Pacific Northwest Software Symposium

September 23 - 25, 2011 - Seattle, WA


Westin Bellevue
600 Bellevue Way NE
Bellevue, WA   98004
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NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in SeattleSeptember 6 - 8, 2013.
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NoSQL Smackdown!

Friday 1:15 PM - Tim Berglund

You've read that the relational model is old and busted, and there are newer, faster, web-scale ways to store your application's data. You've heard that NoSQL databases are the future! Well, what is all this NoSQL stuff about? Is it time to ditch Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server in favor of the new guard? To be able to make that call, there's a lot you'll have to learn.

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Economic Games in Software Projects

Friday 1:15 PM - Matthew McCullough

The full title of this talk reveals its grand aims: Game Theory and Software Development: Explaining Brinksmanship, Irrationality, and Other Selfish Sins

Once in a while, a topic, seemingly orthogonal to software development, presents a great opportunity to showcase how engineering can benefit from knowledge of seemingly more social disciplines. In this talk, the fundamental principles of economics' Game Theory are compared to often inexplicable behaviors and decisions we frequently observe in programming projects.

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Concurrency without pain in pure Java

Friday 1:15 PM - Venkat Subramaniam

Programming concurrency has turned into a herculean task. I call the traditional approach as the synchronized and suffer model. Fortunately, there are other approaches to concurrency and you can reach out to those directly from your Java code.

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Getting Agile Right!

Friday 1:15 PM - 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.

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4 Practical Uses for Domain Specific Languages

Friday 1:15 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.

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Cascading through Hadoop: A DSL for Simpler MapReduce

Friday 3:15 PM - Matthew McCullough

Hadoop is a MapReduce framework that has literally sprung into the vernacular of "big data" developers everywhere. But coding to the raw Hadoop APIs can be a real chore. Data analysts can express what they want in more English-like vocabularies, but it seems the Hadoop APIs require us to be the translator to a less comprehensible functional and data-centric DSL.

The Cascading framework gives developers a convenient higher level abstraction for querying and scheduling complex jobs on a Hadoop cluster. Programmers can think more holistically about the questions being asked of the data and the flow that such data will take without concern for the minutia.

We'll explore how to set up, code to, and leverage the Cascading API on top of a Hadoop sample or production cluster for a more effective way to code MapReduce applications all while being able to think in a more natural (less than fully MapReduce) way.

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Collections for Concurrency

Friday 3:15 PM - Venkat Subramaniam

Traditional collections on the Java platform focused on providing thread-safety at the expense of performance or scalability. More modern data structures strive to provide performance without compromising thread-safety. Some of them require you to adopt to a different semantics or programming model. In this presentation we will explore some data structures that can help reach both thread-safety and reasonable performance.

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Programming HTML5

Friday 3:15 PM - Tim Berglund

HTML5 wants to make some major changes to the way we deliver media over the web and the way we mark up our pages, but it also gives us a bunch of new stuff in the browser's programming model. To ignore these new JavaScript APIs is to give up on a richer browser UI and a lot of fun.

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Agile Engineering Practices

Friday 3:15 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.

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Enterprise Security API library from OWASP

Friday 3:15 PM - 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.

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Cassandra: Radical NoSQL Scalability

Friday 5:00 PM - Tim Berglund

Want to go deep on a popular NoSQL database? Cassandra is a scalable, highly available, column-oriented data store in use at Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, Rackspace, and other web-scale operations. It offers a compelling combination of a rich data model, a robust deployment track record, and a sound architecture, making it a good choice of NoSQL databases to study first.

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Rediscovering JavaScript

Friday 5:00 PM - Venkat Subramaniam

JavaScript is one of those very powerful languages that is often misunderstood and underutilized. It's quite popular, yet there's so much more we can do with it.

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Keynote: Abstraction Distractions

Friday 7:15 PM - Neal Ford

Computer science is built on a shaky tower of abstractions, but we've been distracted by other things until we believe it is reality.

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Cryptography on the JVM: Boot Camp

Saturday 9:00 AM - Matthew McCullough

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.

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Functional Thinking

Saturday 9:00 AM - Neal Ford

Learning the syntax of a new language is easy, but learning to think under a different paradigm is hard.

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Automated testing tools and techniques for JavaScript

Saturday 9:00 AM - Venkat Subramaniam

Programmers often complain that it is hard to automate unit and acceptance tests for JavaScript. Testability is a design issue and with some discipline and careful design we can realize good automated tests.

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Simpler Cryptography with 3 JVM Libraries

Saturday 11:00 AM - Matthew McCullough

Cryptography at first seems like a daunting topic. But after a basic intro and the leverage of the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE), it seems downright feasible to add encryption and decryption capabilities to your application.

Developers weren't satisfied with just the JCE and its plug-in concepts though. Over the last few years, framework architects have made strides in either wrapping or re-writing the approachable JCE in more convenient APIs and fluent interfaces that make effective and accurate crypto down right simple.

Explore three of these libraries -- Jasypt, BouncyCastle and KeyCzar -- and how they can be leveraged to make your next Java cryptography and data security effort a simple exercise and not a tribulation.

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Scala for the Intrigued

Saturday 11:00 AM - Venkat Subramaniam

Scala is a statically typed, fully OO, hybrid functional language that provides highly expressive syntax on the JVM. It is great for pattern matching, concurrency, and simply writing concise code for everyday tasks. If you're a Java programmer intrigued by this language and are interested in exploring further, this section is for you.

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Continuous Delivery Best Practices

Saturday 11:00 AM - Ken Sipe

There is a new “movement” in software development circles called DevOps. It is about the automation of development best practices as well as the automation of the deployment pipeline. Answer this question, “How long does it take your organization or team to push 1 line code of change into production?” That’s what this session is all about.

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Git Going with Distributed Version Control

Saturday 1:30 PM - Matthew McCullough

Many development shops have made the leap from RCS, Perforce, ClearCase, PVCS, CVS, BitKeeper or SourceSafe to the modern Subversion (SVN) version control system. But why not take the next massive stride in productivity and get on board with Git, a distributed version control system (DVCS). Jump ahead of the masses staying on Subversion, and increase your team's productivity, debugging effectiveness, flexibility in cutting releases, and repository redundancy at $0 cost. Understand how distributed version control systems are game-changers and pick up the lingo that will become standard in the next few years.

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The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Akka

Saturday 1:30 PM - Ted Neward

With the rise of multi-core processors, and their growing ubiquity (on client machines, to say nothing of the server machines on which Java applications most frequently execute), the need to "program concurrently" has risen from "nice-to-have" to "mandatory" requirement, and unfortunately the traditional threading-and-locking model is just too complicated for most Java developers--even the brightest of the lot--to keep track of with any degree of reliability. As a result, numerous new solutions are emerging, each of them with their own strengths and weaknesses, leaving the Java developer in a bit of a quandary as to which to examine.

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Gradle Jumpstart (Bring a Laptop)

Saturday 1:30 PM - Tim Berglund

Gradle is a compelling new build tool that incorporates the lessons learned from a decade of Ant and Maven. More than just a compromise between declarative and imperative build formats, or between convention and configuration, Gradle is a sophisticated software development platform that simple builds easy and complex, highly automated continuous software delivery pipelines possible to build. Using its extensible APIs and expressive DSL, you're equipped to build your next build.

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Git Workshop (Bring A Laptop)

Saturday 3:15 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.

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Busy Java Developer's Guide to Android: Basics

Saturday 3:15 PM - Ted Neward

Android is a new mobile development platform, based on the Java language and tool set, designed to allow developers to get up to speed writing mobile code on any of a number of handsets quickly. In this presentation, we'll go over the basic setup of the Android toolchain, how to deploy to a device, and basic constructs in the Android world.

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HTML 5 Overview

Saturday 3:15 PM - Brian Sletten

People are confused about the status of HTML 5. Is it ready? Is it not? What is part of the spec and what isn't? We'll talk about the situation in the "HTML 5 and the Kitchen Sink" discussion, but as always, the proof is in the pudding. We will introduce the most exciting new features of HTML 5 and its related technologies and build examples that use them.

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Build Your Own Technology Radar

Saturday 3:15 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.

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What's new in Spring

Sunday 9:00 AM - Craig Walls

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.

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Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST I

Sunday 9:00 AM - 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.

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jQuery: Ajax Made Easy

Sunday 9:00 AM - Nathaniel Schutta

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.

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Busy Java Developer's Guide to Java 7

Sunday 9:00 AM - Ted Neward

With the forthcoming release of Java7, a number of things come to fruition, both in the Java language and in the libraries, and it's important for Java developers to know what those features are, and how they change the game of writing Java code--or not.

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

Sunday 11:00 AM - Craig Walls

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.

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Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST II

Sunday 11:00 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.

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Going Mobile with jQuery

Sunday 11:00 AM - Nathaniel Schutta

The word just came down from the VP - you need a mobile app and you need it yesterday. It needs to be polished and have that design stuff too. Oh and it needs to be on all the major platforms in time for the big marketing push next month. After a moment of panic, you wonder if it's too late to become a plumber but don't worry, there's hope! More and more developers are falling in love with the "write less do more" library and for good reason; it simplifies the job of today's front end engineer. But did you know jQuery could also help you with your mobile needs as well? That's right, jQuery Mobile is a touch optimized framework designed to provide a common look and feel across a wide variety of today's mot popular platforms. In this session, we'll take a look at all that jQuery Mobile has to offer and we'll convert a native application to an HTML5, jQuery Mobile masterpiece.

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Requirements and Estimating - state of the art

Sunday 11:00 AM - Peter Bell

A chance for experience agile developers to learn and share state of the art tips for improving requirements gathering and project estimation.

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Busy Java Developer's Guide to Guava

Sunday 11:00 AM - Ted Neward

"The Google Guava project contains a host of new features/classes for use by the Java programmer. Intended as a drop-in supplement for the standard JDK APIs, Guava provides features like immutable and forwarding collections, some concurrency utilities, more support for primitives, and so on.

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Resource-Oriented Architectures : RDF/SPARQL

Sunday 2:15 PM - Brian Sletten

The fourth of 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.

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Usability 101

Sunday 2:15 PM - Nathaniel Schutta

Day in and day out we are subjected to poorly designed applications. From those we experience directly to the time we waste waiting on others who are struggling with systems that seem like they were built to hinder the user. It doesn't have to be like this and many users are waking up and demanding better applications. Are you prepared to deliver? After this workshop, you will be. When you're done, you'll have the tools you need to make sure your application helps your users kick ass!

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Pragmatic Architecture

Sunday 2:15 PM - Ted Neward

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.

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Essential Complexity: Developing and maintaining complex software

Sunday 2:15 PM - Peter Bell

Some apps are little more than CRUD. The interesting projects are those with essential complexity in the domain. In this presentation we'll show how ideas from Domain Driven Design, Domain Specific Modeling and Domain Specific Languages can be used to more effectively design, refine and maintain the code at the heart of complex applications.

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Securing Spring

Sunday 2:15 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.

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Resource-Oriented Architectures : RDFa

Sunday 4:00 PM - Brian Sletten

The fifth 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.

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How to Select and Adopt a Technology

Sunday 4:00 PM - Peter Bell

What's the point attending a conference unless you do something with the knowledge you gain? In this session we look at practical strategies for selecting new technologies and proven approaches for driving adoption back at the office.

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Architectural Kata Workshop

Sunday 4:00 PM - Ted Neward

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.

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HTML5 For Developers

Sunday 4:00 PM - Nathaniel Schutta

Wonder what all the fuss is about HTML5? This session will show you how to leverage HTML5 in the applications you are building today. We'll start with a gentle overview describing just what HTML5 is all about and then we'll delve into the details. We'll look at the new elements HTML5 brings to the table, why canvas isn't just something you find in the art department, how geolocation can find Waldo and much much more.

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Developing Social-Ready Web Applications

Sunday 4:00 PM - Craig Walls

Businesses are increasingly recognizing the value of connecting with their customers on a more personal level. Companies can utilize social networking to transition from "Big Faceless Corporation" to "Friend" by taking their wares to the online communities where their customers are. In this age of social media, those communities are found at social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In this session, you'll learn how to build applications that interact with the various social networks. We'll also look at Spring Social, a new feature in the Spring portfolio that enables integration with social networks in Spring-based applications.

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