By Jeff Brown

Groovy is an agile dynamic language for the Java platform. The language and its libraries bring many things to the table to ease the process of building applications for the Java platform. This session provides a detailed run through Groovy with lots of code samples to drive home the power of the language.

Dynamic languages provide a lot of power and flexibility compared to statically typed languages. Groovy brings that power and flexibility to the Java platform in a way that is totally compatible with all of your existing Java code, tools and infrastructure. This session covers all of the fundamentals of Groovy and gives developers a whole lot of practical information they need to get started with the language.

By Jeff Brown

Grails is a full stack MVC framework for building web applications for the Java platform. Grails makes web application development both fun and easy. This session covers all of the fundamentals of building web applications with Grails.

Businesses need rich web applications and developers want to be able to build those applications without the pain that usually comes along with doing so. Grails addresses these needs very well. Grails demolishes many of the pain points that Java developers have almost (not quite) become numb to after years of suffering. This session covers all of the fundamentals:

Introduction To Grails

Domain Objects

Controllers

GSPs

Custom TagLibs

GORM

By Jeff Brown

Grails makes web application development both fun and easy. This session dives beyond the basics to cover advanced details of Grails that bring the really exciting features to your applications.

Getting started building web applications for the Java platform is easy. Following that through to rich interactive applications that solve the business needs is more tricky. Grails goes the whole way to address pain points not only for simple applications but of real enterprise applications with real demands. This session steps through many of the advanced features of Grails that help get your applications through that last 20% that teams often struggle with.

Prerequisite: Grails - Agile Web 2.0 The Easy Way

By Jeff Brown

Dynamic languages bring a lot of interesting elements to the table for teams interested in doing Test Driven Development (TDD). Groovy lends itself very well to TDD and this session demonstrates many features of the language and its libraries that help teams build more testable systems and build better tests.

The value of Test Driven Development (TDD) has become widely accepted. The practice has extended beyond just XP teams. Good TDD practices yield high quality software and help teams maintain confidence in their software as complexity grows. The dynamic nature of Groovy makes TDD easy and fun. Groovy may be used to unit test not only Groovy code but other code as well. Testing Java code with Groovy is a snap. Learn to use the power of Groovy to test your systems.

By Jeff Brown

Metaprogramming is a key component in building truly dynamic and flexible applications with Groovy. Groovy's metaprogramming capabilities bring great new possibilities to the table that would be very difficult or just plain impossible to write with Java alone. This session will demystify a lot of the magic that seems to be going on inside of a Groovy application.

When Java developers are first introduced to Groovy one of the first things they notice is how much easier things are in Groovy compared to Java. Boilerplate code typically generated by your IDE all melts away to nothing in a Groovy bean. Creating XML is a snap, not a tangled mess. File I/O is a breeze. Those developer productivity gains are an important part of the story. However, in addition to making easy the things you are used to doing the hard way Groovy brings whole new capabilities to the party that Java developers don't even think about because you can't do those things with Java. Many of those capabilities are made possible because of the powerful metaprogramming capabilities

Prerequisite: A Thorough Introduction To Groovy

By Neal Ford

The Gang of Four book should have been entitled "Palliatives for Statically Typed Languages", because the recipes it provides are cumbersome solutions to the problems it poses. Using powerful languages makes the solutions in the GoF book look hopelessly complicated. This session shows how to solve the same problems concisely, elegantly, and with far fewer lines of code using the facilities of dynamic languages.

The Gang of Four book was actually 2 books: a nomenclature describing common software problems and a recipe book for solutions. The vocabulary they defined is still useful. The recipes are a disaster! Dynamic languages (like Groovy and Ruby) have powerful meta-programming facilities far beyond statically typed languages. It turns out that many of the structural design patterns in the Gang of Four book and beyond are much easier to solve with meta-programming. This session compares and contrasts the "traditional" approach of design patterns with a more nuanced meta-programming approach. Using language features creates cleaner abstractions with fewer lines of code and little or no additional s

By Neal Ford

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.

This session shows how to fully exploit regular expressions. It begins with the basic premise of how regular expressions work, then shows how to take advantage of the RegEx library built into the Java platform. This session shows how to use wildcards, escape characters, meta-tags, character class operators, look-aheads/look-behinds, and how to use the greedy operators effectively. It covers regular expressions from the beginning through to advanced usage, both in Java and in tools that support regular expressions. This session is packed with real examples of regular expressions (including a game show with no fabulous prizes).

Key Session Points:

Regular expressions defined

Examples

Using t

By Neal Ford

What does code + methodology have to do with one another? Everything! Agile projects focus on delivering working code, and tools exist to allow you to verify some quality metrics for your code. This session is a survey of tools and metrics that allow you to determine the quality of your code and strategies to "wire it" into your agile project.

Agile projects focus on delivering code. The responsibility for the quality of that code lies with developers. Yet most developers have a poor sense of how to gauge the quality of code, both during development and forensically. This talk lives on the boundary between what is important in agile projects and ways to verify code quality. It is both a survey of tools and metrics and strategies for proactively applying these techniques to ongoing projects. I talk about the Hawthorne effect, analysis tools (both byte and source code), useful metrics, tools for generating metrics, and how to analyze raw data into actionable tasks.

Session Topics:The Hawthorne EffectHow Agility and Metrics Feed Eac

By Neal Ford

Most developers think that "TDD" stands for Test-driven Development. But it really should stand for "Test-driven Design". Rigorously using TDD makes your code much better in multiple ways.

This session demonstrates how stringent TDD improves the structure of your code. I discuss TDD as a technique for vetting consumer calls, using mock objects to understand complex interactions between collaborators, and some discussions of improved code metrics yielded by TDD. This session shows that TDD is much more than testing: it fundamentally makes your code better at multiple levels.

By Neal Ford

Developers from the 1980s would be shocked at how inefficiently developers use their computers because of the advent of graphical operating systems. This talk describes how to reclaim productivity afforded by intelligent use of command lines and other ways of accelerating your interaction with the computer and bending computers to do your bidding. Stop working so hard for your computer!

In The Productive Programmer, I identify 4 principles of productivity: acceleration, focus, automation, and canonicality. This session defines the principles and describes their use, but the primary focus of this talk is on real-world examples of how you can use these principles to make yourself a more productive programmer. Acceleration covers ways to speed up development by taking command of your computer. This includes keyboard shortcuts (including ways to learn them and make better use of them) in both IntelliJ and Eclipse. Focus describes how you can utilize your environment (both physical and computer) to greatly enhance your productivity. Canonicality (the DRY principle from The Pragm

By Neal Ford

You can read books about Agile projects, but you must consult real-world experience to really understand the dynamics of agile project management. This session discusses agile management topics including estimation, project tracking, and useful metrics (and how to obtain them). And just a little about Mingle, the agile project tracking tool from ThoughtWorks.

OK, sure, you can read the XP Explained book. Now what? Agile project management in the real world requires understanding of not just the practices but why they work. This talk delves into several topics relevant to agile project management, including estimation, project tracking, accurate project metrics (and the practices that make them possible). This talk is designed to describe some of the nuances required to handle real agile projects, along with a demonstration of some of the artifacts ThoughtWorks uses to track projects (the most elaborate spreadsheet you've ever seen!). And, towards the end, I show how our experience has culminated into Mingle, the agile project tracking tool from T

By Neal Ford

This session describes JRuby, the 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. It covers the basics of programming with JRuby and examples of how to integrate it into existing Java projects.

Like hamburger & fries and turkey & dressing, JRuby allows you to harness the awesome power of Ruby in your Java projects. This session describes the origins, capabilities, and limitations of JRuby, the 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. This session also demonstrates some areas where it makes sense to mixin Ruby and Java code: Rails on Java, testing, and dynamic programming. JRuby is a powerful implementation of Polyglot Programming, and this session shows you how to leverage this cutting-edge concept.

Session Topics:JRuby's originsCalling Java from RubyCalling Ruby from JavaLimitations and pitfallsExample usageRails on JavaTestingDynamic programmingThe

By Neal Ford

Ruby is the revenge of the Smalltalkers. Not since Smalltalk has a language had such powerful meta-programming facilities. While this may seem like a minor feature, it turns out that surgical meta-programming allows solutions to problems that are clearer, more concise, more maintainable, and take orders of magnitudes fewer lines of code.

This session shows one of the reasons that JRuby is the most

powerful mainstream language today: meta-programming. It shows tons of

meta-programming techniques in Ruby, including open classes, the shadow

meta-class, defining methods, method_ & const_missing, dynamically

adding and removing mixins, and more. And each of these comes with an

example that actually makes sense!

Session TopicsModulesStructsFreezingMessages and Dynamic InvocationThe Shadow Meta-classCode as ObjectsDelegationOpen ClassesAspectsMissing! Const Method ReflectionMixology

By Ted Neward

Wondering why your enterprise Java app just... sucks? Trying to figure out why you can't get more than 10 concurrent users online at the same time? Looking for ways to try and spot the slowdowns and ways to fix them?

In this talk, we'll look at the various things that can occur in an enterprise Java app (from the smallest web site to the largest multi-resource environment) to make your Java apps perform and scale less well than they should, and how you can work to correct them. We'll examine a variety of broad concepts to apply in architecture and design, and examine what factors make an enterprise application slow, then use a variety of tools to figure out how to remedy them.

By Ted Neward

Permissions, policy, SecurityExceptions, oh my! The Java platform is a rich and powerful platform, complete with a rich and powerful security mechanism, but sometimes understanding it and how it works can be daunting and intimidating, and leave developers with the basic impression that it's mysterious and dark and incomprehensible. Nothing could be further from the truth, and in this presentation, we'll take a pragmatic, code-first look at the Java security platform, including Permissions, the SecurityManager and its successor, AccessController, the Policy class and policy file syntax, JAAS, and more.

For an intermediate-level audience.

By Ted Neward

If you've ever gotten a ClassCastException and just knew the runtime was wrong about it, or found yourself copying .jar files all over your production server just to get your code to run, then you probably find the Java ClassLoader mechanism to be deep, dark, mysterious, and incomprehensible. Take a deep breath, and relax--ClassLoaders aren't as bad as they seem at first, once you understand a few basic rules regarding their operation, and have a bit more tools in your belt to diagnose ClassLoader problems. And once you've got that, and hear about ClassLoaders' ability to run multiple versions of the same code at the same time, and to provide isolation barriers inside your application, or even compile code on the fly from source form, you might just find that you like ClassLoaders after all... maybe.

For a beginning to intermediate Java audience.

By Ted Neward

Want to get the soup-to-nuts story on Java annotations? In this presentation, we'll first talk about what annotations provide to the Java language. After setting ourselves a conceptual basis to operate from, we'll look at the language definition for Java annotations, from how to use them to how to define them. Finally, we'll take a look at the other side of annotations, consuming them at source-level (using "apt", the annotation processing tool), class-level (using a bytecode toolkit such as BCEL), and at runtime (using enhancements to the Reflection API made in Java5).

For an intermediate Java audience.

By Ted Neward

Ever since its 1.1 release, the Java Virtual Machine steadily becomes a more and more "hackable" (configurable, pluggable, customizable, choose your own adjective here) platform for Java developers, yet few, if any, Java developers take advantage of it. Time to take the kid gloves off, crack open the platform, and see what's there. Time to play.

In this presentation, we'll examine several of the "hackable" customization points inside the JVM: the boot classpath, allowing us to add or modify existing JDK classes without violating the license agreement; the JNI Invocation API, allowing us to create custom Java launchers to establish an environment for the JVM that corresponds to exactly the way we want it; or even replace core Java classes with our own versions. Innocents beware--we're a long way from "Hello, Java". (Attendees should have some familiarity with C/C++ code and native build practices to get the most out of this talk.)

By Mark Richards

Awareness about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has grown significantly in the past several years. Unfortunately, along with that growth has come a significant amount of confusion about what SOA really is. SOA has become such a ubiquitous buzzword that it now has many faces and means different things to different people. CIO's, managers, vendors, business users, architects, and developers all see SOA differently which creates a sea of confusion about what is and isn't SOA. In this highly interactive and thought provoking session we will look beyond the hype and marketure of SOA and explore SOA from an architecture and development point of view - in other words, SOA as an architecture pattern. During this session we will look at SOA use cases, services, integration, implementation, guiding architecture principles of SOA, and attempt to answer the following question: What is and isn't SOA?

Agenda

- SOA? Someone help me, please!

- What is and isn?t SOA?

- SOA Architecture Pattern Elements and Principles

- What All This About an ESB?

- SOA Challenges

- Post Discussion

- Summary

By Mark Richards

The chances are good that at some point in your career you will need to use messaging to pass information between applications, subsystems, or external systems, particularly with service-oriented architecture on the rise. The Java Messaging Service (JMS) allows Java applications to implement messaging using a standard API, thereby removing the dependency on any particular messaging provider. In Part 1 of this session we will take a look at some of the basics of messaging, including sending and receiving messages, message types, and request/reply messaging. I will begin the session by going over the basics of messaging and the JMS API. Then, through interactive coding using OpenJMS I will demonstrate how to connect to JMS providers, send messages, receive messages, and use message properties. Please note that this is a two part session.

Agenda:

JMS Basics

- Messaging Models Overview

- JMS Message Structure

- Primary JMS Interfaces

- JMS Providers

- Internal vs. External Destinations

Practical JMS

- Obtaining a JMS Connection

- Sending a Message to a Queue

- Receiving a Message from a Queue

- Using Message Properties

- Implementing Request/Reply Messaging

- Message Correlation

By Mark Richards

In Part 1 of the JMS session I covered messaging models, messaging basics, the JMS API, and point-to-point messaging. In this interactive code-intensive session I will cover some additional JMS topics such as browsing queues, load balancing, publishing and subscribing to messages within the pub/sub model, durable and non-durable subscribers, message selectors, and message filtering. I will also discuss and demonstrate message prioritization, persistent and non-persistent messages, and finally message expiration (expiry). Note that this is Part 2 of a two-part JMS session.

Agenda:

- Browsing Messages

- Load Balancing

- Publish and Subscribe Model

- Durable Subscribers

- Message Selectors and Filtering

- Persistent and Non-Persistent Messages

- Message Priority and Expiration (Expiry)

Prerequisite: Enterprise Messaging With JMS (Part 1) or some knowledge of JMS

By Mark Richards

EJB3 (JSR-220) offers some great improvements over the prior EJB specs in terms of development simplicity and new features. In this session we will explore in detail some of the new features of the core EJB 3 specification. Included in this session will be a hands-on discussion and demonstration of session beans, dependency injection, interceptors (aop), and Message-Driven Beans (MDB). For the interceptors discussion I will be showing how to define interceptors for enabling a method trace, mocking objects, and sending JMS message notifications to be later picked up by the MDBs I will be creating. During the session I will demonstrate the new features of EJB 3 through interactive coding examples. Note: this session does not cover the new Java Persistence API (JPA) - only the core specification.

Agenda

- Introduction

- Constructing and Accessing EJB 3 Session Beans

- Dependency Injection

- Interceptors (AOP)

- Method Trace

- Mock Objects

- Sending JMS Message Notifications

- Message-Driven Beans (MDB)

- Using XML over Annotations

- Summary and Discussion

By Mark Richards

Java Persistence has come along way since the days of straight JDBC coding and custom framework development. We have at our disposal several outstanding open source frameworks such as Hibernate, Toplink, iBatis, and OpenJPA (just to name a few), and we now have a promising and emerging standards-based solution called Java Persistence API (JPA). However, all to often we find in the Java persistence space that it is a world of one-size-does-not-fit-all. We continually struggle with traditional ORM solutions like Hibernate when it comes to reporting queries, complex queries, complex relationships, and stored procedures, and we also struggle with managing the enormous amount of SQL required for solutions such as iBATIS or JDBC-based frameworks. In this coding-intensive session we will take a detailed look at identifying and overcoming the challenges we face when using frameworks such as Hibernate, iBATIS, and JPA, and how to combine the various persistence frameworks to create an effective Java persistence solution that approaches (but of course does not reach) the silver bullet.

Agenda:

- Introduction

- Framework Differences

- Brief Overview of iBatis

- Brief Overview of JPA

- Aspect Analysis

- Inserts and Updates

- Reporting Queries

- Stored Procedures

- Complex SQL

- Debugging and Testing Techniques

- The Fast Lane Reader Pattern

- Combining ORM and SQL Mapping Frameworks

- Summary and Q&A

By Mark Richards

Most web-based applications rely solely on the database to manage transactions, thereby freeing the developer from having to worry about transaction management. While this works in some circumstances, there are times when the use of transactions is vital to the integrity and operations of an application and its corresponding data. In this session I will demonstrate through real-world coding examples why transactions are such a critical part of the application development process. I will review the basics of both programmatic and declarative transactions, then introduce three transaction design patterns and explain when they should be applied, how to use them, and what problems they solve. By the end of this session you will see that by using transaction design patterns you can build an effective transaction management strategy for your application with very little effort.

Agenda:

Why Transactions Are Necessary

Programmatic Transaction Management (EJB, Spring)

Declarative Transaction Management (EJB, Spring)

Transaction Design Patterns Overview

Client Owner Transaction Design Pattern

Domain Service Owner Transaction Design Pattern

Server Delegate Owner Transaction Design Pattern

Summary

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

By Brian Sletten

If you have started to take a look at REST as way of exposing web services or managing information spaces, you may be frustrated by the support offered by legacy containers. There is no direct support for REST concepts in the J2EE specs (yet). XML-based configurations are so 1990's. Come learn about Restlets, a little API that has caught the attention of many in the RESTafarian community.

The Restlet API was created by a guy who wanted object-level support for RESTful concepts, but didn't want to make the move to an advanced resource-oriented environment like NetKernel. He wanted his REST and conventional environments too. He also wanted a path to more modern containers that aren't tied to a blocking I/O model like the Servlet spec is.

This talk will include a brief review of REST and its primary concepts and will then provide an introduction to the Restlet API and how it supports these ideas. It will then focus on standing up a REST-oriented infrastructure using the Restlet API and a variety of other open source tools to support a publish/find/bind infrastructure without to

Prerequisite: REST (unless you are very comfortable with REST)

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 encompas

By Brian Sletten

You're a good Java programmer. You understand the JDK libraries and how to use them. The problem is that many fundamental APIs don't take the bigger performance picture in mind. Garbage collection can end up killing your app if you aren't careful. Concurrency problems and contention can keep your well-intentioned software from leveraging modern hardware architecture that support multi-core and multi-cpu systems.

Who knew that simply using the standard library code the way it was designed was opening you up for performance problems in your apps?

Don't worry, Javolution has your back.

Javolution is a small (300K) API designed to bring many of the benefits of the Real-Time Java Specification (RTJS) to J2SE, J2ME, GCJ and CLDC through deliberate design decisions.

It includes re-implementations of the java.util, java.lang, java.text, java.io and java.xml to demonstrate time-deterministic behavior. It also includes a framework for testing its own performance, supporting parallel computing, communicating with C/C++ applications and a real-time object to XML marshalling framework.

Come see how you can get some of the time-determinism and concurrency benefits in either your client or server side applications. This is a fairly deep talk and is largely a decomposition of an API

By Brian Sletten

How well do you understand the dynamics of your applications? In our systems, we detect when simple things happen. Customers log in, people buy things, a stock is sold at a particular price, inventory shifts locations... all of these events mean little things, but what about the larger picture? Complex events are particular patterns of simpler events that suggest something deeper is happening. Do you know how you'd discover these bigger picture occurrences? Come hear how the Esper open source software represents a new class of complex event processing (CEP) frameworks that can be added to even high volume, high transaction systems.

Trying to write software to track event occurrence is difficult to do correctly and almost impossible to do efficiently. The problem is that the higher volume and performance our systems get, the harder it becomes and the more important it is to highlight interesting or unexpected activity that isn't represented simply by a log entry.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Event Stream Processing (ESP) systems are emerging as a new strategy for processing and detecting complex sequences of more rudimentary events that could have bigger implications to your production systems. While commercial software is starting to add this behavior, Esper represents one of the most accessible and widely-used

By Venkat Subramaniam

A good design is critical for success with agile development. That does not mean a big up-front design. The design has to be evolutionary. However, the design you evolve must be extensible and maintainable. After all, you can't be agile if your design sucks.

In this presentation, we will address

what evolutionary design is, and will delve into principles

and practices that can help realize an effective evolutionary design.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Java has been around for well over a decade now. It started out with the goal of being simple. Over the years, its picked up quite a bit of features and along comes complexity. In this presentation we will take a look at some tricky features of Java, those that can trip you over, and also look at some ways to improve your Java code.

Java features

Set of tricks

Tips to improve your Java code

By Venkat Subramaniam

Begin agile is more than saying your organization is committed to being agile or your team is agile.

In this presentation we will delve into the details of what "Being Agile" really means, why you should

be agile, what are some of the fundamental practices?at team and organizational level?you need to consider

to be successful with agility.

By Venkat Subramaniam

TBD

TBD

By Venkat Subramaniam

We all have seen our share of bad code. We certainly have come across some good code as well. What are the characteristics of good code? How can we identify those? What practices can promote us to write and maintain more of those good quality code. This presentation will focus on this topic that has a major impact on our ability to be agile and succeed.

Characteristics of quality code

Metrics to measure quality

Ways to identify and build quality

By Venkat Subramaniam

Functional Programming Languages (FPLs) have been around for a long time. A lot of features that we get excited about in dynamic languages are common place in FPLs. FPLs are gaining importance due to various changes in our industry. What's exciting is that you can use them on the JVM. In this presentation we will dig into the details of what makes FPLs so interesting and look at ways to use them on the JVM?in your Java projects.

What's Functional Programming?

Why is Functional Programming suddenly important?

Features of Functional Programming

Functional Programming Languages

JVM and FPLs

Examples of Functional Programming features

Examples of mixing Java and FPLs

By David Bock

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

This talk will talk about everything from build processes, teamwork, and project structure through versioning, release plans, upgrde strategies, package dependencies, and more. Using real-world scenarios from two projects with 12-15 people working together over a 5-year time span, this presentation will offer advice based on multiple successful deliveries of real software.

By David Bock

Maven is a build tool that does a lot, demos well, and leaves the build maintainers managing what seems like unbridled complexity. It doesn't have to be that way - Maven is driven by some strong 'build process methodology', and that complexity can become manageable by wrapping your head around it. Furthermore, you can migrate to Maven 'piecemeal', by mapping your existing ant build to the Maven Lifecycle and calling your existing Ant tasks - you can decide to sip the Maven kool-aid.

Ideally, a build tool should be so simple and approachable that it fades into the project background and allows anyone to maintain it. Unfortunately, Maven's power comes at the expense of this ideal - Maven's philosophy is more like "the build process is so important that the people maintaining it should be steeped in the ways of Maven". This talk will give you the exposure you need without elevating The Maven Way to a religion.

In this talk we will cover:

Internals of the Maven POM

Integrating Maven with Eclipse

The Maven Build Lifecycle, and hooking your own goals into it

Calling Ant tasks from Maven

Extending your build with existing Maven Plugins

Maven subprojects and the SuperPOM

Writing your own Maven Plugins

By David Bock

Estimating is regarded as little little more than 'educating guessing', but so much can hang on the quality of those estimates. With good estimates we can set clear expectations for project delivery, but with bad estimates we can run over schedule and over budget, or worse. We often estimate when we know the least about the work that needs to get done - so how can we make the best of what is potentially a bad situation?

In this session we will look at how successful agile teams estimate the scope of work at the beginning of a project, estimate the amount of work that fits into any one iteration, track the work through the iteration, and the 'burn down' through the end of the project. We will look at 'low ceremony' estimation techniques like planning poker, trim down 'high ceremony' techniques like Wideband Delphi, and look at "FET+", an estimation technique originally developed as a foil for a CMMi effort.

With a little effort, a little planning, a little tracking, open communication, and some good metrics, estimation does not have to be a 'crystal ball' activity.

By David Bock

Most good developers eventually have the opportunity to be managers. Whether they call you the "project manager", "Technical Lead", "Lead Developer", or some other classic middle-management title, you become the 'goto' guy between management and developers. You're the guy who is expected to keep the project in-line, track a schedule, and occasionally answer the question "How's it going?", and perhaps still contribute at a technical level. So how do you do that?

So what do you do next? How do you plan what needs to be developed? How do you know if you are 'on schedule' or heading off-track? Using good ideas from a bunch of successful projects (but no methodology in particular), you will learn the basics of good project planning, execution, and tracking.

While this talk as management methodology agnostic, many of the ideas are tracable directly back to concepts from XP, SCRUM, and even RUP and CMMi. Whether you are following a management methodology or not, the ideas in this talk will be applicable to technical managers.

By David Geary

In April 2005, annual growth rates for jobs in JavaServer Faces, Struts, and Ruby on Rails were all at about 0%. Today, Struts' growth rate still hovers around 0%, but JSF and Rails have taken off. At the end of 2007, both JSF and Rails were growing at a rate of between 400-500% annually (according to indeed.com).

JSF has passed the adoption tipping point, and is now the Java-based framework of choice, as is evidenced by its ecosystem. From vendors such as MyEclipse and RedHat to open source projects such as Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4JSF, JSF is where the action is.

Come see why JSF is so popular. In this code- and demo-intensive session, I'll show you the fundamentals of JSF.

This session is taught by a member of the JSF Expert Group for JSF 1.0 and 2.0., and co-author of the best-selling book on JSF: Core JavaServer Faces. David will take you through a whirlwind introduction to JSF including what JSF is, how it was developed, and how you can best take advantage of the technology. Here is a list of topics:

Components, managed beans, value expressions, and static navigation

i18n, CSS, and actions

The Faces Context and Faces messages

The JSF Event Model

Using JavaScript with JSF

This introduction to JSF also contains 5 live-code demos, where David will develop a simple, but robust application during the course of the session.

Prerequisite: Some knowledge of Java-based web applications, such as Struts, is a plus, but is not required. If you have a significant experience with JSF, you probably already know most of what's covered in this session.

By David Geary

Facelets is a combination of Tiles and Tapestry, and it's the hottest JSF-related open source project on the planet. It's popularity is well deserved, and in fact, much of what is in Facelets today will make its way into the JSF 2.0 spec due out in 2008. So not only can you come to this session and see some really cool demos that you can put to use in the real world, but you'll also be learning JSF 2.0 before it's even been defined! How's that for a ROI?

This session is 90 minutes of nothing-but-Facelets, so we're going to cover a good bit of ground. You'll see all of the basics, such as templating, error handling and debugging, and some of the more advanced aspects, such as creating your own components and tag libraries.

Prerequisite: Some knowledge of JSF is essential. If you're familiar with a templating framework, such as Velocity or Tiles, that's a plus, but not required.

By David Geary

Ajax4jsf makes it very easy to add Ajax to your JSF applications. Come to this presentation to see how.

The JSF spec has changed little since JSF debuted in 2004. However, the open source community is a frentic cauldron of activity that has produced lots of cool innovations, many of them related to Ajax. In this talk, we'll look at one of the most popular open source Ajax frameworks for JSF, Ajax4jsf.

Ajax4jsf gives you a very capable set of low-level Ajax tags (JSP or Facelets), along with their corresponding APIs, that let you easily incorporate Ajax features, most of the time by just using a custom tag or two. Ajax4jsf is an ideal solution if you want to add Ajax functionality to an existing JSF application.

In early 2008, the JSF Expert Group has begun to focus it's attention on incorpor

By David Geary

Have you ever stopped to think that you need to learn two frameworks to develop a non-trivial, database-backed, web application? Struts and iBatis; JSF and Hibernate; Tapestry and EJB3.0.

Two frameworks. And then you have to learn to use them together. Why do we have to learn two frameworks just to retrieve "Hello World" from a database and show it in a view. Isn't that crazy?

Now you can use one framework, and use one component model. One. Isn't that nice?

By David Geary

The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is truly a revolutionary framework that lets you develop Ajaxified web applications without knowing anything about Ajax or JavaScript. But the GWT goes way beyond basic Ajax by letting you implement desktop-like applications that run in the ubiquitous browser.

In this, the first of a two-part session on the GWT, you will learn about the framework and its fundamental capabilities, such as: rapid development with project and application generators; the GWT widget hierarchy; remote procedure calls; the GWT's history mechanism, including its integration with the Back button and bookmarks; and integrating JavaScript frameworks, such as Script.aculo.us, with your GWT applications.

By David Geary

In the second part of this talk, you will learn how to extend the GWT by implementing custom widgets, including a scrolling viewport and a drag and drop framework. After discussing custom widgets, you will see how to integrate database access into your GWT applications, and how to deploy your GWT applications to external servers.

You will also learn how to integrate GWT widgets into legacy applications built with web application frameworks such as Struts, JavaServer Faces, or Tapestry. The GWT is one of the most powerful Ajax frameworks on the planet, and one of the few that let you easily implement desktop-like applications that run in a browser, and because of that, it has gained incredible mindshare in a short period of time. Come to these two sessions on the GWT and see what all the buzz is all about.

By Brian Goetz

To many developers, garbage collection is black magic. Accordingly, there are is a lot of conflicting advice about what is good or bad for the garbage collector. In this talk, I look at how garbage collection is implemented in the HotSpot VM, and techniques for writing programs that exhibit good garbage collection behavior. Surprisingly, many of these techniques coincide with writing good, clean code.

This presentation covers:

- Basics of garbage collection in HotSpot

- Where the performance costs are in garbage-collected systems

- Coding techniques for reducing GC costs

- Finalization

- Techniques for tracking down "memory leaks"

By Brian Goetz

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.

Java was the first mainstream programming language to incorporate a formal, cross-platform memory model, which is what enabled the development of write-once, run-anywhere concurrent classes. It is the Java Memory model that defines the semantics of synchronized, volatile, and final.

However, because the most commonly used processors (Intel and Sparc) offer stronger memory models than is required by the JMM, many developers frequently use synchronization and volatile incorrectly, but have been insulated from failure by the stronger memory guarantees offered by the processor architecture they happen to be deploying on. (The infamous "double checked locking" idiom is an example of this sor

By Brian Goetz

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.

The cost of finding a bug increases dramatically the longer it lurks without being discovered. Fortunately, today?s development tools (IDEs and compilers) can identify many potential bugs within a few seconds of their creation, resulting in higher quality code and more productive programmers. However, even the best programmers can create bugs that are very hard to spot if they make it through their first few minutes of their existence.

Until recently, automated code analyzers have not been very useful for mainstream developers. Most code analysis packages focused either on stylistic issues (such as indenting and variable naming), or on formal correctness proofs (which require an investme

By Brian Goetz

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.

Prior to the release of JDK 5.0, the Java platform provided basic primitives for writing concurrent programs, but they were just that -- primitive -- and difficult to use properly. Building multithreaded applications on the Java platform's low-level concurrency primitives posed many traps for the unwary, and many developers were forced to reinvent the wheel by writing their own classes for thread pools, semaphores, and task schedulers.

To help users create robust, scalable, and (most importantly) correct multithreaded applications, JDK 5.0 includes a rich set of high-level concurrency constructs, such as thread pools, semaphores, mutexes, barriers, and high-performance concurrent collectio

By Brian Goetz

The Java programming language has turned a generation of applications programmers into concurrent programmers through its direct support of multithreading. However, the Java concurrency primitives are just that: primitive. From them you can build many concurrency utilities, but doing so takes great care as concurrent programming poses many traps for the unwary.

Based on the principles in the best-selling Java Concurrency in Practice, this talk focuses on design techniques that help you create correct and maintainable concurrent code.

Presented in the style of Effective Java, this talk offers bite-sized items for effectively writing concurrent code, divided into three categories: writing thread-safe code, structuring concurrent applications, and improving scalability.

Writing thread-safe code:

- Encapsulate your data

- Encapsulate any needed synchronization

- Document thread-safety intent and implementation

- Prefer immutable objects

- Exploit effective immutability

Rules for structuring concurrent applications

- Think tasks, not t

By Jared Richardson

Software projects fail over and over for many of the same reasons. We'll look at some of the more avoidable problems and some solid ways to fix them, or avoid them in the first place.

We'll talk about discovering what went wrong (and what went right!) with your last project, solving code integration issues, resolving lingering quality problems, establishing automated test suites, reining in soaring project requirements and more.

By Jared Richardson

There are a number of great techniques you can use across technologies and projects. Come hear some of my favorite ways to move "beyond" and contribute a few of your own. We'll discuss topics ranging from glue languages to ditching your IDE to building your brain.

In this session we'll discuss:

- Move beyond tools

- Glue languages

- Inbox Zero

- Learning to learn

- Not being a cog anymore

- Macro Object Orientation

- Clean code

- Looking smarter than you are

- Open source tool stacks

- Tighter feedback loops

- Scripted deployments

- Scripting databases

- Virutalization

And more...

By Jared Richardson

Technical debt has long been recognized in technical circles for years, but convincing your manager to budget time to repay "technical debt" has always been problematic. Let's couch the term technical debt concept in language more familiar to our managers: credit card debt.

Like credit card debt, technical debt accumulates slowly over time, and usually takes just as long to pay off. The interest slowly builds up until you're no longer able to pay off the principle: your entire development cycle is devoted to just "paying the interest". We'll examine common types of technical debt and strategies to effectively communicating the problems, and their solutions, to your managers.

By Jared Richardson

Has your career been a random product of your manager's whims or company's needs? Never rely on your company to keep your skills current and marketable. Take control of your own career with a proven strategy.

These are solid, repeatable steps to get your career in the trajectory you want. The first step is deciding where you want to go. We'll walk through creating a long-term plan, then break it down into manageable steps. Learn to lead within your own company, then stretch out to your local, regional and national community, building your reputation as you go. From coding to writing to speaking, each step will move you closer to where you want to be: in a position of having options and in control of your career.

By Jared Richardson

An agile team is first and foremost "a team". When that gets lost in the rush to get a product out the door, the people suffer as well as the products. It's bad for the company, but even worse for the team members. We'll learn how to defuse some of the more common problems you'll run into on dysfunctional teams.

Restoring trust and providing visibility is hard once you've been burned. It's not always possible, but we'll examine concrete steps you can take to start rebuilding your trust and your team.

By Jared Richardson

A great team builds great software, but how do you build a great team?

Let's move beyond getting lucky and look at some key practices that will help you build your scattered cats into a well-oiled machine.