Great Lakes Software Symposium

November 17 - 19, 2006



Event Details

Location

Wyndham Northwest Chicago
400 Park Boulevard
Itasca, IL 60143
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NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in Chicago November 17 - 19, 2006. You may view the event details here ».

Session Highlights

Don't miss your chance to attend more than forty education and solutions sessions:

  • Seating is Limited
  • In-depth Discussions
  • Peer Exchange
  • Access to Speakers
  • Expert Panel Discussions
  • Hands-on Code Examples
  • Best Practices
  • Birds of a Feather Session
  • Insight on Cutting-Edge Tools

Featured Sessions

By Ben Hale

Have you ever developed a web application with a long user action based on form input? Did you curse the Java community for their inability to address this very common application type? Well, attend this session about Spring Web Flow and you'll curse no more.

By Brian Goetz

Performance myths about the Java platform abound, from the general "Java is slow", to the more specific "reflection is slow", "allocation is slow", "synchronization is slow", "garbage collection is slow", etc. Many of these myths have their root in fact (in JDK 1.0, everything was slow); today, not only are many of these statements not true, but Java performance has surpassed that of C in many areas, such as memory management.

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.

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.

By Brian Sletten

REST sounds like such a simple thing. But, what is it really? How do you convince your boss to let you try it when she has been sold on the equation SOAP = SOA + P(rofit)? How do you go about building, deploying, publishing and orchestrating web services without the (Un)Holy Trinity of SOAP, WSDL and UDDI?

By Bruce Tate

Agile programming is a collection of core principles and techniques that allow software developers to create lighter, more responsive applications, and to have fun doing it. Many established organizations are either openly or sub-conciously hostile to many of the principles of Agile development.

By Bruce Tate

You can have rapid web development with Rails without losing access to your critical Java code. With the explosion of the Ruby programming language, more developers will need a strategy for letting Java and Ruby interoperate. This session explores two strategies: JRuby and Rails-based web services.

By David Geary

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.

By David Geary

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.

By David Hussman

This session will focus on tools and techniques for tracking an agile project plan from creation to project completion.

By David Hussman

The presentation will briefly discuss stories, the origin and authoring of story tests, and a demonstration of how FIT and FitNesse (FIT living within a Wiki) can be used to automate acceptance tests.

By Jason Hunter

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension with a hook to let you run your own JavaScript after each page loads. People have written hundreds of Greasemonkey scripts, each using Ajax techniques, to do everything from making a static page dynamic to changing a page's style to integrating comparison pricing on Amazon pages and giving Google search results easy keyboard shortcuts. Greasemonkey lets you take back control of the web browsing experience -- and teaches you Ajax while you're at it.

In this talk we'll look at about a dozen useful Greasemonkey scripts. Each script provides a benefit in its own right, but like good engineers we'll dissect them to see what makes them tick.

By Nathaniel Schutta

Seemingly overnight, Ajax has gone from an obscure acronym to, well, having conferences devoted to it. People are often surprised when they learn that Ajax isn't really anything new - so if it's yesterday's technology, why all the hype? This talk will examine the course of events that led up to the current love affair with richer client applications. We'll talk examine the technologies that power an Ajax application and discuss how to work with them - and then we'll examine a number of frameworks that will do much of the heavy lifting for us!

By Neal Ford

This session describes the use and workings of Selenium, the open source web user interface testing tool.

By Neal Ford

This session shows you how to become a more productive programmer every day by using tools that you didn't know you already had.

By Pete Behrens

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.

By Ramnivas Laddad

Support for aspect-oriented programming is an important part of the Spring framework. It is the AOP support that allows keeping implementation of functionality such as transaction management and security out of your POJOs. While many developers only use aspects provided with Spring, once you understand how it all works, you can make a better use of those aspects, extend them, and write brand new aspects.

By Ramnivas Laddad

Domain Driven Design (DDD) suggests dealing with complex software system using a domain model and preserving the model in implementation. Since domain model entities have rich behavior, so should their software implementation artifacts. A direct mapping between domain model and software artifacts create simple-to- understand, inexpensive-to-implement, and easy-to-evolve systems.

While the idea behind DDD isn't new and the value is easily understood, many implementations do not adhere to its principles. This disconnection may be due to many obstacles in implementing it. Combining Dependency Injection (DI) with a full-fledged aspect-oriented programming (AOP) system such as AspectJ help overcome many obstacles.

By Scott Davis

Mark Twain once said, "Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Do you feel the same way about Unit Testing? Are you actively testing your code, or are you just thinking about testing your code... some day... once you get some more free time...

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).

By Ted Neward

Mustang, the Java6 release, is out, and even if you're not looking to adopt the new platform right away, it's important to know what's there so you can start to plan for it. In this presentation, we'll go over the major new features of the Java6 platform, including the new integrated XML services capabilities (JAX-WS and JAXB), dynamic/scripting language support (javax.script), new JVM "attach" capabilities, new annotations supported by the javac compiler, and more.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Refactoring is one of the core practices in Agile Software Development. Refactoring is based on some core principles that apply to more than writing good code. But, what's refactoring? Why should you do it? How do you go about doing that? What tools are available to successfully refactor your App?

By Venkat Subramaniam

Object-oriented scripting languages, or agile dynamic languages, as some like to call those, are gaining programmers' attention. Groovy bring this excitement to
the Java platform with its ability to generate byte code. You can use Groovy instead of Java for some parts of your application. By learning it, you can switch between the languages where you consider fit.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Inspired by the Ruby on Rails project, Grails brings the ease of web development and "convention over configuration" to the Java platform. We will learn how to create web applications using Grails, how to integrate it with Hibernate, and how to Ajax it, all using the built in features of Grails. This section assumes that you are familiar with Groovy or you have attended the “Groovy for Java Programmers” session. The session will be example driven with live coding where we will build a web application from scratch.

By Venkat Subramaniam

You have worked on software projects with varying degree of success. What were the reasons for the success of your last project? What were the reasons for those that failed? A number of issues contribute to project success - some non-technical in nature. In this presentation the speaker will share with you practices in a number of areas including
coding, developer attitude, debugging, and feedback. The discussions are based on the book with the same title as the talk.