Lone Star Software Symposium

June 6 - 8, 2008



Event Details

Location

Crowne Plaza Suites Dallas
7800 Alpha Road
Dallas, TX 75240
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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
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Featured Sessions

Beginning Drools - Rule Engines in Java
By Brian Sam-Bodden

Drools is an open source pure-Java implementation of a forward chaining rules engine. Drools can be used in a J2SE or J2EE application and allows you to express rules programatically or by building domain specific rule languages. Learn how Business Rules with Drools can make your Java applications more flexible and robust.



Advanced Rules Programming with Drools
By Brian Sam-Bodden

In this session you'll learn some of the more advanced features of Drools; a pure-Java Rule Engine. This session will walk through the construction of an advanced Rules application covering such topics as:

- Fine control and monitoring of a Working Memory session
- Using Decision Tables
- Advanced Rule Language Features
- Building Domain Specific Languages
- Managing your Rules

Boosting Programmer productivity with Mylyn
By Brian Sam-Bodden

Mylyn is a task-focused toolkit for the Eclipse IDE that allows developers to focus on tasks in a way that they never been able to do before. Mylyn eliminates the constant context switching produced by typical ways IDEs are used. No more scrolling/browsing/searching/tagging/sending emails with progress updates... Mylyn provides a new way of working that allows you to focus on specific tasks by reducing information overload. Mylyn also provides a framework for integrating with the most commonly usage task tracking systems and version control systems.
In this talk you'll learn how Mylyn can boost your productivity as a Java developer by letting you get the most out of your IDE.

10 ways to use Hibernate effectively
By Brian Sam-Bodden

Learn 10 tried and true ways to improve the way you use Hibernate today. In this session you would learn about a collection of 10 tips, tricks, practices and tools that will make you more effective at designing, implementing, testing and tuning your application's Hibernate-powered object-relational layer.

Give it a REST
By Brian Sletten

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.

Viva La Javolution!
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.

Spring in Action: Fundamentals for Developing Spri..
By Craig Walls

Spring has been one of the most exciting frameworks to emerge in the past few years. With Spring you can decouple your application's objects, enrich them with AOP, and apply transactional boundaries and security to them declaratively. It simplifies data access, remoting, web services, and JMS. It comes with its own web framework. And, even though Spring eliminates much of the need for EJBs, it will still integrate nicely with any EJBs you may have lying around. What's not to love?

A (re)introduction to Spring Security
By Craig Walls

Spring Security (formerly known as Acegi Security) is a very powerful and flexible security framework for Java. Based on the Spring Framework, Spring Security provides declarative method and web level security including a wealth of options for meeting your application's specific security needs.

Enterprise Messaging Using JMS (Part 1)
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.

Java Persistence: Approaching the Silver Bullet
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.


Keynote: Ancient Philosophers & Blowhard Jamborees..
By Neal Ford

It turns out that ancient philosophers knew a lot about software -- did you know that Plato defined object-oriented programming? This keynote applies old lessons to new problems and old problems to new lessons. It describes why SOA is so hard, and why people in your company make bone-headed decisions. What other keynote includes Rube Goldberg, Aristotle, Dave Thomas, and Chindia?

Evolutionary SOA
By Neal Ford

This session demonstrates that "Agility" and "SOA" complement each other quite well. Just because SOA is buzz-word compliant doesn't mean that you should throw good practices out the window. This session demonstrates how you can apply the principles of agility to building highly complex distributed enterprises.

10 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
By Richard Haefel

An effective software architect understands that every application is different and requires unique choices regarding programming language, middleware, integration, data access, user interface design, etc. Richard Monson-Haefel has distilled knowledge from his own experience and from personal interviews with the World's best software architects to define 10 principles every software architect should know in order to be effective.


How to Catch Hackers: Security Auditing and Loggin..
By Roman Hustad

This session examines the code that developers must write in order to enable the detection of malicious activity and preservation of evidence after a security breach.


How to Do a Security Code Review
By Roman Hustad

This session is a hand-on exercise in Java code review that will cover both manual and automated techniques. If you envision code review as a line-by-line slog through thousands of programs, you will be surprised to learn some effective techniques that reduce the tedium and increase your enjoyment of this activity (well, maybe not the enjoyment part). Familiar methods such as pair programming and peer reviews are a great place to start and will immediately increase the security of your code base.

Grails for Struts Developers: A Groovy Alternative..
By Scott Davis

Struts is the defacto web framework for Java web developers. It has been with us since 2001. Struts enjoys unprecedented success -- most surveys place its market share between 60% and 70%. It introduced a whole generation of web developers to the phrase 'MVC' (Model / View / Controller).

Grails 1.0 was released in 2008. It marries the modern features of Rails with the need for legacy support for Struts. Grails is inspired by Rails, but it is not a simple port of the project to Java. It takes the ideas of Rails, but expresses them in familiar Java libraries like Spring and Hibernate. It also leverages a new dynamic language for the JVM called Groovy.




YSlow: Building Your Website for Speed
By Scott Davis

How optimized is your website? YSlow, a FireFox/FireBug plugin, doesn't pull any punches. It gives any website an A, B, C, D, or F rating based on 14 individual analysis points. You'll be amazed (or depressed) at what YSlow thinks of your site. In this talk, we'll walk through these points step by step, learning what Yahoo! (the creator of this utility) does to keep its web properties running as quickly as possible.

Know your Java?
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.

Acceptance Testing Application Behavior
By Venkat Subramaniam

How do you ensure your applications meet the expectations of your key customers? In this session we will explore using the FIT tool and Behavior Driven Design tools to do exactly this.

Design Patterns in Java and Groovy
By Venkat Subramaniam

You're most likely familiar with the Gang-of-four design patterns and how to implement them in Java. However, you wouldn't want to implement those patterns in a similar way in Groovy. Furthermore, there are a number of other useful patterns that you can apply in Java and Groovy. In this presentation we'll look at two things: How to use patterns in Groovy and beyond Gang-of-four patterns in Groovy and Java.

Caring about your Code Quality
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.

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