Northern Virginia Software Symposium

November 4 - 6, 2011 - Reston, VA


Sheraton Reston
11810 Sunrise Valley Drive
Reston, VA   20191
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NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in RestonNovember 1 - 3, 2013.
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Concurrency without pain in pure Java

Friday 1:15 PM - Venkat Subramaniam

Programming concurrency has turned into a herculean task. I call the traditional approach as the synchronized and suffer model. Fortunately, there are other approaches to concurrency and you can reach out to those directly from your Java code.

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Agile Engineering Practices

Friday 1:15 PM - Neal Ford

Most of the time when people talk about agile software development, they talk about project and planning practices and never mention actual development practices. This talk delves into best development practices for agile projects, covering all of its aspects.

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Busy Java Developer's Guide to Java 7

Friday 1:15 PM - Ted Neward

With the forthcoming release of Java7, a number of things come to fruition, both in the Java language and in the libraries, and it's important for Java developers to know what those features are, and how they change the game of writing Java code--or not.

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Economic Games in Software Projects

Friday 1:15 PM - Matthew McCullough

The full title of this talk reveals its grand aims: Game Theory and Software Development: Explaining Brinksmanship, Irrationality, and Other Selfish Sins

Once in a while, a topic, seemingly orthogonal to software development, presents a great opportunity to showcase how engineering can benefit from knowledge of seemingly more social disciplines. In this talk, the fundamental principles of economics' Game Theory are compared to often inexplicable behaviors and decisions we frequently observe in programming projects.

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What's new in Spring

Friday 1:15 PM - Craig Walls

In this session, I'll lead a guided tour through the latest that Spring has to offer. Whether you're a Spring veteran or a Spring newbie, there will be something new for nearly everyone.

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Collections for Concurrency

Friday 3:15 PM - Venkat Subramaniam

Traditional collections on the Java platform focused on providing thread-safety at the expense of performance or scalability. More modern data structures strive to provide performance without compromising thread-safety. Some of them require you to adopt to a different semantics or programming model. In this presentation we will explore some data structures that can help reach both thread-safety and reasonable performance.

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Cryptography on the JVM: Boot Camp

Friday 3:15 PM - Matthew McCullough

Does your application transmit customer information? Are there fields of sensitive customer data stored in your DB? Can your application be used on insecure networks? If so, you need a working knowledge of encryption and how to leverage Open Source APIs and libraries to make securing your data as easy as possible. Cryptography is quickly becoming a developer's new frontier of responsibility in many data-centric applications.

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Agile.next

Friday 3:15 PM - Neal Ford

Agile has matured to the point of mainstream success. Even large companies have discovered that it helps them build better quality software faster. But the agile practices that are mainstream today have been around for a long time. What is the next wave of innovation in the Agile world going to bring?

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NoXML: Spring for XML-Haters

Friday 3:15 PM - Craig Walls

In this presentation, we'll explore all of the ways to do bean wiring in Spring We'll take a pragmatic view of each style, evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, and applicability to varying circumstances.

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Build Your Own Technology Radar

Friday 5:00 PM - Neal Ford

A Technology Radar is a tool that forces you to organize and think about near term future technology decisions, both for you and your company.

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Testing with Spock

Friday 5:00 PM - Venkat Subramaniam

Spock is an awesome tool that exploits Groovy AST transformation to provide elegant, fluent syntax for writing automated unit tests and functional tests. In this presentation we will learn how to use Spock to unit test both Java and Groovy code.

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Simpler Cryptography with 3 JVM Libraries

Friday 5:00 PM - Matthew McCullough

Cryptography at first seems like a daunting topic. But after a basic intro and the leverage of the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE), it seems downright feasible to add encryption and decryption capabilities to your application.

Developers weren't satisfied with just the JCE and its plug-in concepts though. Over the last few years, framework architects have made strides in either wrapping or re-writing the approachable JCE in more convenient APIs and fluent interfaces that make effective and accurate crypto down right simple.

Explore three of these libraries -- Jasypt, BouncyCastle and KeyCzar -- and how they can be leveraged to make your next Java cryptography and data security effort a simple exercise and not a tribulation.

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Busy Java Developer's Guide to Guava

Friday 5:00 PM - Ted Neward

"The Google Guava project contains a host of new features/classes for use by the Java programmer. Intended as a drop-in supplement for the standard JDK APIs, Guava provides features like immutable and forwarding collections, some concurrency utilities, more support for primitives, and so on.

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Gradle: Bringing Engineering Back to Builds

Saturday 9:00 AM - Matthew McCullough

Gradle. Another build tool? Come on! But before you say that, take a look at the one you are already using.

Whether your current tool is Make, Rake, Ant, or Maven, Gradle has a lot to offer. It leverages a strong object model like Maven, but a mutable, not predetermined one. Gradle relies on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) lifecycle like Maven, but one that can be customized. Gradle offers imperative build scripting when you need it (like Ant), but declarative build approaches by default (like Maven). In short, Gradle believes that conventions are great -- as long as they are headed in the same direction you need to go. When you need to customize something in your build, your build tool should facilitate that with a smile, not a slap in the face. And customizations should be in a low-ceremony language like Groovy. Is all this too much to ask?

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Functional Thinking

Saturday 9:00 AM - Neal Ford

Learning the syntax of a new language is easy, but learning to think under a different paradigm is hard.

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Towards a Humane Interface—Aesthetics and Usability

Saturday 9:00 AM - Venkat Subramaniam

A successful application has to focus on three dimensions—value (business), design (engineering) and usability. Usability is not only about the wow factor. It is about making the application easier and intuitive to use. In this presentation we will learn the fundamentals of creating a usable application. We will look at some basic dos and don't. These will help you move forward from being a programmer to a good application developer.

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Securing Spring

Saturday 9:00 AM - Craig Walls

In this session, I'll show you how to secure your Spring application with Spring Security 3.0. You'll see hot to declare both request-oriented and method-oriented security constraints. And you'll see how SpEL can make simple work of expressing complex security rules.

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Effective Java Reloaded

Saturday 9:00 AM - Matt Stine

Even with the recent explosion in alternative languages for the JVM, the vast majority of us are still writing code in "Java the language" in order to put bread on the table. Proper craftsmanship demands that we write the best Java code that we can possibly write. Fortunately we have a guide in Joshua Bloch's Effective Java.

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Scala for the Intrigued

Saturday 11:00 AM - Venkat Subramaniam

Scala is a statically typed, fully OO, hybrid functional language that provides highly expressive syntax on the JVM. It is great for pattern matching, concurrency, and simply writing concise code for everyday tasks. If you're a Java programmer intrigued by this language and are interested in exploring further, this section is for you.

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4 Practical Uses for Domain Specific Languages

Saturday 11:00 AM - Neal Ford

Domain Specific Langauges seems like a cool idea, but where's the payoff? This talk provides an overview of how to build both internal and external DSLs (including the state of the art tools), stopping along the way to show how this is practical to your day job.

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Developing Social-Ready Web Applications

Saturday 11:00 AM - Craig Walls

Businesses are increasingly recognizing the value of connecting with their customers on a more personal level. Companies can utilize social networking to transition from "Big Faceless Corporation" to "Friend" by taking their wares to the online communities where their customers are. In this age of social media, those communities are found at social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In this session, you'll learn how to build applications that interact with the various social networks. We'll also look at Spring Social, a new feature in the Spring portfolio that enables integration with social networks in Spring-based applications.

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The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Akka

Saturday 1:30 PM - Ted Neward

With the rise of multi-core processors, and their growing ubiquity (on client machines, to say nothing of the server machines on which Java applications most frequently execute), the need to "program concurrently" has risen from "nice-to-have" to "mandatory" requirement, and unfortunately the traditional threading-and-locking model is just too complicated for most Java developers--even the brightest of the lot--to keep track of with any degree of reliability. As a result, numerous new solutions are emerging, each of them with their own strengths and weaknesses, leaving the Java developer in a bit of a quandary as to which to examine.

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Rediscovering JavaScript

Saturday 1:30 PM - Venkat Subramaniam

JavaScript is one of those very powerful languages that is often misunderstood and underutilized. It's quite popular, yet there's so much more we can do with it.

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Git Workshop (Bring A Laptop)

Saturday 1:30 PM - Matthew McCullough

Git is a version control system you may have been hearing a bit about lately. But simply hearing more about it may not be enough to convince you of its value. Getting hands on experience is what really counts. In this workshop, you'll bring your Windows, Mac or Linux laptop and walk through downloading, installing, and using Git in a collaborative fashion.

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The Seven Wastes of Software Development

Saturday 1:30 PM - Matt Stine

One of the first principles of lean software development is the elimination of waste. Shigeo Shingo identified seven types of manufacturing waste in his "A Study of the Toyota Production System." Later, the Poppendieck's translated these to seven wastes of software development.

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Emergent Design

Saturday 1:30 PM - Neal Ford

Emergent design is a big topic in the agile architecture and design community. This session covers the theory behind emergent design and shows examples of how you can implement this important concept.

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Spock - Unit Test and Prosper

Saturday 1:30 PM - Ken Sipe

Spock is a groovy based testing framework that leverages all the "best practices" of the last several years taking advantage of many of the development experience of the industry. So combine Junit, BDD, RSpec, Groovy and Vulcans... and you get Spock!

This is a significant advancement in the world of testing.

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Automated testing tools and techniques for JavaScript

Saturday 3:15 PM - Venkat Subramaniam

Programmers often complain that it is hard to automate unit and acceptance tests for JavaScript. Testability is a design issue and with some discipline and careful design we can realize good automated tests.

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Busy Java Developer's Guide to Android: Basics

Saturday 3:15 PM - Ted Neward

Android is a new mobile development platform, based on the Java language and tool set, designed to allow developers to get up to speed writing mobile code on any of a number of handsets quickly. In this presentation, we'll go over the basic setup of the Android toolchain, how to deploy to a device, and basic constructs in the Android world.

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Getting Agile Right!

Saturday 3:15 PM - Ken Sipe

Whether you are just getting started, or you’ve made an attempt and well… it could be better… a lot better, this session is for you. Ken has been working on Agile projects as a coach and mentor for a number of years. Come discover the common reasons teams fail to get it right. Bring your own challenges and lets discuss. This is set to be an engaging and illuminating discussion.

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HTML 5 Overview

Saturday 3:15 PM - Brian Sletten

People are confused about the status of HTML 5. Is it ready? Is it not? What is part of the spec and what isn't? We'll talk about the situation in the "HTML 5 and the Kitchen Sink" discussion, but as always, the proof is in the pudding. We will introduce the most exciting new features of HTML 5 and its related technologies and build examples that use them.

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Rock SOLID Software

Saturday 3:15 PM - Matt Stine

Object-oriented programming was formally introduced in the 1970's with the advent of Smalltalk. C++ took it mainstream in the 1980's, and Java carried it to the next level in the 1990's. Unfortunately, if you examine the vast majority of Java codebases, what you'll find is a bunch of C-style structs (a.k.a. JavaBeans) and functions. As these codebases grow, a number of design smells can potentially crop up, which in turn cripple our ability to respond to change. We need SOLID principles that we can apply to keep our software clean and malleable.

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Building Workflow Applications with StonePath

Saturday 3:15 PM - David Bock

Stonepath is a workflow modeling methodology with its roots in a long-running Java project at the U.S. State Department. Starting with techniques for deriving requirements/user stories from your users, user interface patterns, state-and-task based workflow modeling, and some domain modeling ideas, you can build comprehensive 'Enterprise' applications for managing aspects of workflow and group coordination.

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jQuery

Sunday 9:00 AM - Nathaniel Schutta

Sure, Ajax might not be the hardest thing you'll have to do on your current project, but that doesn't mean we can't use a little help here and there. While there are a plethora of excellent choices in the Ajax library space, jQuery is fast becoming one of the most popular. In this talk, we'll see why. In addition to it's outstanding support for CSS selectors, dirt simple DOM manipulation, event handling and animations, jQuery also supports a rich ecosystem of plugins that provide an abundance of top notch widgets. Using various examples, this talk will help you understand what jQuery can do so you can see if it's right for your next project.

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Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST I

Sunday 9:00 AM - Brian Sletten

The first in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.

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Continuous Delivery Best Practices

Sunday 9:00 AM - Ken Sipe

There is a new “movement” in software development circles called DevOps. It is about the automation of development best practices as well as the automation of the deployment pipeline. Answer this question, “How long does it take your organization or team to push 1 line code of change into production?” That’s what this session is all about.

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Executable Specifications: Automating Your Requirements Document with Geb and Spock

Sunday 9:00 AM - Matt Stine

One of the hallmarks of lean software development is the elimination of waste. Several of the key wastes in software development revolve around incomplete, incorrect, or obsolete documentation, especially documentation of requirements. One effective means of ensuring that your requirements documentation is complete, correct, and up-to-date is to make it executable. That sounds nice, but how do we get it done, especially in the world of modern, cross-browser web applications?

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Going Mobile with jQuery

Sunday 11:00 AM - Nathaniel Schutta

The word just came down from the VP - you need a mobile app and you need it yesterday. It needs to be polished and have that design stuff too. Oh and it needs to be on all the major platforms in time for the big marketing push next month. After a moment of panic, you wonder if it's too late to become a plumber but don't worry, there's hope! More and more developers are falling in love with the "write less do more" library and for good reason; it simplifies the job of today's front end engineer. But did you know jQuery could also help you with your mobile needs as well? That's right, jQuery Mobile is a touch optimized framework designed to provide a common look and feel across a wide variety of today's mot popular platforms. In this session, we'll take a look at all that jQuery Mobile has to offer and we'll convert a native application to an HTML5, jQuery Mobile masterpiece.

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Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST II

Sunday 11:00 AM - Brian Sletten

The second in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.

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Code Archaeology

Sunday 11:00 AM - Matt Stine

Feature requests are steadily pouring in, but the team cannot respond to them. They are paralyzed. The codebase on which the company has "bet the business" is simply too hard to change. It's your job to clean up the mess and get things rolling again. Where do you begin? Your first task is to get the lay of the land by applying a family of techniques we'll call "Code Archaeology."

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Busy Java Developer's Guide to Games

Sunday 11:00 AM - Ted Neward

Games? What do games have to do with good business-oriented applications? Turns out, a lot of interesting little tidbits of user-interface, distribution, and emergence, found normally in the games we play, have direct implications on the way enterprise applications can (or should) be built.

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Pragmatic Architecture

Sunday 2:15 PM - Ted Neward

Building an application is not the straightforward exercise it used to be. Decisions regarding which architectural approaches to take (n-tier, client/server), which user interface approaches to take (Smart/rich client, thin client, Ajax), even how to communicate between processes (Web services, distributed objects, REST)... it's enough to drive the most dedicated designer nuts. This talk discusses the goals of an application architecture and why developers should concern themselves with architecture in the first place. Then, it dives into the meat of the various architectural considerations available; the pros and cons of JavaWebStart, ClickOnce, SWT, Swing, JavaFX, GWT, Ajax, RMI, JAX-WS, , JMS, MSMQ, transactional processing, and more.

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Resource-Oriented Architectures : RDF/SPARQL

Sunday 2:15 PM - Brian Sletten

The fourth of a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.

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Building Maintainable Javascript with Coffeescript

Sunday 2:15 PM - David Bock

CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath all of those embarrassing braces and semicolons, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous object model at its heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.

The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, and runs in every JavaScript implementation.

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Requirements and Estimating - state of the art

Sunday 2:15 PM - Peter Bell

A chance for experience agile developers to learn and share state of the art tips for improving requirements gathering and project estimation.

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Usability 101

Sunday 2:15 PM - Nathaniel Schutta

Day in and day out we are subjected to poorly designed applications. From those we experience directly to the time we waste waiting on others who are struggling with systems that seem like they were built to hinder the user. It doesn't have to be like this and many users are waking up and demanding better applications. Are you prepared to deliver? After this workshop, you will be. When you're done, you'll have the tools you need to make sure your application helps your users kick ass!

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Enterprise Security API library from OWASP

Sunday 2:15 PM - Ken Sipe

When it comes to cross cutting software concerns, we expect to have or build a common framework or utility to solve this problem. This concept is represented well in the Java world with the loj4j framework, which abstracts the concern of logging, where it logs and the management of logging. The one cross cutting software concern which seems for most applications to be piecemeal is that of security. Security concerns include certification generation, SSL, protection from SQL Injection, protection from XSS, user authorization and authentication. Each of these separate concerns tend to have there own standards and libraries and leaves it as an exercise for the development team to cobble together a solution which includes multiple needs.... until now... Enterprise Security API library from OWASP.

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Architectural Kata Workshop

Sunday 4:00 PM - Ted Neward

Fred Brooks said, "How do we get great designers? Great designers design, of course." So how do we get great architects? Great architects architect. But architecting a software system is a rare opportunity for the non-architect.

The kata is an ancient tradition, born of the martial arts, designed to give the student the opportunity to practice more than basics in a semi-realistic way. The coding kata, created by Dave Thomas, is an opportunity for the developer to try a language or tool to solve a problem slightly more complex than "Hello world". The architectural kata, like the coding kata, is an opportunity for the student-architect to practice architecting a software system.

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Hacking Your Brain for Fun and Profit

Sunday 4:00 PM - Nathaniel Schutta

The single most important tool in any developers toolbox isn't a fancy IDE or some spiffy new language - it's our brain. Despite ever faster processors with multiple cores and expanding amounts of RAM, we haven't yet created a computer to rival the ultra lightweight one we carry around in our skulls - in this session we'll learn how to make the most of it. We'll talk about why multitasking is a myth, the difference between the left and the right side of your brain, the importance of flow and why exercise is good for more than just your waist line.

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Resource-Oriented Architectures : RDFa

Sunday 4:00 PM - Brian Sletten

The fifth in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.

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How to Select and Adopt a Technology

Sunday 4:00 PM - Peter Bell

What's the point attending a conference unless you do something with the knowledge you gain? In this session we look at practical strategies for selecting new technologies and proven approaches for driving adoption back at the office.

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