Salt Lake Software Symposium
June 29 - 30, 2012 - Salt Lake City, UT
View the event details here ».
Video Preview
Effective Spring
Friday 8:45 AM - Craig Walls
After almost a decade and several significant releases, Spring has gone a long way from challenging the then-current Java standards to becoming the de facto enterprise standard itself. Although the Spring programming model continues to evolve, it still maintains backward compatibility with many of its earlier features and paradigms. Consequently, there's often more than one way to do anything in Spring. How do you know which way is the right way?
Watch Video Preview >Build Lifecycle Craftsmanship Tools
Friday 8:45 AM - Matthew McCullough
You've heard a bit about Git, Gradle, Jenkins, and Sonar, but are you putting them to use? Are you maximizing what they can offer in terms of standardized project models, faster incremental compiles, automated commit-triggered builds, and rapid source code analysis? In this intense presentation, live demonstrations will be given for all of the latest versions of the aforementioned tools and what they have to offer a highly proficient Java developer.
Watch Video Preview >NoSQL Smackdown 2012
Friday 8:45 AM - Tim Berglund
Alternative databases continue to establish their role in the technology stack of the future—and for many, the technology stack of the present. Making mature engineering decisions about when to adopt new products is not easy, and requires that we learn about them both from an abstract perspective and from a very concrete one as well. If you are going to recommend a NoSQL database for a new project, you're going to have to look at code.
Watch Video Preview >Domain Modeling Using Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
Friday 8:45 AM - Paul Rayner
This presentation seeks to provide a solid introduction to the fundamentals of DDD. Learn why modeling a complex business domain in software is so advantageous to your business and ways in which your team can go about delivering software models to give your business a competitive edge.
Watch Video Preview >Getting Agile Right!
Friday 8:45 AM - Ken Sipe
Whether you are just getting started, or you’ve made an attempt and well… it could be better… a lot better, this session is for you. Ken has been working on Agile projects as a coach and mentor for a number of years. Come discover the common reasons teams fail to get it right. Bring your own challenges and lets discuss. This is set to be an engaging and illuminating discussion.
Watch Video Preview >Sonar Code Metrics Workshop (Bring a Laptop)
Friday 10:45 AM - Matthew McCullough
You're serious about improving the quality of your code base, but with 10,000 lines of code, where do you start and how do you ensure the greatest ROI for the re-work your team members will perform?
Sonar is an open source tool that brings together the best of breed static and dynamic analysis of Java projects. The result is a unified view of problematic areas of your code on a time-line basis, allowing the team to attack the problems with the best ROI, and maintain a more watchful eye for positive and risky trends in the codebase in the future.
Watch Video Preview >Developing Next-Generation Applications
Friday 10:45 AM - Craig Walls
For a long while, we've built applications pretty much the same way. Regardless of the frameworks (or even languages and platforms) employed, we've packaged up our web application, deployed it to a server somewhere, and asked our users to point their web browser at it.
But now we're seeing a shift in not only how applications are deployed, but also in how they're consumed. The cost and hassle of setting up dedicated servers is driving more applications into the cloud. Meanwhile, our users are on-the-go more than ever, consuming applications from their mobile devices more often than a traditional desktop browser. And even the desktop user is expecting a more interactive experience than is offered by simple page-based HTML sites.
With this shift comes new programming models and frameworks. It also involves a shift in how we think about our application design. Standing up a simple HTML-based application is no longer good enough.
Watch Video Preview >Connected Data with Neo4j
Friday 10:45 AM - Tim Berglund
Neo4j is an open-source, enterprise-class database with a conventional feature set and a very unconventional data model. Like the databases we're already used to, it offers support for Java, ACID transactions, and a feature-rich query language. But before you get too comfortable, you have to wrap your mind around its most important feature: Neo4j is a graph database, built precisely to store graphs efficiently and traverse them more performantly than relational, document, or key/value databases ever could.
Watch Video Preview >Strategic Design Using DDD
Friday 10:45 AM - Paul Rayner
Not every part of a software system will be well-designed. How do you know where to put the time and effort to refine the design, or refactor existing code? Learn how strategic Domain-Driven Design (DDD) patterns can show you how to know which parts of your system matter most to your business and how to focus your team's design efforts most effectively.
Watch Video Preview >Complexity of Complexity
Friday 10:45 AM - Ken Sipe
Of all the non-functional requirements of software development, complexity receives the least attention and seems to be the most important from a long term standard point. This talk will look at some of forces that drive complexity at the code level and at a system level and their impact. We will discuss what causes us to over look complexity, how our perception of it changes over time and what we can do about it?
Watch Video Preview >Git Workshop (Bring A Laptop)
Friday 1:15 PM - Matthew McCullough
Git is a version control system you may have been hearing a bit about lately. But simply hearing more about it may not be enough to convince you of its value. Getting hands on experience is what really counts. In this workshop, you'll bring your Windows, Mac or Linux laptop and walk through downloading, installing, and using Git in a collaborative fashion.
Watch Video Preview >Hadoop
Friday 1:15 PM - Tim Berglund
When you want to measure fractions of a millimeter, you get a micrometer. When you want to measure centimeters, you get a ruler. When you want to measure kilometers, you might use a laser beam. The abstract task is the same in all cases, but the tools differ significantly based on the size of the measurement.
Likewise, there are some computations that can be done quickly on data structures that fit into memory. Some can't fit into memory, but will fit on the direct-attached disk of a single computer. But when you've got many terabytes or even petabytes of data, you need tooling adapted to the scale of the task. Enter Hadoop.
Watch Video Preview >Client-Side MVC: Web and Mobile Development with Spine.js
Friday 1:15 PM - Craig Walls
In this session, we'll start with an empty directory and use Spine.js to create an interactive client-side web application. Then we'll leverage what we learned to build a mobile web application with a native feel that can be deployed either through a phone's web browser or via native wrapper frameworks such as Apache Cordova (aka, PhoneGap).
Watch Video Preview >Using DDD Patterns for Supple Design
Friday 1:15 PM - Paul Rayner
Come on a guided tour of how applying Domain-Driven Design (DDD) building block patterns can make your code cleaner, more expressive, and more amenable to change. We cover examples of DDD patterns such as entities, value objects, closure of operations and side-effect-free functions. We will focus particularly on how implementing value objects can lead to more supple design.
Watch Video Preview >Agile Engineering Practices
Friday 1:15 PM - Neal Ford
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.
Watch Video Preview >Gradle Workshop (Bring a Laptop)
Friday 3:00 PM - Matthew McCullough
Gradle. Another build tool? Come on! But before you say that, take a look at the one you are already using.
Whether your current tool is Make, Rake, Ant, or Maven, Gradle has a lot to offer. It leverages a strong object model like Maven, but a mutable, not predetermined one. Gradle relies on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) lifecycle like Maven, but one that can be customized. Gradle offers imperative build scripting when you need it (like Ant), but declarative build approaches by default (like Maven). In short, Gradle believes that conventions are great -- as long as they are headed in the same direction you need to go. When you need to customize something in your build, your build tool should facilitate that with a smile, not a slap in the face. And customizations should be in a low-ceremony language like Groovy. Is all this too much to ask?
Watch Video Preview >Securing Spring
Friday 3:00 PM - Craig Walls
In this session, I'll show you how to secure your Spring application with Spring Security 3.0. You'll see hot to declare both request-oriented and method-oriented security constraints. And you'll see how SpEL can make simple work of expressing complex security rules.
Watch Video Preview >Aggregate-Oriented Modeling with DDD and NoSQL
Friday 3:00 PM - Paul Rayner
Many of the problems encountered in scaling, parallelizing and distributing systems that tend to be addressed in ad-hoc ways are actually deeply connected with the manner in which the business domain has been modeled. Domain-Driven Design (DDD) has rich modeling resources for tackling concurrency, transactional and distribution boundary issues within the domain model itself, enabling teams to be more effective in dealing with business complexity and change.
Watch Video Preview >Build Your Own Technology Radar
Friday 3:00 PM - Neal Ford
A Technology Radar is a tool that forces you to organize and think about near term future technology decisions, both for you and your company.
Watch Video Preview >MongoDB: Scaling Web Applications
Friday 3:00 PM - Ken Sipe
Google “MongoDB is Web Scale” and prepare to laugh your tail off. With such satire, it easy to pass off MongoDB as a passing joke… but that would be a mistake. The humor is in the fact there seems to be no end to those who parrot the MongoDB benefits without a clue. This session is about getting a clue.
Watch Video Preview >Securing the Modern Web with OAuth
Friday 4:45 PM - Craig Walls
In this session, we'll look at OAuth, focusing on OAuth 2, from the perspective of an application that consumes an OAuth-secured API as well as see how to use OAuth to secure your own APIs.
Watch Video Preview >Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST I
Friday 4:45 PM - Brian Sletten
The first in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Watch Video Preview >Measure for Measure – Lean Principles for Effective Metrics and Motivation
Friday 4:45 PM - Paul Rayner
This presentation explores the nature of motivation and the place of metrics and measurement in software development, and how lean software development principles and practices shed light on motivation and metrics and how they can be used to support deep organizational improvement.
Watch Video Preview >Functional Thinking
Friday 4:45 PM - Neal Ford
Learning the syntax of a new language is easy, but learning to think under a different paradigm is hard.
Watch Video Preview >Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST II
Saturday 8:15 AM - Brian Sletten
The second in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Watch Video Preview >Continuous Delivery Pt 1: Deployment Pipelines
Saturday 8:15 AM - Neal Ford
Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. This workshop focuses on the Deployment Pipeline concept from Continuous Delivery.
Watch Video Preview >HTML5
Saturday 8:15 AM - Nathaniel Schutta
Interested in HTML5? Want a change to play around with the latest and greatest in web app development? This workshop is for you! We'll cover feature detection, web forms, the new HTML elements, take a spin around the canvas, and we'll finish up with offline/local storage and web sockets.
Watch Video Preview >Groovy, part 1: Collections, closures, and the Groovy JDK
Saturday 8:15 AM - Kenneth Kousen
Want to use Groovy but don't have time to read all of Groovy in Action? This talk gives you a whirlwind introduction to its capabilities, from basic data types, Groovy strings, POGOs, collections, Groovy SQL, and the Groovy JDK.
Watch Video Preview >OOP Principles
Saturday 8:15 AM - Ken Sipe
For decades object-oriented programming has been sold (perhaps over sold) as the logical programming paradigm which provides “the way" to software reuse and reductions in the cost of software maintenance as if it comes for free with the simple selection of the an OO language. Even with the renewed interests in functional languages, the majority of development shops are predominately using object-oriented languages such as Java, C#, and Ruby. So most likely you are using an OO language… How is that reuse thing going? Is your organization realizing all the promises? Even as a former Rational Instructor of OOAD and a long time practitioner, I find great value in returning to the basics. This session is a return to object-oriented basics.
Watch Video Preview >Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST III
Saturday 10:00 AM - Brian Sletten
The third in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
Watch Video Preview >Continuous Delivery Pt 2: Infrastructure
Saturday 10:00 AM - Neal Ford
Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. This workshop focuses on the agile infrastructure required to implement a deployment pipeline and continuous delivery.
Watch Video Preview >JavaScript Libraries You Aren't Using...Yet
Saturday 10:00 AM - Nathaniel Schutta
You're all over jQuery - you write plugins in your sleep - and before that, you were a Prototype ninja. Your team treats JavaScript like a first class citizen, you've even written more tests than Kent Beck. Is that all there is in the land of the JavaScript developer? Believe it or not, the JavaScript party hasn't stopped. What other libraries are out there? What do they offer? This talk will survey the field of modern JavaScript libraries getting you up to speed on what's new. We'll dive in just deep enough to whet your appetite on a wide variety of libraries such as Backbone, Underscore, Zepto and more.
Watch Video Preview >Groovy, part 2: Builders, metaprogramming, and AST Transformations
Saturday 10:00 AM - Kenneth Kousen
Want to use Groovy but don't have time to read all of Groovy in Action? Building on the Groovy 101 talk, this presentation reviews features of Groovy that aren't based on simplifying Java. Topics include building and parsing XML and JSON, using the metaclass to enhance existing classes, and Abstract Syntax Tree Transformations like @Delegate, @Immutable, @Canonical, and more.
Watch Video Preview >Enterprise Security API library from OWASP
Saturday 10:00 AM - Ken Sipe
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.
Watch Video Preview >Designing for Mobile
Saturday 1:00 PM - Nathaniel Schutta
The word just came down from the VP - you need a mobile app and you need it yesterday. Wait, you've never built a mobile app...it's pretty much the same thing as you've built before just smaller right? Wrong. The mobile experience is different and far less forgiving. How do you design an application for touch? How does that differ from a mouse? Should you build a mobile app or a mobile web site? This talk will get you started on designing for a new, and exciting, platform. Whether that means iPhone, Android, Windows Phone or something else, you need a plan, this talk will help.
Watch Video Preview >Spock - Unit Test and Prosper
Saturday 1:00 PM - Ken Sipe
Spock is a groovy based testing framework that leverages all the "best practices" of the last several years taking advantage of many of the development experience of the industry. So combine Junit, BDD, RSpec, Groovy and Vulcans... and you get Spock!
This is a significant advancement in the world of testing.
Watch Video Preview >Decision Making in Software Teams
Saturday 1:00 PM - Tim Berglund
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.
Watch Video Preview >4 Practical Uses for Domain Specific Languages
Saturday 1:00 PM - Neal Ford
Domain Specific Langauges seems like a cool idea, but where's the payoff? This talk provides an overview of how to build both internal and external DSLs (including the state of the art tools), stopping along the way to show how this is practical to your day job.
Watch Video Preview >The Mobile App Smackdown: Native Apps vs. The Mobile Web
Saturday 2:45 PM - Nathaniel Schutta
Mobile is the next big thing and your company needs to there. But what does there actually entail? Should you build a native app? On which platforms? Do you have the skills for that? What about the web? Can you deliver an awesome experience using nothing but a mobile web browser? This talk will help you navigate these treacherous waters. We'll discuss the pros and cons of the various approaches and give you a framework for choosing.
Watch Video Preview >Web Security Workshop
Saturday 2:45 PM - Ken Sipe
As a web application developer, most of the focus is on the user stories and producing business value for your company or clients. Increasingly however the world wide web is more like the wild wild web which is an increasingly hostile environment for web applications. It is absolutely necessary for web application teams to have security knowledge, a security model and to leverage proper security tools.
Watch Video Preview >Semantic Web Workshop
Saturday 2:45 PM - Brian Sletten
The Web is changing faster than you can imagine and it is going to continue to do so. Webs of Documents are giving way to machine-processable Webs of Information. We no longer care about data containers, we only care about data and how it connects to what we already know.
Perhaps the concepts of the Semantic Web initiative are new to you. Or perhaps you have been hearing for years how great technologies like RDF, SPARQL, SKOS and OWL are and have yet to see anything real come out of it.
Whether you are jazzed or jaded, this workshop will provide you with the understanding of a technological tidal wave that is heading in your direction.
Watch Video Preview >Grails Workshop
Saturday 2:45 PM - Kenneth Kousen
Build a Grails application from start to finish in this half-day workshop. We'll start with domain classes, apply constraints, add controllers and services, apply both unit and integration tests, and then add additional functionality through plugins.
Watch Video Preview >Emergent Design
Saturday 2:45 PM - Neal Ford
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.
Watch Video Preview >Leading Technical Change
Saturday 4:30 PM - Nathaniel Schutta
Technology changes, it's a fact of life. And while many developers are attracted to the challenge of change, many organizations do a particularly poor job of adapting. We've all worked on projects with, ahem, less than new technologies even though newer approaches would better serve the business. But how do we convince those holding the purse strings to pony up the cash when things are "working" today? At a personal, how do we keep up with the change in our industry?
Watch Video Preview >The Curious Clojureist
Saturday 4:30 PM - Neal Ford
Why is Clojure the best new language on the JVM? Come to this session and see why this functional, dynamic Lisp is the best thing on the JVM since Java.
Watch Video Preview >








