Gateway Software Symposium

March 16 - 18, 2007



Event Details

Location

St. Louis Marriott West
660 Maryville Centre Drive
St. Louis, MO 63141
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Session Descriptions

Scott Davis - Author of "Groovy Recipes" & TDD Expert

Scott Davis

Groovy and Java: The Integration Story

I'm attracted to Groovy because of its spirit of inclusiveness. Because it extends my platform of choice, not replaces it -- include a single JAR in your classpath and you are Groovy-enabled. Because it offers full bidirectional integration with Java. Because it offers a nearly flat learning curve for experienced Java developers. Come see how you can use Groovy to augment your existing Java codebase.

Groovy: The Next Generation of Java

This is the year of the dynamic scripting language. Ruby (and Rails) has won the hearts and minds of many independent software developers. JavaScript is experiencing a renaissance thanks to the wild success of AJAX and websites like Google Maps. And Groovy (JSR-241) brings the same level of excitement and "scripting goodness" to the Java platform.


KEYNOTE: No, I Won't Tell You Which Web Framework to Use: or The Truth (with Jokes)

"Which framework should I use?" is the question most often heard on the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour. It's well worth asking. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. After years on the tour, most speakers have crafted a response that would make any Washington politician proud -- long on style, but essentially, "Well, it depends..."

Mocking Web Services

In this talk, we'll survey the web services exposed by leading websites (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay) and discuss how they can be easily mocked up for testing purposes and to aid offline development. You'll see working examples of RESTful, SOAP, and JSON web services, as well as strategies for unit and functional testing your asynchronous, service-oriented architecture.

Real World Grails

Scott Davis is the Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com. The website, in addition to being, umm, about Groovy, is implemented in Grails. This talk shows you how to get started with Grails, but also talks about the experience of using it in a live, production web site.

The Zen of REST

Google quietly deprecated their SOAP search API at the end of 2006. While this doesn't mean that you should abandon SOAP, it does reflect a growing trend towards simpler dialects of web services. Google joins a number of popular websites (Yahoo, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us) that offer all of the benefits of web services without all of the complexity of SOAP.

Stuart Halloway - CEO of Relevance

Stuart Halloway

JRuby

JRuby is not one, but two great technologies: the Ruby language, and the Java Virtual Machine and libraries. In this talk you will learn the basics of programming JRuby, and how to integrate JRuby code into existing Java projects.

Programming Java Concurrency

Java has always provided a model for concurrency and threads. With Java 1.5, this model received a major facelift. Learn how to use the new concurrency utilities to build responsive, scalable, and correct concurrent applications.

Prototype: Ajax and JavaScript++

Learn to simplify Ajax development with Prototype through a series of real-world examples. Along the way, learn to code in Prototype's modern JavaScript style, taking advantage of Prototype's extensions to JavaScript's object model

Streamlined

Streamlined is a framework for automating user interfaces in Rails. Where ActiveRecord makes the "M" in MVC simple and declarative, Streamlined does the same thing for the "V" and the "C."

Brian Pontarelli - Brian Pontarelli - founder of Inversoft

Brian Pontarelli

Bullet Proof Builds

Learn how to create software builds that will stand the test of time and make the world a better place - okay perhaps just your development environment a better place. Builds are usually the tedious work that we all leave to the last minute or sometimes throw together as we build an application. But in most applications, builds contain complex logic and many dependencies, just as the application does. This presentation covers how to make a manageable and enjoyable build system using Apache Ant and a new Ant framework that is part of the JCatapult platform called JCatapult-Ant.

Java NIO

The Java NIO packages that were added in JDK 1.4 and these packages allow Java applications to perform true non-blocking IO operations. This presentation will cover the basics of the standard IO packages, which date back to the beginning of Java, and some of the shortcomings they have. This will be followed by coverage of the newer NIO packages and how they address these issues.

SOA Topologies

This talk will cover many of the different types of SOA topologies from EJBs and WebServices all the way to message queues and tuple spaces. SOA has many different meanings but it never dictates a single implementation and this talk covers many of the most common implementations of a service oriented architecture.

Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Consultant

Brian Sletten

Abusing Maven For Fun and Profit : (Near) Zero-Admin Deployments

Ok, I can't promise you profit, but hopefully you'll have fun. Maven 2 introduces a number of new features (including that performance feature) that make it a swell project management tool for development.

Come hear about how we can abuse Maven to manage distributed deployment scenarios before the Modules JSR is done.

Applied AOP

Most people new to Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) are fed up with separation of concerns zealots explaining how great their techniques are at dealing with... logging. Ok, you get it. Logging is a cross-cutting concern that can be appropriately modularized. What else does AOP have to offer? A lot, it turns out. This talk will give an introduction to the motivations of AOP as well as a series of concrete examples drawn from enterprise and client side Java. Come learn how AspectJ-flavored AOP can begin to benefit you immediately either in development or production environments. Learn how to enforce architectural policies, find Swing threading issues, reduce the invasiveness of the Observer design pattern or even improve the reusability of your domain models. Now that Spring 2.0 provides support for AspectJ, the time has never been better to learn about these new (but backwards compatible) ways of thinking about building software.

Give it a REST

As developers, we sometimes get to make choices about the technologies we use, sometimes not. We base these decisions on personal experiences, recommendations from others and a general sense of where the industry is going.

Web Services have been all the rage for several years now. We have been told time and again that we should be building systems around them; as an industry, we've never been more confused. Perhaps it is time to Give it a REST.

Resource-Oriented Computing w/ NetKernel : Software for the 21st Century

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.

David Geary - Author of Graphic Java and co-author of Core JSF

David Geary

Ajaxian Faces

JavaServer Faces is a perfect platform for implementing Web 2.0 interfaces with Ajax. This session explores how you can use these two potent technologies--JSF and Ajax--together to create applications that look and behave like desktop applications but run in the browser.

JavaServer Faces: A Whirlwind Tour

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.

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.


Killer JavaScript Frameworks: Prototype, Scriptaculous, and Rico

An introduction to the popular Prototype JavaScript framework, and two frameworks built on top of Prototype: Scriptaculous and Rico.

RAD JSF with Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4jsf, Part One

In this session, see how you can get Ruby On Rails-like productivity on the Java side of the house with this compelling combination of technologies.

RAD JSF with Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4jsf, Part Two

A continuation of a 2-session presentation on Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4jsf.

The Google Web Toolkit, Part One

Developing highly interactive web applications, for the most part requires knowledge of a wide array of technologies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest, JSP, JSF, etc.

With the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Google turns that notion of development on its head. Instead, you implement Ajax applications by writing almost entirely in Java. You use an AWT-like API, which the Google compiler compiles to JavaScript that runs on the client.

The Google Web Toolkit, Part Two

The second part of a 2-session presentation on the Google Web Toolkit.

Jared Richardson - Agile coach and co-author of Ship It

Jared Richardson

Agile Software Testing Strategies

Creating and maintaining a solid automated test suite is critical to an Agile strategy, but often we're just told to "Do it." In this talk we'll look at several pragmatic strategies for creating and building your suite.

Build Teams, Not Products

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

Gradual Agile: The Secret to Introducing Agile Practices

Agile practices are popular because they work, but getting people to take that first step can be tricky.

Shippers Unite!

An overview of the Agile software approach from the book Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects.

Jason Hunter - Author of Java Servlet Programming

Jason Hunter

Forgotten Web Algorithms

In this talk I'll explain -- without any needless math or boring proofs -- several fun algorithms of interest to back-end web programmers. Each algorithm was selected because it's really practical, really interesting, or both. The algorithms aren't always the same but can include: public key cryptography, credit card checksum validation, TCP Slow Start, two's complement, priority queues, the XOR swap, and the Google MapReduce function for massively distributed calculation.

New Features in Java 5

The new Java 5 release introduces a number of significant Java language enhancements: generics, typesafe enums, autoboxing, an enhanced "for" loop, a static import facility, and a general-purpose metadata facility. This talk gives an overview of the changes and helps you understand what all the funny new syntax means.

Web Publishing 2.0

If we're moving toward Web 2.0, what does that mean for online publishing? In this talk I'll answer that question. Based on my experience as Principal Technologist at Mark Logic working with dozens of the largest online publishers, I'll present a vision for how the Web 2.0 concepts like personalization, collective intelligence, the long tail, and the importance of "owning the data" can and should reshape the face of online publishing -- and how XML, XQuery, and XML-aware text search act as the key enablers. I'll also introduce new Web Publishing 2.0 concepts like "Sweat the content" and "Give answers not links".

What's New in Java 6

The Java 6 (Mustang) release should make your life easier, for a change. It doesn't alter the core language like Java 5 did. It doesn't pack in so many sub-JSRs that you'll be overwhelmed by the amount you have to learn. Instead Java 6 adds several handy things that honestly should have been added before. Among the improvements we'll cover in this fast-paced class:

* A new Console class
* A real Compiler API
* A GIF writer
* Pluggable Locale data
* Access to disk partition size data
* Array reallocation
* Low-level floating point functions
* Reflective access to parameter names
* Access to network interface details
* Pluggable annotation processing
* Improved class file format
* Streaming XML with StAX
* A new Scripting interface

XQuery By Example: Building an Email Archive System

The classic searchable email archive system is cluged together -- a frankenstein monster combining a relational database with a search engine, with Java just barely able to keep the two together. In this talk we'll demonstrate how email is more content than data, how it's better encoded in XML rather than relational tables, and how Java can convert emails to XML and drive an XQuery backend to produce a simpler and more scalable email archive system.

Jeff Brown - G2One Director Of North American Operations - Groovy and Grails Developer

Jeff Brown

Advanced Techniques With Grails

Grails represents technology that offers great flexibility and power without the complexity introduced by other Java web application frameworks. Custom tag libraries are a snap. GSP Templates provide a simple mechanism for reusing UI elements. Sitemesh is integrated to help provide a consistent presentation across the entire application. Grails provides simple mechanisms for leveraging the power of Ajax.

Introduction To Agile Web Development With Grails

Grails brings the powerful "coding by convention" paradigm to Groovy and Java. Grails is not just another flavor in the pool of web development frameworks for Java. Grails leverages the powerful dynamic features of Groovy while taking advantage of best of breed technologies like Hibernate, Spring, Sitemesh and Quartz to make web application development both fun and easy.

Ken Sipe - Technology Director, Perficient, Inc. (PRFT)

Ken Sipe

Java Memory, Performance and the Garbage Collector

You are using Java, whew!!! No need to worry about memory, the garbage collector will handle that. Those who have had a memory issue in Java are not so naive any more. Often memory utilization and heap sizes are an after thought and are not recognized until the application is in production, often caused by application uptime, production request volume or production sets of data. When the OutOfMemory Error occurs, often the science of development seems to brake down and knobs are turned. First the (-mx) maximum heap space gets adjusted... More is better right. The next OutOfMemory, heads start scratching, code reviews start in earnest, and Google gets several new hits. Did you know that it is possible to get an OutOfMemory error without running out of heap space?



Mark Richards - SOA and Enterprise Architect, Author of Java Transaction Design Strategies

Mark Richards

Advanced Java Persistence API (JPA)

This session picks up where the Intro to JPA session left off and covers some of the more advanced topics in the Java Persistence API. Some of the topics covered in this session include switching persistence providers, versioning, compound keys, entity inheritance, and finally handling both simple and complex stored procedures. Some knowledge of JPA is recommended for this session as I will not be covering the basics of JPA (that is covered in a separate Intro to JPA session). Through a combination of slides and interactive coding I will demonstrate these advanced topics using both Hibernate and Toplink JPA.

Intro to Java Persistence API (JPA)

In addition to providing a simplified API, the new EJB3 specification (JSR-220) defines a standard ORM Java Persistence API (JPA) that is rapidly gaining in popularity. As you will see in this session, JPA bears a striking resemblance to popular ORM solutions like Hibernate and Toplink. In this session we will explore in detail the new Java Persistence API offered by JSR-220. We will start by discussing the overall design and architecture of the JPA and how the major components within JPA interact. We will then look at defining mapping objects (entities) and how to use the EntityManager to manage these entities. Through interactive coding examples we will investigate the pros and cons of detached entities and merging, how to map and use entity relationships (1-1, 1-N, N-1, and N-N), discuss Lazy Loading, and finally see how to use XML mappings rather than annotations. More advanced features of JPA will be covered in a separate session.

Java Persistence: Approaching the Silver Bullet

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.


The Enterprise Service Bus: Do We Really Need It?

There has been a significant amount of buzz in the community and industry about the definition and role of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), particularly within the area of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). In this product-agnostic high energy session we will take a step back and consider whether we really need an ESB. Through real-world application and architecture scenarios we will see where an ESB would be helpful and where it would be overkill. We will take a look under the hood and find out just what an ESB is really doing, and take a quick look at JBI (JSR-208) and see the impact it has on the ESB worls. Then, using product-agnostic coding examples we will learn what an Enterprise Service Bus is supposed to do, then answer the question about whether the ESB is just a bunch of hype or if we really need it.

Mark Volkmann - Software Consultant and Partner at OCI

Mark Volkmann

Ruby Plays Well With Others

Developing applications entirely in Ruby isn't always practical. It may be desirable to utilize existing code written in other languages. Also, implementing some functionality in Ruby may not yield sufficient performance. When these situations arise, Ruby can invoke code written in Java or C.

The easiest way to invoke Java code from Ruby is to use JRuby (http://jruby.codehaus.org/). JRuby is maturing rapidly now that Sun is financing much of its development.

C code can be invoked from Ruby by using wrapper code that is generated using SWIG (http://www.swig.org/) or written manually.



Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.

Neal Ford

Advanced Selenium

This session discusses advanced Selenium techniques for testing web applications. It discusses techniques for both TestRunner and Remote Control Selenium, including data driven tests, creating branch points, testing Ajax applications, creating flexible tests, integration with continuous integration, and tons more.

Debugging and Testing the Web Tier

As out applications have spilled from the server across the wire to the web tier, we increasingly must debug and test in the browser. This session covers debugging and testing tools for clients, JavaScript, and Ajax.

Implementing SOA

This talk avoids SOA hype and gets to the meat of the matter: how do you implement a Service-Oriented Architecture, what are the technological pitfalls, how do you test it, and what traps should you avoid. No marketecture: just implementation details.

Productive Programmer: Acceleration, Focus, and Indirection

This session discusses how to use the Productive Programmer principles of acceleration, focus, and indirection to become a more productive programmer. This session describes these principles, but the primary focus of this session is demonstration of these principles with real-world examples.

Productive Programmer: Automation and Canonicality

This session discusses how to use the Productive Programmer principles of automation and canonicality to become a more productive programmer. This session describes these principles, but the primary focus of this session is demonstration of these principles with real-world examples.

The Productive Programmer: Practice (10 Ways to Improve Your Code)

No one writes perfect code: even the best developers fall into bad habits and traps. These topics from The Productive Programmer illustrate blind spots and helps you write better code.

Pete Behrens - Organizational Agility Coach

Pete Behrens

A Scrum Experience

Scrum is a very easy agile framework to understand, but is very difficult in practice. Why is that?

For one, Scrum requires compressing an entire software lifecycle into very short time increments of 2-4 weeks in length. It requires cross-functional team commitment, discipline, communication, and collaboration to accomplish their goals. These changes are difficult and often expose organizational and environmental issues that must be addressed for the team to be successful.

This session brings focus to the Scrum heartbeat - the sprint. After a brief introduction of the Scrum framework and a focus on the sprint, we will be taking an experiential hands-on journey through a full sprint with your newly formed team.

Agile Enterprise Architecture: The role of the architect

Are you overrunning your architectural runway? Many companies struggle with their ability to retain their architectural integrity when they transition to agile methods. Emergent Architecture (the other EA) can lead to cowboy coding and ad-hoc design decisions that emerge into a poor overall architecture.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been a tried and true approach to address these architectural needs throughout the organization, yet this approach often leads to a heavy-handed, document-rich, control-oriented culture lacking ability to keep pace with today's dynamic business environment.

Attempting to integrate an agile process with an Enterprise Architecture approach can be like mixing oil and water - they just don't work together. This session evaluates alternatives in balancing Agility and EA and proposes an architectural approach to build an Agile Enterprise Architecture into your organization.

Agile Estimating, Planning and Tracking: Part I

Business leaders and stakeholders require accountability and accuracy in our software release projections and yet, as an industry, we have failed. However, many of these same leaders are not convinced that agile is any more than an excuse to avoid projections at all. While it is true that agility provides the framework to support change, it doesn't mean you can't provide accurate projections. In fact, a well-executed agile process actually provides more accurate results with less time investment than traditional methods. This session will demonstrate these agile project management techniques to manage 6-12 month projects.

This session focuses on the release level, followed by Part II which focuses on the sprint level.

Agile Requirements with User Stories

User Stories, a key practice from Extreme Programming, provide a right-sized solution to more efficiently identify, track and implement product requirements. Learn how identify, write and decompose "good" user stories that drive agile behavior and business value.

Agile Tooling: Team to Enterprise

"YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It)" and "Doing the simplest thing possible" are mantras of agile development. A white board, sticky notes, and flip chart paper are by far the best tools for individual teams. However, when coordinating work across 10 - 50 teams across 12 time zones, more tooling is required. Learn how agile enterprises are leveraging tooling to manage their portfolios, projects and products.

Scott Delap - Author of Desktop Java Live

Scott Delap

Developing Enterprise Business Applications in Eclipse RCP

This tutorial emerges out of the combined experience the presentor gained while working on a large Eclipse RCP/J2EE enterprise application (2.3 million lines of code in the RCP application). It will address the gap between the standard functionality of Eclipse RCP and what is needed for the creation of polished highly usable business applications.

Introducing the Eclipse Rich Client Platform

Rich client application development using Java can be intimidating giving the vast flexibility in application design and structure. It also can be frustrating to create the large number of support services (persistence, menus, event and job frameworks) that a large scale rich client applications needs. The Eclipse Rich Client Platform is one project attempting to solve these issues by providing a core infrastructure that not only provides the day to day services a rich client application developer needs, but also providing a suggested path to guide you down the road of designing your application. This presentation introduces both the Eclipse RCP and the tools provided by the Eclipse IDE that assist developers in writing RCP apps.


Scott Leberknight - Chief Architect at Near Infinity

Scott Leberknight

Effective Hibernate

Hibernate seems simple on the surface yet when you go beyond very simple use cases it can become much more complex. Intended for beginner to intermediate-level Hibernate developers, come see how to put Hibernate to effective use on your projects.

Spring/Hibernate Integration Basics

Hibernate is a very popular Java transparent persistence framework, but you often need to create additional infrastructure to manage sessions, transactions, and lazy-loading in a clean and elegant manner. See how Spring can help.

Spring/Hibernate Integration Patterns, Idioms, and Pitfalls

Using Spring's Hibernate integration significantly simplifies applications that use Hibernate for data persistence by removing tedious and repetitive infrastructural code that you need to write. Intended for developers familiar with Spring/Hibernate integration basics, who want to learn additional idioms and solutions to common problems.

Ted Neward - Enterprise, Virtual Machine and Language Wonk

Ted Neward

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to ClassLoaders

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.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Debugging

Bugs? We all know your code has no bugs, but someday, you're going to find yourself tracking down a bug in somebody else's code, and that's when it's going to be helpful to have some basic ideas about bug-tracking in your toolbox. Learn to make use of the wealth of tools that the Java Standard Platform makes available to you--tools that your IDE may not know exist, tools that you can make use of even within a production environment.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Java Platform Security

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.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Reflection

If you've never used Reflection (java.lang.reflect), you don't know what you're missing. In this presentation, we'll take a code-first, soup-to-nuts look at the Java Reflection APIs, from how to examine the class metadata that Reflection provides, to using annotations to enhance that metadata with your own information, even through the use of Java Dynamic Proxies to create flexible object "interceptors" that can layer services in front of ordinary method calls with nothing more complicated and an interface and a factory.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Rules and Rules Engines Using JESS

If you've been keeping your ear to the ground, you may have heard some talk recently about "rules", "business rules" and "rules engines", but not necessarily any clear discussion on what they are, how to use or design them, or why they might be useful or important.

Venkat Subramaniam - Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.

Venkat Subramaniam

Annotation Hammer

Annotation is an interesting feature in Java.
However, like any features, there are good uses and bad uses.
When should you use Annotation? This presentation will answer that question for you.

Domain Driven Design

Domain Driven Design (DDD) is an approach that places emphasis on the domain model and carrying it into implementation. DDD is mostly repackaging of fundamental OO Design. It brings new emphasis to what we should be already doing, but often find it hard and confusing given the realities and complexities of our real world. In this presentation we will take a close look at what DDD is and how to use it for agile development. We will discuss several design options, and also look at some examples of good modeling and layering.

Drooling with Groovy and Rules

Rule based programming allows us to develop applications using declarative rules. These can simplify development in applications where such rules based knowledge is used for decision making.

OSGi: A Well Kept Secret

In this presentation we will introduce OSGi and
discuss how it can help modularize and version
your enterprise Java applications.

Spring into Groovy

What do you get when you mix an agile, object-oriented, dynamic language with a lightweight, flexible, and extensible framework? You get a Groovier Spring. Spring allows you to develop using Groovy as much as Java. Groovy brings some neat concepts to the Java Platform that is hard to realize directly through the Java language. Using these capabilities can lead to elegant and easier Spring development.



Scott Davis

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Scott Davis Author of "Groovy Recipes" & TDD Expert
Scott Davis is an internationally recognized author and speaker. He is passionate about open source solutions and agile development. He has worked on a variety of Java platforms, from J2EE to J2SE to J2ME (sometimes all on the same project).

Scott's books include Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java, GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Web Applications, The Google Maps API, and JBoss At Work.

Scott is the Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com, a news and information website that tracks the latest developments in Groovy and Grails. He also writes a regular column for IBM DeveloperWorks -- Mastering Grails.

Scott is a frequent presenter at national conferences (such as No Fluff, Just Stuff) and local user groups. He was the president of the Denver Java Users Group in 2003 when it was voted one of the top-ten JUGs in North America. After a quick move north, he is currently active in the leadership of the Boulder Java Users Group. Keep up with him at http://www.davisworld.org.


Stuart Halloway

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Stuart Halloway CEO of Relevance
Stuart Halloway is the CEO of Relevance, Inc. (www.thinkrelevance.com). With co-founder Justin Gehtland, Stuart helps enterprises adopt emerging best practices such as Ruby on Rails. Justin and Stuart founded the Streamlined Framework (www.streamlinedframework.org), and authored Rails for Java Developers. Stuart is also the author of Component Development for the Java Platform. Prior to founding Relevance, Stuart was the Chief Architect at Near-Time, and the Chief Technical Officer at DevelopMentor.


Brian Pontarelli

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Brian Pontarelli Brian Pontarelli - founder of Inversoft
Brian Pontarelli is the founder and president of Inversoft, a Colorado based software company. In addition to Inversoft, Brian works on many open source projects including Struts, Savant and Java.net commons. In the past, he was the president of the Chicago Java User Group and an enterprise architect for Orbitz.

Brian has been programming for many years and works primarily with Java and Ruby. He has published various articles in both print and online magazines about Java, J2EE security, Java Server Faces and NIO.




Brian Sletten

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Brian Sletten Forward Leaning Software Consultant
Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a mentor and a trainer. His experience has spanned defense, finance and commercial domains with security consulting, network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and currently lives in Fairfax, VA. He is a partner in Zepheira, LLC, a new services company focused on using semantic-oriented technologies to solve architectural and data integration problems not handled by conventional tools and techniques.


David Geary

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David Geary Author of Graphic Java and co-author of Core JSF
David Geary is the president of Clarity Training, Inc. (corewebdevelopment.com), where he teaches developers to implement web applications using JSF, GWT, and Grails.

A prominent author, speaker, and consultant, David holds a unique qualification as a Java expert: He wrote the best-selling books on both Java component frameworks: Swing and JavaServer Faces (JSF). David's Graphic Java Swing was one of the best-selling Java books of all-time and Core JSF, which David wrote with Cay Horstman, is the best-selling book on JavaServer Faces.

David was one of a handful of experts on the JSF 1.0 Expert Group (EG) that actively defined the standard Java-based web application framework, and he's currently helping to define the next version of JSF on the JSF 2.0 EG.

Besides serving on the JSF and JSTL Expert Groups, David has contributed to open-source projects and co-authored Sun's Web Developer Certification Exam. He invented the Struts Template library which was the precursor to Tiles, a popular framework for composing web pages from JSP fragments, was the 2nd Struts committer and contributed to Shale.

A regular on the NFJS tour, David also speaks at other conferences such as JavaOne and JavaPolis. David has taught at Java University and was twice voted a JavaOne rock star, for presentations in 2005 and 2007.



Jared Richardson

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Jared Richardson Agile coach and co-author of Ship It
Jared Richardson, co-author of Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful
Software Projects
, is a speaker and agile coach at 6th Sense Analytics. Jared has been in the industry for more than fifteen years as a consultant, developer, tester, and manager.

Until recently he was an independent consultant focused helping teams build better software. He's now bringing that same focus to 6th Sense Analytics and their clients, using both the 6th Sense toolset and his unique experience. Jared can be found online at Agile Artisans and the Sixth Sense Analytics blog.




Jason Hunter

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Jason Hunter Author of Java Servlet Programming
Jason Hunter is Principal Technologist with Mark Logic, specializing in large-scale XML content manipulation using XQuery. He's probably best known as the author of "Java Servlet Programming" (O'Reilly Media). He's also an Apache Member and as Apache's representative on the Java Community Process Executive Committee he established a landmark agreement allowing open source Java. He's publisher of Servlets.com and XQuery.com, an original contributer to Apache Tomcat (and Apache Ant committer), the creator of the JDOM open source project, a member of the expert groups responsible for Servlet, JSP, JAXP, and XQJ API development, and was recently appointed Sun Java Champion. In 2003, he received the Oracle Magazine Author of the Year award, and in both 2005 and 2006, the JavaOne Outstanding Talk award. His largest audience was 15,000 at a JavaOne conference keynote.



Jeff Brown

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Jeff Brown G2One Director Of North American Operations - Groovy and Grails Developer
Jeff Brown is the Director Of North American Operations for G2One and a member of the core Groovy and Grails development teams. For over 10 years Jeff has been involved in designing and building object oriented systems.

Jeff teaches a number of Java and object oriented training courses in addition to doing consulting and mentoring work for industries including Aerospace, Financial and Medical. Areas of expertise include Java, agile web development with Groovy and Grails, distributed computing, object database systems, object oriented analysis and design and agile development.


Ken Sipe

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Ken Sipe Technology Director, Perficient, Inc. (PRFT)
Ken Sipe is a Technology Director with Perficient, Inc. (PRFT), IBM's largest service partner, where he leads multiple teams in the development of solutions in the SOA, Web 2.0 and portal domains, on both the Java and .Net platforms.

Ken was the founder of CodeMentor, where he was the Chief Architect and Mentor, leading clients in the execution of RUP and Agile methodologies in the delivery of software solutions. He is a former trainer for Rational in OOAD and RUP, and a CORBA Visibroker trainer for Borland. He continues to enjoy providing training and mentoring in all aspects of software development.

Ken has a deep need to be highly diversified. Ken often works with IT executives on high-level strategic roadmaps, currently geared around service oriented architectures (SOA). Ken also likes to keep his hands "dirty" in the code, which has him on a regular basis, pairing or otherwise producing code. Ken is regularly requested by clients that know him to "rescue" projects, either through the streamlining of processes or the rapid production of code.

Ken is a certified JBoss developer and is a frequent participates on open source projects. Ken is currently interested in the growing maturity of SOA solutions in the open source space, such as the ESB solutions like ServiceMix and Mule, or rules engines such as JBossRules.



Mark Richards

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Mark Richards SOA and Enterprise Architect, Author of Java Transaction Design Strategies
Mark Richards is an SOA and Enterprise Architect involved in the architecture and design of large-scale Service Oriented Architectures in J2EE and other technologies, primarily in the financial services industry. He has been involved in the software industry since 1984, and has significant experience and expertise in J2EE architecture and development, Object-oriented design and development, and systems integration. Mark served as the President of the Boston Java User Group in 1997 and 1998, and the President of the New England Java Users Group from 1999 thru 2003. He is the author of "Java Transaction Design Strategies", contributing author of "NFJS Anthology Volume 1", contributing author of "NFJS Anthology Volume 2", and contributing author of the Java Coding Standards book produced by the Nejug. Mark is an IBM Certified Application Architect, Certified Master IT Architect (TOG), Sun Certified J2EE Business Component Developer, a Sun Certified J2EE Enterprise Architect, a Sun Certified Java Programmer, a BEA WebLogic Certified Developer, a Certified Java Instructor, and holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science from Boston University. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series and speaks at conferences and user groups around the country. When he is not working Mark can usually be found hiking with his wife and two daughters in the White Mountains or along the Appalachian Trail.


Mark Volkmann

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Mark Volkmann Software Consultant and Partner at OCI
Mark Volkmann has been a software consultant for Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) in St. Louis since 1996. He has been developing software in Java since 1995.

Mark has created and teaches many courses in Java, XML and Ruby. They include: Introduction to Java, Java Syntax for Non-C Programmers, Java Programming, Advanced Java Programming, Creating Graphical User Interfaces Using Java (Swing), eXtensible Markup Language (XML), XML Programming Using Java and Web Services Using Java, and Ruby Programming.

Mark is a member of the St. Louis Java User Group steering committee and a regular presenter for that group. He has written for XML Journal. Mark has also presented at XML DevCon conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff Java symposiums
and the St. Louis Ruby User Group.



Neal Ford

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Neal Ford Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.
Neal Ford is an Application Architect for ThoughtWorks. He is an architect, designer, and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, and video/DVD presentations. Neal is also the author of Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques (Prentice Hall PTR, 1996), JBuilder 3 Unleashed (SAMS Publishing, 1999), and Art of Java Web Development (Manning, 2003). His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Object Pascal, C++, and C. Neal’s primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 30 developers’ conferences worldwide.


Pete Behrens

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Pete Behrens Organizational Agility Coach
Pete Behrens is the Founder and President of Trail Ridge Consulting, a firm specializing in enterprise-wide agile transitions and adoption. Their Organizational Agility Services align proven agile organizational patterns with enterprise-enabled agile practices to transform organizational ability to organizational agility.

Pete Behrens is a Certified Scrum Trainer and a Certified Scrum Coach. He has been guiding enterprise agile implementations for the past 6 years. Pete has over 17 years experience leading product development and architecture in adaptive, iterative and phased-based development methods for EDS and Rational Software. He led development of RequisitePro, the leading requirements management solution in the IBM Rational product line. He has extensive experience developing under the Rational Unified Process (RUP), Rapid Application Development (RAD), as well as traditional waterfall approaches. You can contact him at pete@trailridgeconsulting.com



Scott Delap

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Scott Delap Author of Desktop Java Live
Scott Delap is President of Rich Client Solutions, Inc., a software consulting firm focusing on technologies such as Swing, Eclipse RCP, GWT, Flex, and Open Laszlo. He is actively involved in the Java community, speaking at events such as NFJS, QCon and JavaOne. Scott is also the Java Editor of InfoQ.com and runs ClientJava.com, a portal focused on desktop Java development.


Scott Leberknight

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Scott Leberknight Chief Architect at Near Infinity
Scott is Chief Architect at Near Infinity Corporation, an enterprise software development, training, and consulting services company based in Reston, Virginia. He has been developing enterprise and web applications for 13 years professionally, and has developed web applications using Java, Ruby/Rails, Groovy/Grails and a smidgeon of Python. His main areas of interest include object-oriented design, system architecture, testing, and frameworks of all types including Spring, Hibernate, Ruby on Rails, Grails, and Django. In addition, Scott enjoys learning new languages to make himself a better and more well-rounded developer a la The Pragmatic Programmers' advice to "learn one language per year."

Scott holds a B.S. in Engineering Science and Mechanics from Virginia Tech, and an M. Eng. in Systems Engineering from the University of Maryland. Scott speaks at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposiums and various other conferences. In his (sparse) spare time, Scott enjoys spending time with his wife, two daughters, and two cats. He also tries to find time to play soccer, go snowboarding, and mountain bike whenever he can.


Ted Neward

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Ted Neward Enterprise, Virtual Machine and Language Wonk
Ted Neward is an independent consultant specializing in high-scale enterprise systems, working with clients ranging in size from Fortune 500 corporations to small 20-person shops. He speaks on the conference circuit, including the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium tour, discussing Java, .NET and XML service technologies, focusing on Java-.NET interoperability. He has written several widely-recognized books in both the Java and .NET space, including the recently-released "Effective Enterprise Java". He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two sons, four video-game consoles, thousands of books (on programming and otherwise), and eight PCs.



Venkat Subramaniam

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Venkat Subramaniam Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. He is author of ".NET Gotchas" (O'Reilly), coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf), and author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).