By Neal Ford

You can read books about Agile projects, but you must consult real-world experience to really understand the dynamics of agile project management. This session discusses agile management topics including estimation, project tracking, and useful metrics (and how to obtain them). And just a little about Mingle, the agile project tracking tool from ThoughtWorks.

OK, sure, you can read the XP Explained book. Now what? Agile project management in the real world requires understanding of not just the practices but why they work. This talk delves into several topics relevant to agile project management, including estimation, project tracking, accurate project metrics (and the practices that make them possible). This talk is designed to describe some of the nuances required to handle real agile projects, along with a demonstration of some of the artifacts ThoughtWorks uses to track projects (the most elaborate spreadsheet you've ever seen!). And, towards the end, I show how our experience has culminated into Mingle, the agile project tracking tool from ThoughtWorks with skinnable religion.

By Neal Ford

What does code + methodology have to do with one another? Everything! Agile projects focus on delivering working code, and tools exist to allow you to verify some quality metrics for your code. This session is a survey of tools and metrics that allow you to determine the quality of your code and strategies to "wire it" into your agile project.

Agile projects focus on delivering code. The responsibility for the quality of that code lies with developers. Yet most developers have a poor sense of how to gauge the quality of code, both during development and forensically. This talk lives on the boundary between what is important in agile projects and ways to verify code quality. It is both a survey of tools and metrics and strategies for proactively applying these techniques to ongoing projects. I talk about the Hawthorne effect, analysis tools (both byte and source code), useful metrics, tools for generating metrics, and how to analyze raw data into actionable tasks.

Session Topics:

• The Hawthorne Effect
• How Agility and Metrics Feed Each Other
• Analysis Tools
• FindBugs
• PMD/CPD
• Testing Metrics
• Cyclomatic Complexity
• Chidamber and Kemerer Object-oriented Metrics
• JDepend
• Code Change Risk Analyzer and Predictor for Java
• Panopticode
• Tools

By Neal Ford

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.

It is too easy to get into a coding slump and not realize it. This talk revitalizes your relationship to code, forcing you to rethink some of the thing that you take for granted and showing new approaches to solving hard problems. It covers topics that range from improve the overall structure of your code to the way you write JavaBeans, with lots of examples. Everything in this talk may not be new to you, but I guarantee that you'll see some things that will make you reevaluate the way you think about your code.

Session Outline:

1. TDD
2. Static Analysis
3. Good Citizenship
• getters and setters
• Constructors
• Static State
4. YAGNI
5. Occam and His Razor
6. Question Authority
• DSLs
• JavaBean Specification
7. SLAP
8. New Languages
9. Every Nuance
10. Anti-objects

By Neal Ford

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.

In The Productive Programmer, David Bock and I identify 5 principles of productivity: this talk goes into great detail on 3 of those principles. The session defines the principles and describes their use, but the primary focus of this talk is on real-world examples of how you can use these principles to make yourself a more productive programmer. Acceleration covers keyboard shortcuts (including ways to make better use of them) in both IntelliJ and Eclipse. Focus describes how you can modify both the operating system and your code base to eliminate noise. Indirection shows how a simple concept can have profound effects, including how to share a common set of plugins across an entire Eclipse project. This talk includes tons of examples, all culled from real-world projects.

Session Topics:

• The Productive Programmer
• Acceleration defined
• Applying Acceleration
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Plug-ins
• Getting around in a hurry
• Launching stuff
• Focus defined
• Applying Focus
• Get out of the trees
• Searching several ways
• Code focus
• Avoiding the trash pile
• Indirection
• Applying Indirection
• links vs. shortcuts
• Sharing stuff
• Canonical plug-ins
• Environment isolation

Note: This is a companion talk to my other talk, Productive Programmer: Automation and Canonicality, but each talk is completely independent of the other -- they are not "Part 1" and "Part 2".

By Neal Ford

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.

In The Productive Programmer, David Bock and I identify 5 principles of productivity: this talk goes into great detail on 2 of those principles. The session defines the principles and describes their use, but the primary focus of this talk is on real-world examples of how you can use these principles to make yourself a more productive programmer. Canonicality (the DRY principle from The Pragmatic Programmer) discourages repeating artifacts in projects. This talk shows effective ways to avoid this repetition. For example, I show how to reuse documentation via a Subversion hook that posts comments to a Wiki with an RSS feed. Automation refers to making the computer do more work for you. This talk includes tons of examples, all culled from real-world projects.

Session Topics:

• The Productive Programmer
• Automation defined
• Applying automation
• Scripting with...
• Win XP
• Bash
• Unix shell/cygwin
• Ruby
• Groovy
• Case Studies
• Canonicality defined
• Applying canonicality
• Hibernate and code generation
• Documentation Part 1
• Documentation Part 2

<cite>Note: This is a companion talk to my other talk, <b>Productive Programmer: Acceleration, Focus, and Indirection</b>, but each talk is completely independent of the other -- they are not "Part 1" and "Part 2".</cite>

By Neal Ford

This session describes JRuby, the 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. It covers the basics of programming with JRuby and examples of how to integrate it into existing Java projects.

Like hamburger & fries and turkey & dressing, JRuby allows you to harness the awesome power of Ruby in your Java projects. This session describes the origins, capabilities, and limitations of JRuby, the 100% pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. This session also demonstrates some areas where it makes sense to mixin Ruby and Java code: Rails on Java, testing, and dynamic programming. JRuby is a powerful implementation of Polyglot Programming, and this session shows you how to leverage this cutting-edge concept.

Session Topics:

• JRuby's origins
• Calling Java from Ruby
• Calling Ruby from Java
• Limitations and pitfalls
• Example usage
• Rails on Java
• Testing
• Dynamic programming
• The future

By Neal Ford

This session explains all the hype surrounding Ruby on Rails, in a context familiar to Java developers. It covers convention over configuration, ActiveRecord, controllers, views, Ajax, scaffolding, testing, and deployment...on the JVM, using JRuby.

Find out why everyone won't shut up already about Ruby on Rails! This web framework for Ruby has appeared from nowhere to become the critics darling: there must be good reasons why. This session shows those reasons, in a context familiar to Java developers. It discusses how configuration works in Rails, persistence through ActiveRecord, scaffolding, controllers, views, and Ajax. It also covers the important topic of testing, and how Rails makes it easy and automatic. Finally, this session discusses deployment on the JVM, using JRuby, and reflects back on the important lessons that Rails teaches Java developers. This session also presents information about the boundary between Rails, Ruby, and JRuby.

Session Topics:

• Why Ruby? Why Rails?
• Getting started
• JRuby and Rails
• Convention over configuration
• Scaffolding
• ActiveRecord: Persistence done right
• ActionPack
• • Controllers
  • Views
  • Ajax for free
• Testing
• Deployment
• Reflection

By Ted Neward

Java's threading capabilities took a serious turn for the better with the release of Java5, thanks to the incorporation of the java.util.concurrent packages, a set of pre-built components for thread pooling and execution, synchronization, and more.

In this presentation, we'll explore the Thread API, the Java threading model beneath it, and the enhancements made in Java5 to make it easier for Java code to walk and chew gum at the same time.

By Ted Neward

Java's threading capabilities have been a part of the Java platform since its inception, yet for many Java developers, using Threads still remain a dark and mysterious art, and synchronization beyond the use of the "synchronized" keyword is almost unknown.

In this talk, we'll explore the Java "monitor" concept, and how a monitor isn't quite the same thing as a lock from other concurrency systems. We'll see how monitors can be used to perform signalling across threads, and then how the new java.util.concurrent API (introduced in Java 5) can be used to simplify the same sorts of tasks that used to require deep knowledge of the synchronized keyword. Finally, we'll answer that age-old question, "Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road?"

Prerequisite: The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Concurrency (Part 1: Threads)

By Ted Neward

Wondering why your enterprise Java app just... sucks? Trying to figure out why you can't get more than 10 concurrent users online at the same time? Looking for ways to try and spot the slowdowns and ways to fix them?

In this talk, we'll look at the various things that can occur in an enterprise Java app (from the smallest web site to the largest multi-resource environment) to make your Java apps perform and scale less well than they should, and how you can work to correct them. We'll examine a variety of broad concepts to apply in architecture and design, and examine what factors make an enterprise application slow, then use a variety of tools to figure out how to remedy them.

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.

For an audience comfortable with some prior Java experience, preferably familiar with Java5.

By Ted Neward

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.

For a beginning to intermediate Java audience.

By Mark Richards

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.

Agenda - Introduction - JPA Framework Overview - Defining and Mapping Entity Objects - Managing Entity Objects (EntityManager) - Detached Entities and Merging - Entity Relationships - Lazy Loading - Using XML Mappings - Summary

By Mark Richards

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.

Agenda - Introduction - Switching Providers - Versioning - Compound Keys - Entity Inheritance - Handling Stored Procedures - Summary and Discussion

By Mark Richards

EJB3 (JSR-220) offers some great improvements over the prior EJB specs in terms of development simplicity and new features. In this session we will explore in detail some of the new features of the core EJB 3 specification. Included in this session will be a hands-on discussion and demonstration of session beans, dependency injection, interceptors (aop), and Message-Driven Beans (MDB). For the interceptors discussion I will be showing how to define interceptors for enabling a method trace, mocking objects, and sending JMS message notifications to be later picked up by the MDBs I will be creating. During the session I will demonstrate the new features of EJB 3 through interactive coding examples. Note: this session does not cover the new Java Persistence API (JPA) - only the core specification.

Agenda - Introduction - Constructing and Accessing EJB 3 Session Beans - Dependency Injection - Interceptors (AOP) - Method Trace - Mock Objects - Sending JMS Message Notifications - Message-Driven Beans (MDB) - Using XML over Annotations - Summary and Discussion

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.

Agenda: - Introduction - Framework Differences - Brief Overview of iBatis - Brief Overview of JPA - Aspect Analysis - Inserts and Updates - Reporting Queries - Stored Procedures - Complex SQL - Debugging and Testing Techniques - The Fast Lane Reader Pattern - Combining ORM and SQL Mapping Frameworks - Summary and Q&A

By Venkat Subramaniam

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.

In this presentation we will take a closer look at annotation. We will see how to write them, how to use them. Then we will take a look at examples of annotation in various Java applications/frameworks. We will discuss examples of good use and not so good use. We will then lay out some good practices to follow.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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.

In this presentation we will take a look at Drools and its evolution into JBoss Rules and how you can express rules including Groovy and other alternatives. We'll taken an example oriented approach to creating a sample application.

By Venkat Subramaniam

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

In this session we will delve into: What is OSGi? OSGi fundamentals Modularization and versioning Developing and deploying components OSGi implementations OSGi and Spring integration

By Venkat Subramaniam

You are convinced that Test Driven Development is good for you and your project. You realize the benefits it has to offer. What's holding you back? All the code and components that your code so heavily depends on is most likely making you wonder if TDD is really for you. We will start out by looking at dependency and dependency inversion. Then we will discuss how mock objects can help separate our code from its dependencies.

In this presentation, we will take an examples oriented approach to utilizing mock objects. We will first hand toss a mock and see how our code benefits from it. Then we will take a look at using frameworks that can assist with the creation of mocks.

By Venkat Subramaniam

Unit testing tells you, the programmer, that your code (and the change) meets your expectations. How do you know if you are meeting your customers' expectations? Agile development is all about feedback and doing what's relevant to the customers, isn't it? Framework for Integration testing or Fit helps you to automate tests for customer expectations.

In this presentation we will learn how to write Fit tests and how to automate their execution. We will also use FitNesse.

Topics: Beyond Unit Testing Integration Testing Customer Expectations Writing Fit Tests Writing Fixtures Automating tests What is FitNesse Using FitNesse

By David Bock

Internationalization and Localization in Java is easy, right? Everyone knows you just store your strings in some resource bundles, set the locale, wave your hands a little bit, and your application is good-to-go. Right? Maybe not... Java provides some great utilities to get started, but leaves you needing more when it comes to things like screen layout, cultural sensitivities, semantic differences in translation, use of color and iconography, and other issues.

This presenter spent 9 years developing applications for the U.S. State Department that have been deployed in dozens of countries and languages. While some aspects of internationalization and localization are trivial, there are plenty of issues that are not. If you have an application that you expect to localize into other locales, there will be information here that is invaluable to you. This talk is entertaining for the war-stories alone! No other no-fluff presentation will feature pictures of the presenter waiting in line behind a herd of sheep to cross a pontoon bridge into Bosnia.

By David Bock

For several years, I was a member of a team of people caught in the middle of a 200+ person software development company, with senior management wanting "buzzword compliant process improvement" such as CMMI, and engineers wanting more ?agile? solutions (and people on both sides confusing Agile with ad-hoc). We were responsible for sorting it all out. Reconciling this was a herculean effort, and can be a source of lessons learned for your own process improvement efforts. Are you trying to be more agile in your organization? Are you expecting it to be harder than it needs to be because of political and bureaucratic forces beyond your control? Do you have to "educate" your senior management to protect them from buzzwords? Come learn from my successes... and mistakes.

Introducing change into a large organization can be difficult, even when everyone is in agreement. By starting with 'the quick win' and fixing some real pain in your organization, you can begin to get people moving in the right direction. In this talk we will look at the kinds of quick process wins that are possible, and how to introduce new ideas into a large organization.

By David Bock

How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a big ball of code you have to plod through to try to get anything done? How many times have you been the ?new guy? on an established project where it seems like the code grew more like weeds and brambles than a well-tended garden? With a few good structural guidelines and several tools to help analyze the code, we can keep our project from turning into that big ball of mud, and we can salvage a project that is already headed down that path.

This talk will talk about everything from build processes, teamwork, and project structure through versioning, release plans, upgrde strategies, package dependencies, and more. Using real-world scenarios from two projects with 12-15 people working together over a 5-year time span, this presentation will offer advice based on multiple successful deliveries of real software.

By Scott Davis

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.

In this presentation, we take a very pragmatic "prove it in code" approach to learning Groovy. Since the syntax is (almost) identical to Java, we can dive right in from the very beginning, learning the "syntactic sugar" as we solve real world problems.

You'll learn how easy it is to install Groovy and get started working with it. You'll tackle file I/O, reading and creating text files. You'll create and parse XML and HTML. You'll interact with databases. You'll create Groovlets (servlets sprinkled with Groovy-dust). And finally, you'll get a brief introduction to Grails (hint: the 'G' is silent).

By Scott Davis

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.

We'll look at calling Groovy from Java. We'll look at calling Java from Groovy. We'll look at compiling Groovy code, JARring it up, and deploying it alongside Java.

Groovy offers the same level of integration with Ant. We'll look at Ant tasks that allow you to include Groovy in your build process. Or maybe you'd prefer to use the Groovy AntBuilder and completely manage your build in code. The choice is yours. The important thing is Groovy works along side your familiar toolkit instead of forcing you to replace it.

By Scott Davis

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.

Grails is a fully integrated, modern Java web development stack. In a single zip file, it includes a web server (Jetty), a database (HSQLDB), a build system (GANT, a Groovy/Ant hybrid), a logging framework (Log4J), and a unit testing framework (JUnit). It also includes mainstream libraries like Spring for dependency injection, Hibernate for Object/Relational mapping, Quartz for scheduling, and SiteMesh for page layout. For Ajax, Grails allows you to choose between three major included technology stacks: Prototype/script.aculo.us, the Yahoo UI library, and Dojo. Coupling the power of these mainstream libraries with the ease-of-use that Groovy offers, you have an unprecedented collection of technologies that will have you up and running in record time.

Grails maximizes the strengths of these familiar Java libraries while minimizing the XML jockeying it usually takes to get them all to play nicely with one another. It brings "Convention over Configuration" to Java. It uses Groovy as the language to glue the pieces together, which means that experienced JEE developers can learn Groovy in the context of libraries that they are already familiar with.

It is no exaggeration to say that you will have your first Grails application up and running in minutes. But Grails is more than about a quick start. In this talk, we'll look at ways to move beyond the default configurations. We'll deploy a Grails app to an external Tomcat instance instead of the included Jetty server. We'll move from the default HSQLDB database to MySQL. We'll include external JARs to bring new functionality to the mix.

By Scott Davis

"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..."

In this humorous keynote, Scott Davis turns to unconventional sources for enlightenment. Could best-sellers like Blink, Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, The Paradox of Choice, and The Wisdom of Crowds finally solve the puzzle? In this "Da Vinci Code"-like romp through the conventional wisdom of the day, will the Holy Grail of web frameworks be revealed? Probably not, but possible side effects may include nausea, dry mouth, and insight into the eternal question of our industry.

By Scott Davis

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.

REST isn't a specification or a framework -- it's a set of architectural principles. This means that you can begin using it immediately. No framework wars, no version mismatches. This talk demonstrates some of the more popular RESTful web services out there in the wild. It also shows you live examples of how to implement your own.

We'll look at the simplest form of REST -- GETful web services. We'll also look at more sophisticated RESTful interfaces that utilize all of the HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE) and MIME types. Finally, we'll look at Atom and the Atom Publishing Protocol -- the RESTful implementation that Google chose to replace its aging SOAP implementation.

By Mark Fisher

Spring 2.0 introduced support for Message-Driven POJOs meaning that it is now possible to receive JMS messages asynchronously and delegate the handling of those messages to simple objects even within a lightweight application running outside of any application server. If your POJO has a return value, it will automatically be sent to a response destination.

After a quick overview of Spring's JMS support, we will build a Message-Driven POJO sample application from the ground up. This will include sending a Message as a request and receiving a reply across separate JVMs. You will learn how to configure the Message-Driven POJO without writing a single line of messaging code. You will also learn how to configure the pool of concurrent consumers and integrate with Spring's transaction management. We will use the JMS namespace available as of Spring 2.5, and we will even explore the possibility of delegating to a Groovy-scripted object.

By Mark Fisher

Spring Security (formerly known as 'Acegi') enables self-contained, consistent, and extensible solutions for securing your applications. Version 2.0 provides major enhancements including a domain-specific XML namespace, convention-based defaulting, and annotation support. This provides a significantly simpler experience for developers while still supporting the same degree of flexibility.

Spring Security's interceptor-based approach is non-invasive even when extended to accommodate domain-specific requirements. The two main security processes (authentication and authorization) are decoupled in order to provide flexibility across a wide variety of providers and strategies. This presentation will include an overview of Spring Security's pluggable authentication process and how it accommodates a wide range of possibilities including Database, LDAP, Single Sign On, and even an in-memory option for development and testing. We will then proceed to cover authorization where you will see its consistent approach for securing web requests and method invocations. Throughout the session, we will walk through a sample application that demonstrates Spring Security's core features.

By David Geary

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.

This session is taught by a member of the JSF Expert Group for JSF 1.0 and 2.0., and co-author of the best-selling book on JSF: Core JavaServer Faces. David will take you through a whirlwind introduction to JSF including what JSF is, how it was developed, and how you can best take advantage of the technology. Here is a list of topics:

Components, managed beans, value expressions, and static navigation i18n, CSS, and actions The Faces Context and Faces messages The JSF Event Model Using JavaScript with JSF

This introduction to JSF also contains 5 live-code demos, where David will develop a simple, but robust application during the course of the session.

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.

By David Geary

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

Web2.0 is all about rich, interactive user interfaces (UIs), and these three frameworks provide the capabilities that you need to develop those UIs.

Prototype (prototype.conio.net) is a low-level JavaScript framework that adds significant features to JavaScript that make it easier for you to use the language and to incorporate Ajax calls in your applications.

Scriptaculous is a framework (script.aculo.us) built on top of Prototype that adds some pizazz to Prototype with features such as a wide array of special effects, animation, and drag and drop.

Rico is another framework (openrico.org) built on top of Prototype that, among other things, provides something known as behaviours, where you adorn plain-vanilla HTML with seemingly magical behaviours.

Come to this session and learn how to harness the power of these three frameworks.

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.

JavaServer Faces, with a mature component model and flexible lifecyle, is a perfect platform for implementing Web 2.0 user interfaces with Ajax. This session explores using JSF and Ajax to create applications that act like desktop applications but run in a browser.

We'll start with a quick look at implementing basic Ajax in a JSF application. Then, once your bloodthirst has been slaked, we'll dive deeper into Ajaxian Faces dynamics with a form completion demo that requires its implementor to understand two simple, but vital facts about JSF.

If you're savvy, you probably use client-side validation to augment your server side validation logic, which parenthetically, is no no-brainer in either of the leading web application frameworks, JSF or Rails. But anyway, client-side validation is old school. All the cool developers nowadays use Ajax to implement realtime validation, where you sneak a trip to the server as an unwary user types into your input fields. But to accomplish that, we'll have to dive even deeper into JSF, with concerns such as accessing view state and accounting for client-side state saving.

All of this Ajax development is great fun, but most of it is best relegated to components and frameworks, which are the topics that will wrap up our session. We'll see how to keep your JavaScript separate from your JSF components and how to pass JSP tag attributes all the way through to JavaScript. Finally, we'll take a look at Ajax4jsf, a JSF component library with a tag library that blends Ajax into JSF in a natural, intuitive way without having to write JavaScript.

As web developers, we've been handcuffed long enough by the shackles of Web 1.0 development. Come to this session and see the brave new world of Web 2.0 development with one of the hottest web application frameworks.

By David Geary

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.

JSF has been out for nearly three years now, and in many respects, the JSF specification has become a bit long in the tooth. Fortunately, the open source community has picked up the ball in a big way. In this 2-session presentation, we will explore three open source projects based on JSF--Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4jsf-- that will propel you into the stratosphere of productivity.

Seam is a framework from JBoss that combines the JSF and EJB3.0/Hibernate 3.0 frameworks into one component model. That means you only have to learn one framework to build compelling web applications.

This is the first of a two-part session, where we'll focus mostly on the Seam framework.

By David Geary

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

In the second part of this 2-session presentation, we'll turn our attention to Facelets and how you can use this compelling display technology with Seam.

We will also discuss Ajax4jsf and demonstrate how you can use that framework to create rich, interactive user interfaces for your JSF-based web applications.

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.

In the early days of Java, application development with the AWT was relatively simple. You had to have a decent understanding of Java and AWT fundamentals, but once equipped with such knowledge, you could dive in and develop some impressive applications.

Ten years later, we have, in so many respects, gone significantly backwards. We've shoehorned technologies such as HTML into shoes for which they were never intended, and for our efforts, we have a mismatch of disparate technologies that one needs to knit together for a truly interactive web application.

This is the first session of a two-part presentation on the GWT, where I'll concentrate on GWT basics: implementing Ajax-enabled applications in Java, internationalization, testing, and remote procedure calls.

By David Geary

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

In this session, we'll dive deeper into the GWT and explore some of it's more advanced aspects, such as implementing custom widgets, deploying your application in a servlet container, and implementing drag and drop.

By Andrew Glover

Behavior-driven development, or BDD, has attracted a lot of attention a la RSpec in the Ruby community, but BDD's roots stem from JBehave, a Java based framework. In this session, we'll look at what BDD is and how it shifts the traditional testing vocabulary from being test-based to behavior-based.

Behavior-driven development, or BDD, has attracted a lot of attention a la RSpec in the Ruby community, but BDD's roots stem from JBehave, a Java based framework. In this session, we'll look at what BDD is and how it shifts the traditional testing vocabulary from being test-based to behavior-based.

By Andrew Glover

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. Given the automated nature of continuous integration spawned builds, software teams can now start to look at their build process as something more useful than a simple compile and test process.

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. Given the automated nature of continuous integration spawned builds, software teams can now start to look at their build process as something more useful than a simple compile and test process. Builds can be augmented with a series of Software Inspectors, which report on various aspects of software quality, such as code complexity, code duplication and code dependences to name a few. In this presentation, attendees will learn about the practice of continuous integration and the available CI tools for Java. Furthermore, Software Inspectors will be examined and attendees will learn how to interpret the data they provide and how to take actionable items based upon that data.

By Andrew Glover

It has been said that Grails is the addiction and Groovy is the drug. If you want to start building slick web applications rapidly with Grails it helps to start with a solid understanding of the Groovy language itself.

It has been said that Grails is the addiction and Groovy is the drug. If you want to start building slick web applications rapidly with Grails it helps to start with a solid understanding of the Groovy language itself. In this session, we'll go over the basics of the language by focusing on the core of Groovy. We'll look at Groovy collections, Groovy's interaction with Java, creating Classes in Groovy, Groovy's MOP and much much more. By the end, you'll be a Groovy expert ready to embrace all the language has to offer.

By Andrew Glover

Are your Ant builds giant XML files that scream for attention? Why not enhance your build process to act like a quality gate, much like a test suite would?

Are your Ant builds giant XML files that scream for attention? Why not enhance your build process to act like a quality gate, much like a test suite would? In this session, we'll look at managing 3rd party dependencies with Ivy and then add the power of Groovy to script in quality checks, such as monitoring complexity; plus, we'll look at how to create a customizable dashboard via Groovy.

By John Heintz

Java's Annotations provide a way to add data to program elements. Annotations are used to configure containers, describe persistence configuration, set security roles, and are defined by nearly every recent JSR standard. This presentation explains the processing options available for consuming Annotations and demonstrates the techniques with live code demonstrations.

The presentation: * introduces Annotations and how to create custom Annotations, * surveys the techniques that can add implementation effects from Annotations (code generation, bytecode transformation, runtime reflection), * demonstrates adding behavioral effect to an example with APT, Reflection, Javassist, and AspectJ, * wraps up with best practices for using and defining Annotations.

No prior experience is necessary, and attendees will learn how to define and to provide behavior for custom Annotations in their own systems.

By John Heintz

This presentation introduces REST, compares and contrasts REST with SOA and WS-*, and finally delves into some of the more subtle topics that affect RESTful systems.

This presentation is for beginners and advanced students alike. REST is introduced by answering these questions: * What are the properties and constraints that define a RESTful system? * How does REST relate to HTTP and SOAP? * What does a Resource-Oriented system look like, compared to an Object-Oriented system?

The presentation highlights seldom presented and more subtle RESTful topics: * REST (HTTP) vs SOAP, when to choose SOAP? Hint: message passing styles * What does optimistic locking look like on the Web? * What is a stateless application protocol? Or conversational vs application state explained.

Some of these topics have definitive answers and clear explanations. Other topics should generate lively discourse, everyone is welcome!

By John Heintz

In this session you will learn about the Glassbox open source troubleshooting and monitoring tool. Glassbox enable detection of common application problems such as database failures, slow operations, thread contention, and excessive distributed calls. Glassbox enables low overhead monitoring and troubleshooting without needing to "bake in" instrumentation up front.

Glassbox provides an intuitive Ajax Web interface, an automated installer and concise summaries of common problems out of the box. Glassbox focuses first on highlighting the underlying cause of a problem without requiring a person to sift through volumes of profiling information. Glassbox also supports customization and detailed analysis for deeper investigation. Under the covers, Glassbox uses JMX and Aspect-Oriented programming to discover applications, track performance, and automatically diagnose common problems in Java applications.

You will see how Glassbox can be extended easily (with XML, AspectJ and Spring AOP) to providing a useful foundation for customized application monitoring. Glassbox is open source and can be downloaded freely from http://www.glassbox.com/.

By Mark Johnson

Once you leave academic "hello world" projects, software development is full of unknowns which result in the high rate of project failure we see too often in industry. Reasons for a project failure will vary based on the stakeholder interviewed. This session will provide a software development risk framework and examples you can apply in your projects to reduce or at least soften the impact of failure.

The Software Development Risk Analysis techniques presentation examines several tools taken from the Six Sigma world to identify and manage risks with the objective to avoid failures or at least soften the impact of failure. Because software development is a team exercise this presentation is targeted towards everyone from Software Development managers to hands on developers. During the presentation we will apply risk management techniques to several sample (and typical) software development project problem areas.

By Mark Johnson

Validate that requirements are not missed during the design and development process by creating Requirements document test fixtures to clarify and validate the requirements between the end users, business analysts, architects, and developers early in the project.

The requirements test fixtures are then available throughout the project to validate that the implemented product is the same as documented requirements. Using RDDD can significantly reduce software development projects project duration, improve communication between all stakeholders, improve delivered quality, and customer satisfaction.

By Ramnivas Laddad

This session (part 1 of the two-part session) shows the core concepts in the Spring Framework -- the most popular lightweight container that recently crossed 1 million downloads.

In this session we discuss the need for the Spring way of creating enterprise application. We cover the core ideas such as beans, dependency injection, container configuration, proxy-based AOP, and portable abstraction layer. By the end of this session, you will have a clear idea on what Spring is and what it can do for you.

By Ramnivas Laddad

This session (the second part of the 2-part session) will cover advanced concepts in the Spring framework. While the core concepts in the first session will get you started with Spring, the advanced concepts in this session will make you effective at developing Spring-based applications.

In this session, we will cover advanced concepts such as factory bean, proxy bean, and factory method. We will also cover effective ways to test your Spring applications as well as extend Spring to meet your special requirements. We will do live coding to explain many concepts. By the end of this session, you will be ready to start using Spring (or if you have already started, be effective with it).

By Ramnivas Laddad

Domain-Driven Design (DDD) recommends dealing with complex software system using a domain model and preserving the model through implementation. A direct mapping between domain model and software artifacts creates simple to understand, inexpensive to implement, and easy to evolve systems. The DDD approach suggests ways to distill domain knowledge into a model and offers patterns to design and implement that model.

This session covers important DDD concepts such as entities, value objects, aggregates roots, modules, repositories and how to use those effectively in your enterprise application.

By Ramnivas Laddad

Specifying metadata using annotations has gained huge popularity since its introduction in Java 5. However, the story on consuming annotations isn't as clear. Reading and processing annotation is still a complex process often requiring you to understand byte-code manipulation tools and their low-level API. As a result, most developers shy away from using custom annotations, limiting their usages of annotations only those prescribed by frameworks. The result is missed opportunities for programming simplification. In this session, we explore how AOP can make it a simple task to consume annotation in a powerful manner.

This session explores many opportunities to consume annotations using Spring AOP and AspectJ. The examples discussed in this session cover a wide range from auditing, monitoring to security, transaction management, and policy enforcement. It also examines best practices in using annotations to avoid pre-processor like use of them.

By Jared Richardson

How do you keep a team scattered across time zones in sync?

It's difficult to keep a local team coordinated. When we add geographical distance to the equation, problems are immediately magnified. We'll talk about techniques that you can use to be sure everyone is sharing information and on the same page whether they're in the same office or in different time zones.

By Jared Richardson

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

This book provides a comprehensive look at the software life cycle and can be used to retool the way you, and your team, builds software. While we can't cover the entire book in nintey minutes, we can look how a holistic view of the software life cycle helps you improve your projects and makes your life easier.

By Jared Richardson

Throughout our software careers we learn habits from our coworkers, from books we've read, and occasionally, from conferences we attend. Much of our competence comes from the tips and tricks we pick up as we go.

In this session, learn five of the techniques I've borrowed along the way. We'll discuss The List, code reviews, code change notifications, daily meetings, and tech leads. These techniques are often abused, but when used properly they can make a huge difference in how you develop software. Take this opportunity to add these practices to your toolkit.

By Jason Rudolph

Grails is an open-source web application framework that's all about getting things done. Grails combines best-of-breed Java technologies (including Hibernate and Spring), convention over configuration, and the powerful and dynamic Groovy language. Together with these elements and Groovy's ability to seamlessly integrate with your existing Java code, Grails finally legitimizes rapid web application development for the Java platform.

In this presentation, we'll see first-hand how to use Grails to build a fully-functioning and flexible web application in minimal time. As we develop the application, we'll explore the Grails project structure, its MVC elements, and the power of dynamic methods. We'll see how Groovy's highly-expressive nature allows us to write concise code, and Grails' use of sensible defaults and convention-over-configuration save us from much of the coding and configuration we'd otherwise face with many traditional frameworks.

By Jason Rudolph

Have you seen someone develop a Rails or Grails application in a matter of minutes, only to later discover that their domain model and database schema followed conventions that are different from your existing systems? Or perhaps you're interested in using Grails, but you don't want to duplicate your existing Java domain classes in Groovy. In this session, we'll see how Grails makes it easy to hook into your pre-defined schemas or existing entity classes, while still getting all the rapid application development (RAD) goodness that Grails has to offer.

In an enterprise environment, you're no doubt surrounded by legacy schemas that pre-date Grails by many years, possibly even a decade or so. You want to develop web applications quickly with one of the next-gen frameworks, but there's no chance that management will agree to change all the schemas just so you can code your app using the conventions employed by the next big thing. However, we'll see that with a bit of Hibernate XML or annotations, we can easily wire together our Grails domain models to our existing schema and still get most of the RAD benefits of Grails, including the super-productive dynamic finders. We'll discuss how to deal with various relationship types, non-trivial primary keys, and other database-related challenges.

In another big business scenario, you may find that you already have EJB3 entity beans lying around, perhaps powering some back-end B2B applications. The time has come to build a web front-end for those applications, and you logically want to reuse your current domain classes. With a few simple steps, we'll see how to use those entity beans as your Grails domain classes, and how your EJB3 domain models suddenly get all the benefits of Grails scaffolding, highly-configurable validation rules, powerful Hibernate criteria builders, and more.

By Burr Sutter

At some point, code will be written, software tools will be acquired and systems will be built. Unfortunately the Java development world is a confused mess as it relates to a method of building a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based anything. Our objective is to answer the following questions: Should I use Web Services everywhere? Is an Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) useful and required? Should I be programming in the XML-based syntax of BPEL instead of Java? Do I need JBI and/or SCA? What Open Source implementations are available to solve SOA related challenges?

This session will dive into the actual patterns and code used to SOA "enable" your current applications and skills. Attendees gain insight into techniques and patterns that will allow the typical Struts, Spring & Hibernate developers to move toward the use of SOA. Most importantly, attendees leave this session with practical skills necessary to live in the new Service Oriented world. Students learn to leverage the capabilities of J2EE/Java EE as well as the most popular open source frameworks to create new enterprise integration applications.

By Burr Sutter

This session will be a deep dive into the capabilities of the open source JBoss Enterprise Service Bus 4.2 GA. An ESB is primarily categorized by its capabilties in the areas of protocol mediation/abstraction, transformation, orchestration, routing, endpoint registry, etc. Numerous live demos of ESB functionality.

We will describe in detail those capabilities which define an ESB such as protocol mediation, service registry, transformation, orchestration, content-based routing, and use of popular Enterprise Integration Patterns such as splitter, aggregator, wiretap, translator etc.