy Java Developer's Guide to Collections

By Ted Neward

Getting the most out of your hardware historically was a question of optimizing native code to take advantage of CPU instructions, and setting the right optimization flags on the compiler. Then, when Java came around, it became a matter of simply allowing Hotspot to do its thing. But as the rise of multicore CPUs has made its presence felt in the developer mindspace, so has the need to start writing code in a more parallel/concurrent fashion. Unfortunately, this is an area that most Java developers have historically tried to avoid (like the Plague), so it represents a huge “black hole” for most of them.

In this presentation, we try to lift the cover of the pit over the demons of parallelization, and start exploring some concurrency/parallelization patterns, not with the intent of producing reusable code riffs, but with the intent of giving attendees a good grounding on different designs of parallel processing that apply to more than just Java.

Prerequisite: Busy Java Developer's Guide to Concurrency (Parts 1 and 2) or equivalent education/experience

By Ted Neward

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

After that, the basic architectural discussion from the first part is, with the aid of the audience in a more interactive workshop style, applied to a real-world problem, discussing the performance and scalability ramifications of the various communication options, user interface options, and more.

By Ted Neward

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

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

In this session, attendees will be split into small groups and given a "real world" business problem (the kata). Attendees will be expected to formulate an architectural vision for the project, asking questions (of the instructor) as necessary to better understand the requirements, then defend questions (posed by both the instructor and their fellow attendees) about their choice in technology and approach, and then evaluate others' efforts in a similar fashion. No equipment is necessary to participate--the great architect has no need of tools, just their mind and the customers' participation and feedback.

By Ted Neward

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Games? What do games have to do with good business-oriented applications? Turns out, a lot of interesting little tidbits of user-interface, distribution, and emergence, found normally in the games we play, have direct implications on the way enterprise applications can (or should) be built.

Come to this session, find out some intriguing things about what’s going on in the game industry, but more importantly, how ideas from the gaming world can turn around and answer some thorny problems in the business world.

By Nathaniel Schutta

While your project might have nearly 100% code coverage on the server tier, many projects ignore testing the web layer. With more and more code being pushed to the browser, a lack of tests for the client code begs for trouble.

This talk will explore several testing options including Selenium, JsUnit, Crosscheck, JSCoverage, Watir, JSLint, JSSpec and others.

By Nathaniel Schutta

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

In this talk, we'll go beyond the basics of JavaScript delving into the mysteries of prototype inheritance, objects, language edge cases and the importance of testing.

By Nathaniel Schutta

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

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

By Nathaniel Schutta

Some developers assume that agility and usability are mutually exclusive - in reality, they are extremely complimentary; if you squint, you might have a hard time telling the difference between agile practices and good user interface design. This usability talk is aimed squarely at developers giving you the tools you need to develop UIs that won't make your users yack. We'll discuss the importance of observation, personas, paper prototyping, usability testing and the importance of good moderators. In addition, we'll map the various aspects of user interface design to a typical agile iteration.

Some developers assume that agility and usability are mutually exclusive - in reality, they are extremely complimentary; if you squint, you might have a hard time telling the difference between agile practices and good user interface design. This usability talk is aimed squarely at developers giving you the tools you need to develop UIs that won't make your users yack. We'll discuss the importance of observation, personas, paper prototyping, usability testing and the importance of good moderators. In addition, we'll map the various aspects of user interface design to a typical agile iteration.

By Nathaniel Schutta

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The single most important tool in any developers toolbox isn't a fancy IDE or some spiffy new language - it's our brain. Despite ever faster processors with multiple cores and expanding amounts of RAM, we haven't yet created a computer to rival the ultra lightweight one we carry around in our skulls - in this session we'll learn how to make the most of it. We'll talk about why multitasking is a myth, the difference between the left and the right side of your brain, the importance of flow and why exercise is good for more than just your waist line.

The single most important tool in any developers toolbox isn't a fancy IDE or some spiffy new language - it's our brain. Despite ever faster processors with multiple cores and expanding amounts of RAM, we haven't yet created a computer to rival the ultra lightweight one we carry around in our skulls - in this session we'll learn how to make the most of it. We'll talk about why multitasking is a myth, the difference between the left and the right side of your brain, the importance of flow and why exercise is good for more than just your waist line.

By Ken Sipe

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.

Combined with proper JMX instrumentation, the need to bounce the server may be eliminated for all but the rarest of cases.

This session will look at the Java 6 monitoring and management capabilities, which includes the ability to make VM argument changes on the fly. In addition to what is provide in the JDK, a number of freely available management tools will be demonstrated.

By Ken Sipe

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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.

We'll go through such powerful concepts as: advantages of declarative over imperative build systems, convention over configuration without rigidity, task definitions and dependencies, the benefits of plugins, deep multi-project support, runtime optimizations through partial builds and harvesting existing functionality through Ant and Maven integration as well as strategies for migrating from these build tools. We will demonstrate some of the innovative goodies that come with Gradle out-of-the-box, like smart incremental builds, the Gradle Daemon and the Gradle Wrapper. We show also many of the new features like Eclipse integration, Sonar integration, Heroku integration, C/C++ support and other new plugins.

By Ken Sipe

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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.

This session will look at a number of security concerns and how the ESAPI library provides a unified solution for security. This includes authorization, authentication of services, encoding, encrypting, and validation. This session will discuss a number of issues which can be solved through standardizing on the open source Enterprise Security API.

By Ken Sipe

Companies have focused for years to solidify the back-end infrastructure in defense against hacking attempts. Most companies however are forced to open up many ports including port 80 (http) for users to access web applications among other resources. This has lead to web attacks growing to be the #1 classification of hacker attacks today. In this space Cross Site Scripting (XSS) is the #1 ranked vulnerability affecting a large number of sites. This evolution requires that the understanding of securing an application move beyond sys admins and incorporate all aspects of system delivery for the protection of a system and system resources.

This session will detail what XSS is, including a large number of vectors of attack. We will review information from several OWASP development guides, along with code review tips when focused on XSS. An enabling aspect of XSS is AJAX and in particular JavaScript, for which we will focus on techniques and frameworks to help secure the DOM. Attendees will learn the techniques necessary to help XSS-Proof their web applications.

By Ken Sipe

This session is a quick look at all aspects of being a corporate software architect. Whither you are a developer looking to move into the role of architect, needing to have an understanding of what is expected or already in the role of software architect looking for new and interesting ideas, this session is for you.

This session is designed to be a jam session on all aspects of software architecture and many of the roles of software architect. The following subject areas will be covered: - Software Development Process - Project Key Mechanisms: Languages and Frameworks - Security: Threats, Securing Code Review, Adding Security to you process - Layers, Partitions and Topologies - VM Optimizations - Usability and User Experience - Optimizing the Web - Ready for Production: Monitoring - Integration - Data Modeling

By Brian Sletten

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.

Attendees will learn about HTML 5 and related specs including:

• New and deprecated elements
• Immediate mode 2D drawing w/ the canvas element
• Timed media playback
• Local storage and offline mode
• Bi-directional communication sockets to servers
• Messaging between documents
• Drag and drop support
• And much more!

There will be a lot covered but this should be accessible to anyone interested in Web development.

By Brian Sletten

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.

There is tremendous interest in REpresentational State Transfer (REST) as an architectural style for building scalable, flexible, information-driven architectures in the Enterprise. The success of the Web has caught our attention in the face of increased complexity and many failures with more traditional Web Services technologies. The problem is that it is difficult to sell a way to do things. Managers do not want to feel like they are innovating in the middleware space. They want to understand why they should deviate from the blue prints laid down by the industry leaders. They want to understand when they should use REST, when they should use SOAP and when they might fallback to regular old Java-based messaging. They want to make business-based technology decisions that lay a path to forward progress rather than paying for technological flux.

This talk will introduce REST and walk through why it is so important and makes such a difference. We will talk about REST API design, security, long-lived systems, content-negotiation, contract enforcement, when REST might not make sense, etc.

REST and the Web Architecture are the basis for many exciting things happening on the Web and within our organizations. You owe it to yourself to make sure you really "get it".

This talk should be accessible to everyone but is probably intermediate level.

By Brian Sletten

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.

Meta tags and microformats are useful but will only get us so far. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the metadata substrate of the Semantic Web that will take us to the next level of machine-processability and the Web. It allows you to express fairly arbitrary relationships about people, places, things, and content in an open world way. It is trivial to mix and match terms, vocabularies, etc. and to have a rich expressive capability not bound by the limitations of the relational data model and XML schemas. GRDDL is a technology for generating RDF metadata from content on demand. This can include XML documents, XML-RPC requests, XHTML pages, etc. The content could include authorship information, geotagging, creative commons license information, the topic of the document, etc. RDFa allows us to be more explicit about the metadata by embedding actual RDF relationships in our content. With technologies no more complicated than the presentation markup we are already using, you can imbue any web tier with extra semantic specialsauce that will benefit your users as well as help link you into the emerging Web of data.

By Brian Sletten

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.

We will explore:

• an introduction to RDF and the SPARQL query language
• the fantastically successful Linked Data project that connections billions of interrelated content
• how to include relational data in the mix
• how to include enriched Web pages in the mix
• how to build client-friendly applications on top of this information

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 Brian Sletten

If you have come to the NetKernel overview talk and came away compelled but unsure how to proceed, this talk will jump right in to building real resource-oriented systems with NetKernel. We will move away from the theoretical mind-melting right into the applied mind-melting. It is difficult to make the shift away from an object-oriented model, but this talk will demonstrate several examples of how and why you may want to. It will also include a preview of what is coming in NetKernel 4. This is kind of a REST + Polyglot Programming + SOA + Architecture talk all rolled up into one.

This talk will build out:

• Wrappers around a relational database that can act as RESTful interfaces through HTTP or service higher layers
• Transformational layers that convert the data into different forms
• Orchestration across a variety of data sources
• Integration with a variety of web tier technologies

All along the way, we will make appropriate language choices to solve our problems. One size does not fit all and an environment that embraces this is incredibly important.

Prerequisite: Intro to NetKernel : Software for the 21st Century, Give it a REST (if unfamiliar with REST)

By Matt Stine

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!

In this talk, we'll examine the principles undergirding TBD, the pros and cons of this approach, and walk through the design of a system using TBD. We'll also get a brief introduction to OSGi and its various implementations, look at some of the tools available for OSGi development, and then implement our TBD design.

By Matt Stine

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.

This talk will:

• give a brief introduction to OSGi and polyglot programming
• explore the pros and cons of the polyglot OSGi approach
• experiment with Groovy, Clojure, and Scala in an OSGi container
• look at some of the “gotchas” one might encounter along the way

By Jeff Scott Brown

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.)

This session will cover Spring AOP in detail to demonstrate how easy it can be to leverage the awesome power of Aspect-Oriented Programming.

By Jeff Scott Brown

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.

This session will cover all of these topics to demonstrate how powerful the Grails framework is and show how little effort it takes to build not just a simple toy application but also to build real enterprise web apps.

By Jeff Scott Brown

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.

This session will cover a lot of the GORM API from the developer's perspective as well as diving into some of the implementation details. Knowing how some of this works under the covers will give developers an opportunity to not only improve their productivity with GORM but also open up possibilities of using dynamic metaprogramming in other aspects of their application development efforts.

Prerequisite: Advanced Grails

By Jeff Scott Brown

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.

Part of what makes Grails so compelling is its really powerful plugin system. The Grails plugin system allows capabilities to be bolted on to applications, including adding support for a variety of programming languages. All of the major programming languages available on the JVM are supported by The Grails Framework. These include Java, Groovy, Scala, Clojure and others. This session will dive in to that aspect of the framework with a focus on Scala and Clojure and will demonstrate what is involved in adding support for new languages.

Prerequisite: Advanced Grails

By Jeff Scott Brown

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

This session will cover in detail a number of advanced metaprogramming concepts in Groovy. The discussion will cover using dynamic method interception, meta-class manipulation, AST transformations and Groovy's Metaobject-Protocol (MP) to build flexible applications in Groovy including implementing a Domain Specific Language (DSL).

By Venkat Subramaniam

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

Status of the Java language and the libraries Features that are around the corner JVM capability enhancements Benefits of these imminent changes

Prerequisite: Good programming knowledge of Java

By Venkat Subramaniam

You can't be agile if your code sucks. You know that you have to constantly refactor your code and design. But the questions is how? In this presentation, instead of looking at a laundry list of refactoring techniques, we will instead look at how to effectively approach refactoring and along the way discuss some core principles to look for.

We will take some sample code and refactor it. As we refactor, we will measure the quality of code using continuous integration. You can pick up a list of refactoring techniques from tools. However, in this section you will learn how and when to drive those tools, and more important why.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Scala is a static fully object-oriented, functional language on the JVM. While taking advantage of the functional aspects, you can continue to make full use of the powerful JVM and Java libraries.

In this presentation we will take a in depth look at what Scala is, its strengths, weaknesses, and why, when, and where you'd use it on your applications.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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

We will look at the strengths of Scala from application development point of view. Rather than focusing on the syntax of Scala, we will focus here on Scala idioms and powerful Scala libraries to perform routine tasks.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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

The gaining popularity of multi-core processors has rekindled the concurrency question: How do you effectively implement multithreaded applications on the Java platform? The familiar approach in Java is to create threads and to manage access to shared mutable state using synchronized locks. This approach to concurrency is fraught with hard work and uncertainties. Have you marked the appropriate methods synchronized, did you decorate the relevant fields volatile, did you properly construct the mutually exclusive regions of code, and is there a potential for deadlock lurking in the code.

In this talk you'll learn about alternate ways to tackling concurrency on the JVM. One approach is the functional way, along with an actor based model provided in Scala, to deal with immutable state. This removes the problem at the root, since data can't change there is no issue of contention to contend with. Another distinct approach, provided in Clojure, is to protect access to mutable data, not using locks, but using transactional boundary. The Software Transactional Memory brings database like transaction model to in-memory data. In this presentation we will discuss the pros and cons of these approaches and how to effectively apply them.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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

In this presentation you will take some Java code that does common operations and transform it to idiomatic Groovy. You will participate in exploring various options as you help transform several examples. Each example is intended to hone a particular idiom or Groovy facility.

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

By Craig Walls

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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.

It's been 8 years since Spring 1.0 was released. In that time it has gone from a modest open-source project to being a de facto standard Java application framework. Now, as Spring enters its 8th year, it continues its attack on Java complexity, packed with many new features such as:

• First-class REST support
• A new expression language
• More options for annotation-driven bean wiring
• Bean profiles
• Declarative caching abstraction
• Enhanced Java-based configuration
• A new "c:" namespace
• Unified property management
• And much more

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.

By Craig Walls

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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.

In recent years, rapid application development frameworks such as Rails and Grails have earned a lot of attending. By employing code generation, convention-over-configuration, and the dynamic capabilities of their core languages (Ruby and Groovy) to offer unparalleled productivity, helping get projects off the ground quickly.

As awesome as these frameworks are, they do have one negative mark against them. Although developers love working with them, convincing the "boss" to build mission-critical applications in a relatively new development style based can be difficult. The mere mention of a word like "Groovy" conjures up images of tie-dye shirts and VW vans. Risk-averse project managers often think that free love may have been a big thing in the 70s, but it has no place in serious business.

If psychedelic frameworks are a tough-sell in your organization, then you can still feel much of the same productivity gains while developing Spring applications. Spring Roo mixes Spring and Java with a little code generation and a dash of compile-time AspectJ to achive a rapid development environment that resembles Rails and Grails. But instead of producing Ruby/Rails or Groovy/Grails code that may make your manager twitch, Roo produces Java-based projects that use the Spring Framework--which is already accepted in many organizations.

By Craig Walls

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.

The secret weapon for attacking complexity in any project is to break it down into smaller, cohesive, and more easily digestible pieces. Unfortunately, Java lacks critical ingredients necessary to achieve true modularity.

Enter OSGi. OSGi is a mature and established framework for dynamic modularity in Java. With OSGi, you'll be able to realize true modularity in your Java projects, making them more flexible, comprehensible, and testable.

By Craig Walls

This session will introduce you to Spring-DM. You'll learn how working with OSGi services can be as easy and as natural as declaring a in Spring. In addition, we'll look at how to use Spring-DM's web extender to develop modular web applications in OSGi. And we'll see how Spring-DM became part of the OSGi specification as Blueprint Services.

OSGi is a great framework for realizing true modularity in your Java applications. Unfortunately, however, working with OSGi services requires coding directly to the OSGi API and getting to know some new patterns for dealing with service availability.

If having to work with the OSGi API makes you feel uneasy, then have a look at Spring Dynamic Modules (aka, Spring-DM). Spring-DM brings a declarative service model to OSGi, relieving you from programatically servicing and consuming services. What's more, because Spring-DM is based on the popular Spring Framework, it brings all of the power of Spring to OSGi development.

Prerequisite: Modular Java: An introduction to OSGi