Andrew Glover

By Andrew Glover

This session will walk attendees through a series of iterations on a fictional Java project where an automated build system is created that facilitates compilation, testing, inspection, and deployment. This build system is then plugged into the Hudson CI server and as features are coded using Agile techniques like developer testing, attendees will ultimately see firsthand how a Continuous Integration process reduces risk and improves software quality.

The practice of Continuous Integration facilitates early visibility into the development process by regularly conducting software builds, thus integrating disparate software pieces earlier than later, which often times minimizes the interval between when a defect is coded and when it is discovered. Often times though, Continuous Integration is thought of as a tool, which leads to a false sense of ease when it comes to adopting a Continuous Integration process.

This session will walk attendees through a series of iterations on a fictional Java project where an automated build system is created that facilitates compilation, testing, inspection, and deployment. This build system is then plugged into the Hudson CI server and as features are coded using Agile techniques like developer testing, attendees will ultimately see first hand how a Continuous Integration process reduces risk and improves software quality.

By Andrew Glover

Amazon's S3 and EC2 offerings are publicly available services that enable you to run virtual machines and store (and retrieve) digital assets (i.e. images, music, documents, etc). In this session, we'll cover the ins and outs of S3 & EC2 and see first hand how to leverage them for various purposes -- either personal or in the enterprise.

Amazon's EC2 offering is less of a development platform per se and more of a generic infrastructure service that hosts virtual machines (which can be Linux or Windows based) on which you can run anything you'd like. EC2 isn't free, but it's a lot more flexible than Google App Engine. You can run any Java application (including one that uses Hibernate, for example) provided you can create or borrow a virtual machine. As with Google App Engine, with EC2 the notion of where an application is deployed and how it will scale is largely in Amazon's control, so scaling it to a global audience is quite efficient.

Amazon's S3 offering (which stands for Simple Storage Service) is a publicly available service that enables you to store (and retrieve) digital assets (i.e. images, music, documents, etc). From an end users perspective, S3 is essentially a storage area network (or SAN), the reality, however, is that Amazon is the cloud, in which there are a number of machines (spread across a geographic area) all containing a particular digital asset (or piece of it, perhaps!). The complexity of fulfilling a service request to store your asset and indeed to retrieve it is all handled by Amazon as well. What's more, Amazon hides this complexity behind an intuitive RESTful API, which means your can programmatically access your assets from any platform or language!

In this session, we'll cover the ins and outs of S3 and see first hand how to leverage it for various purposes -- either personal or in the enterprise. What's more, Amazon's S3 forms the backbone for a number of other cloud services; consequently, a firm handle of S3 will undoubtedly come in handy as you pursue other cloud offerings from Amazon's EC2 to Google's AppEngine.

By Andrew Glover

Representational state transfer (REST) is a way of thinking, not a protocol or standard-- it's a style of designing loosely coupled applications that rely on named resources (in the form of URLs, URIs and URNs, for instance) rather than messages. Ingeniously, REST piggybacks on the already validated and successful infrastructure of the Web-- HTTP. That is, REST leverages aspects of the HTTP protocol such as GET and POST requests, which map quite nicely to standard business-application needs such as create read, update, and delete (CRUD). By associating requests, which act like verbs, with resources, which act like nouns, you end up with a logical expression of behavior: GET this document and DELETE that record, for example.

To quote Leonardo da Vinci, "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." REST embodies this thought and thus yields highly scalable, loosely coupled systems that, as it turns out, are simple to build. There are a few mechanisms for implementing RESTful applications-- Restlets and JSR 311 are two in a handful of options; however, they address one aspect of RESTful applications and ignore other aspects like an ORM and testing. Groovy's Grails gives you the ability to apply RESTful techniques with a full fledged web application framework that supports an ORM and testing to boot! As you see, using Groovy's Grails framework makes building RESTful Web services a snap.

By Andrew Glover

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development essentially focuses on meeting customer needs through reducing wasteful activities. For example, Agile developmental practices push for reducing repetitive documentation and for a rapid acceptance of change; yet, achieving these goals is by no means easy. While a process can enable increased collaboration, for instance, there are various tools that can effectively implement Agile principles. Once such tool is easyb (www.easyb.org), which is a Groovy based domain specific language, which facilitates collaboration by bridging those that define requirements (i.e. customers) and those who turn requirements into code (i.e. development). With easyb, collaborative teams can develop stories in a specific format which are then implemented as tests through a framework which marries the underlying application. This test suite enables change and produces accordance among Agile teams in short order.

In this talk, you will learn how to embrace collaboration and change rapidly by defining easyb stories that exercise a Java application end to end. You will learn how to define specific easyb structures, how to plug them into real code, and how to run them in an automated fashion. You will see first hand how non-coders can define tests easily and how the collaboration this brings yields working software faster.

By Andrew Glover

Open source solutions combined with borrowed infrastructures are changing the character of Java development, letting teams deliver better software quickly and at a low cost. If you find yourself budgeting for an IT project, you owe it yourself (and your company's wallet) to see if renting some space from a Google or Amazon is cheaper than acquiring the hardware yourself.

Several years ago, a few smart companies took advantage of the commoditization of hardware (and related software) by building systems made up of a lot of cheap machines, knowing that the entire infrastructure would continue to work even if individual machines broke at some point. Those smart companies -- like Google and Amazon (to name a few) -- have enormous infrastructures that they can literally rent out to people like you and me (and keep their core business running smoothly at the same time). Consequently, the notion of cloud computing is a reality these days. If you find yourself budgeting for an IT project, you owe it yourself (and your company's wallet) to see if renting some space from a Google or Amazon is cheaper than acquiring the hardware yourself.

Google's and Amazon's borrowed infrastructures, however, differ distinctly. Google's App Engine is more of a platform for developing Java Web applications. You can't use everything available to the Java universe, such as Hibernate. Instead, you are constrained somewhat to using Google's Big Table, for instance. However, in return you get a free hosted solution that scales to your heart's desire.

Amazon's EC2 offering is less of a development platform per se and more of a generic infrastructure service that hosts virtual machines (which can be Linux or Windows based) on which you can run anything you'd like. EC2 isn't free, but it's a lot more flexible than Google App Engine. You can run any Java application (including one that uses Hibernate, for example) provided you can create or borrow a virtual machine. As with Google App Engine, with EC2 the notion of where an application is deployed and how it will scale is largely in Amazon's control, so scaling it to a global audience is quite efficient.

By Andrew Glover

TBA

TBA