Developing a rich user interface for web applications is both exciting and challenging. HTML 5 has closed the gaps and once again brought new vibe into programming the web tier. Come to this session to learn how you can make use of HTML 5 to create stellar applications.

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Workshop Requirements

Attendees are expected to pair up and work on the labs. Software requirements:

Latest version of your favorite browser (suggest having at least two different browsers, for example from Firefox, Chrome, Safari,…) so you can see the difference in support and program to it.

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.

In this presentation we'll deep dive into the capabilities and strengths of this prominent language of the web.

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.

In this presentation we'll learn how to automate the testing of JavaScript using both TDD and BDD tools.

Alternative databases continue to establish their role in the technology stack of the future—and for many, the technology stack of the present. Making mature engineering decisions about when to adopt new products is not easy, and requires that we learn about them both from an abstract perspective and from a very concrete one as well. If you are going to recommend a NoSQL database for a new project, you're going to have to look at code.

In this talk, we'll examine three important contenders in the NoSQL space: Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4J. We'll review their data models, scaling paradigms, and query idioms. Most importantly, we'll work through the exercise of modeling a real-world problem with each database, and look at the code and queries we'd use to implement real product features. Come to this session for a thorough and thoroughly practical smackdown between three important NoSQL products.

When you want to measure fractions of a millimeter, you get a micrometer. When you want to measure centimeters, you get a ruler. When you want to measure kilometers, you might use a laser beam. The abstract task is the same in all cases, but the tools differ significantly based on the size of the measurement.

Likewise, there are some computations that can be done quickly on data structures that fit into memory. Some can't fit into memory, but will fit on the direct-attached disk of a single computer. But when you've got many terabytes or even petabytes of data, you need tooling adapted to the scale of the task. Enter Hadoop.

Hadoop is a widely-used open source framework for storing massive data sets in distributed clusters of computers and efficiently distributing computational tasks around the cluster. Come learn about the Hadoop File System (HDFS), the MapReduce pattern and its implementation, and the broad ecosystem of tools, products, and companies that have grown up around this ground-breaking project.

Neo4j is an open-source, enterprise-class database with a conventional feature set and a very unconventional data model. Like the databases we're already used to, it offers support for Java, ACID transactions, and a feature-rich query language. But before you get too comfortable, you have to wrap your mind around its most important feature: Neo4j is a graph database, built precisely to store graphs efficiently and traverse them more performantly than relational, document, or key/value databases ever could.

Neo4j is an obvious fit to anyone who thinks they have a graph problem to solve, but this is not many people. It turns out that the most interesting property of Neo4j is its architectural agenda. It wants you to think of the entire world as a graph—as a set of connected information resources. Steeped in the thinking of resource oriented architecture, this NoSQL database wants to change the way you look at your world, and unlock new value in your data as a result.

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.

The REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architectural style has emerged as a winning strategy for building scalable, flexible, resilient systems that lead with an information focus. Far from being the simple “Web Services through URLs” idea many people have about them, REST-based systems require a new perspective, a fair amount of consideration and the discipline to look beyond simple point-to-point interactions.

The benefits are exciting and provide a gateway to a whole new world of information technology. This first talk will be an introductory session covering the basics of the REST architectural style.

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.

People already familiar with REST (or who have attended the first session) will be walked through the deeper topics of building Level 3 Hypermedia-based RESTful systems, security, content negotiation, etc.

The third 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.

The move to a good REST API yields an explosive combination of options due to content-negotiation and arbitrary workflows. At the same time, the uniform interface you project (representations, how you respond to verbs, response codes, etc.) becomes your contract with your clients. The API itself becomes a completely transportable, reusable bit of organizational knowledge when done well. Testing it sufficiently will give you a safety net but may drive you crazy unless you do it right. We will walk through the use of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to test these kinds of APIs.

We will highlight the problems of sufficiently testing REST APIs while providing a rich and relatively straight-forward solution to the problem. We will use a Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) tool like Cucumber to establish reusable steps and comprehensive, but lightweight testing strategies for testing REST APIs.

This talk will not be an introduction to REST. If you have come to the REST I or REST II talk, or have a good understanding, it should be very accessible.

Some systems are too large to be understood entirely by any one human mind. They are composed of a diverse array of individual components capable of interacting with each other and adapting to a changing environment. As systems, they produce behavior that differs in kind from the behavior of their components. Complexity Theory is an emerging discipline that seeks to describe such phenomena previously encountered in biology, sociology, economics, and other disciplines.

Beyond new ways of looking at ant colonies, fashion trends, and national economies, complexity theory promises powerful insights to software development. The Internet—perhaps the most valuable piece of computing infrastructure of the present day—may fit the description of a complex system. Large corporate organizations in which developers are employed have complex characteristics. In this session, we'll explore what makes a complex system, what advantages complexity has to offer us, and how to harness these in the systems we build.

Ratpack is a hyper-lightweight, Groovy-based web framework for developing and deploying simple apps in a hurry. Like its high-achieving cousin Gaelyk, it provides Groovy developers with a way to create web apps without days of iteration zero setup time.

In this talk, we'll look over Ratpack's very simple structure and live-code a small, practical example application. We'll look at how to evolve simple controller logic, how to manage templates, how to persist data, and how to deploy Ratpack applications to the web. The Java world needs ways to build small applications in a hurry, and Ratpack is the latest way to do it!

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.

The Web of Documents we are so familiar with is being extended with the technologies of the Semantic Web. Information will be freed from its containers and connected regardless of where it comes from. Building on the concepts of REST services and the Web Architecture, we will introduce the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as the basis of a new collection of tools for information sharing and integration. Once the information is woven together, we will want to query it and produce new information resources with technologies like the SPARQL query language.

People already familiar with REST and the Web (or who have attended the REST sessions) will be given both conceptual and technical examples of how and why these technologies are laying the foundation of future information systems.

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.

Once we have a flexible and extensible data model like RDF, we will want to find ways to weave it into our documents to make them easier to organize, find and extract value from on the Web. This talk will highlight techniques for adopting RDFa but will also motivate attendees to dig deeper by showing them how it is already being used by the biggest names on the Web. Improve your search results and allow your customers to leverage relevant information for their own purposes.

You understand how important it is to be on the Web. Come learn how important it is to be on the Web of Data.

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.

In his foreward to the first edition, Guy Steele writes about the importance of learning three aspects of any language: grammar, vocabulary, and idioms. Unfortunately many programmers stop learning after mastering the first two. Effective Java is your guide to understanding idiomatic Java programming.

Effective Java is organized into 78 standalone “items,” all of which will be impossible to cover in one session. Instead I've chosen a subset of the most important techniques and practices that are commonly missed by today's Java programmers. You'll pick from a menu and decide where we'll head. Regardless of the path we take, you'll leave this session thoroughly equipped to write better Java code tomorrow!

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.

Effective Java is organized into 78 standalone “items,” all of which will be impossible to cover in one session. Instead I've chosen a subset of the most important techniques and practices that are commonly missed by today's Java programmers.

*In Part II of this session, we'll cover those items we were unable to reach during Part I. We'll follow that up with a dive into the new features available in Java 7, describing new idioms for effective Java programming in the following areas:

Strings in switch statements
Enhanced syntax for numeric literals
Improved exception handling
ARM (automatic resource management) blocks
Type inference for construction of parameterized types (the “diamond” operator)

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.

Technology changes, it's a fact of life. And while many developers are attracted to the challenge of change, many organizations do a particularly poor job of adapting. We've all worked on projects with, ahem, less than new technologies even though newer approaches would better serve the business. But how do we convince those holding the purse strings to pony up the cash when things are “working” today? At a personal, how do we keep up with the change in our industry?

This talk will explore ways to stay sharp as a software professional. We'll talk about how a technology radar can help you stay marketable (and enjoying your career) and how we can use the same technique to help our companies keep abreast of important changes in the technology landscape. Of course it isn't enough to just be aware, we have to drive change - but how? This talk will consider ways we can influence others and lead change in our organizations.

Successful projects require any number of practices but if you don't know who you're building it for or what you're supposed to build, failure is a distinct possibility. How do we capture the who and what? Personas and story maps are two effective techniques that you can leverage. After discussing the basics, we'll break into small groups and you'll have a chance to actually try building a set of personas as well as a story map.

Personas are a time tested technique to help teams understand their users and facilitate building the right interface. While personas are often backed by extensive ethnographic research, they don't require months and months of effort.

Of course just knowing who we're building for is only part of the picture, we have to know what our users are trying to do. Wether you favor use cases, user stories or more traditional requirements documents, at the end of the day our customers are using our application to further some other goal.

You're all over jQuery - you write plugins in your sleep - and before that, you were a Prototype ninja. Your team treats JavaScript like a first class citizen, you've even written more tests than Kent Beck. Is that all there is in the land of the JavaScript developer? Believe it or not, the JavaScript party hasn't stopped. What other libraries are out there? What do they offer? This talk will survey the field of modern JavaScript libraries getting you up to speed on what's new. We'll dive in just deep enough to whet your appetite on a wide variety of libraries such as Backbone, Underscore, Zepto and more.

So you think you've picked up enough JavaScript to be dangerous, but feel like the whole prototypical language thing is still a mystery. In this session, we'll go from basic JavaScript to advanced JavaScript. We'll discuss and code modular JavaScript with CommonJS. We'll look into the details of a prototype language and discuss things like parasitic inheritance. We'll also look at JavaScript libraries that will help you get the most out of JavaScript - not jQuery, but a library like UnderscoreJS and SugarJS.

This is a fast paced session meant to bring you up to speed with the latest and greatest JavaScript techniques and tools. Whether you're building client side JavaScript with HTML5 or Appcelerator Titanium, or server-side JavaScript with node.js, you'll come away with knowledge and patterns for how the pro's use JavaScript for building real apps.

There's a bevy of options for developing mobile apps. If you're looking at cross-platform solutions, there's a multitude of options to choose from. In this session we'll explore the three basic categories for developing mobile apps: native, cross-platform-to-native, and mobile web. We'll discuss the sweet spot for each of these three approaches and the benefits and drawbacks of each. Technologies discussed include Android, iOS, HTML5/CSS3, Phonegap, Titanium, and jQuery Mobile.

Creating a web site, web app, or native app for mobile use presents a special set of challenges. Specifically, developers and designers should be zoned into the techniques for usability - and usability can be enhanced greatly by taking performance elements into consideration up-front.
In this session, we explore the many performance tips and tricks you can employ to make your website or web app or native app shine on mobile devices. This is an advanced course that discusses issues such as image loading, JavaScript performance, and wireless latency.

After almost a decade and several significant releases, Spring has gone a long way from challenging the then-current Java standards to becoming the de facto enterprise standard itself. Although the Spring programming model continues to evolve, it still maintains backward compatibility with many of its earlier features and paradigms. Consequently, there's often more than one way to do anything in Spring. How do you know which way is the right way?

In this session, we'll explore several ways that Spring has changed over the years and look at the best approaches when working with the latest versions of Spring.

For a long while, we've built applications pretty much the same way. Regardless of the frameworks (or even languages and platforms) employed, we've packaged up our web application, deployed it to a server somewhere, and asked our users to point their web browser at it.

But now we're seeing a shift in not only how applications are deployed, but also in how they're consumed. The cost and hassle of setting up dedicated servers is driving more applications into the cloud. Meanwhile, our users are on-the-go more than ever, consuming applications from their mobile devices more often than a traditional desktop browser. And even the desktop user is expecting a more interactive experience than is offered by simple page-based HTML sites.

With this shift comes new programming models and frameworks. It also involves a shift in how we think about our application design. Standing up a simple HTML-based application is no longer good enough.

In this session, we'll discuss what the next generation of applications looks like, exploring such things as the mobile web and cloud computing. We'll also dig into some of the technologies and practices such as REST, OAuth, and JavaScript microframeworks that enable us to move forward.

In this session, we're going to combine the magic of Spring Boot and the magic of Spring Data to yield something even more powerful. You'll see how to quickly build an application's persistence layer, whether it stores data in a RDBMS, Mongo, Neo4j, or several other popular data stores. You'll also see how to create a functioning REST API with nothing more than an interface and a domain type.

Spring Boot dramatically simplifies application development with Spring. But before Spring Boot came along, Spring Data was already making developers' lives easy when it comes to working with data. When combined, Spring Data and Spring Boot can make data persistence the easiest part of your application.

A little old lady once challenged a well-known scientist’s explanation on the structure of the universe, countering that the world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise. The scientist rebutted the little old lady’s challenge with one of his own by asking what the tortoise was standing on. The little old lady’s sly reply was that it’s, “turtles all the way down.” So too is software architecture “turtles all the way down”.

In this session, we cover a broad range of topics that include challenging traditional practices of software architecture, examining what it takes to bring down the ivory tower, probing the paradoxical aspects of architecture’s goal, and investigating the inextricable link between temporal decisions and structural flexibility. From the highest level applications and services to the code that exists in the bowels of the system, and everything in between, we explore how an effective software architecture must be turtles all the way down. In the end, we will all have gained deep insight to the value of agile architecture.

OSGi was once heralded as a contender for most important technology of the decade. Today, most developers have heard of OSGi, but few are using it to develop their enterprise software applications.Is OSGi failing? Who is using it? And what exactly are its benefits?

In this session, we'll explain the benefits of OSGi, and show that it's not just for the middleware vendor. We'll learn how you can use OSGi without making significant changes to how you write your software applications. We'll explore the OSGi ecosystem, including platforms that support OSGi. Through code examination, we'll see how the Spring framework allows us to leverage OSGi in a non-invasive way. We'll discover how OSGi encourages Polyglot programming on the Java platform. And we'll take a brief glimpse into the future of modularity on the Java platform. You'll walk away with a much better understanding of OSGi, its strengths and benefits, how to use it effectively, as well as the myths surrounding its use.

Modularity is coming to the Java platform! Java 8 will introduce the Jigsaw module system. OSGi is here today. Don’t wait to start designing modular software. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need a framework or a new runtime to start building modular software applications. You can start today. Learn how!

In this session, we'll examine what it means to develop modular software on the Java platform. We'll examine the goals and benefits of modular software, and explore the patterns of modular architecture that help us develop modular software systems. With just a few easy steps, we'll see how to transform our software from a huge monolith to an extensible system of collaborating software modules. By examining an existing software system, we'll see first hand how we can increase software modularity with minimal disruption. You'll walk away not just with a much deeper understanding of the benefits of modular software, but also a migration roadmap for refactoring existing applications to increase their modularity. In other words, you'll see how to get ready today for the application platform of tomorrow.

We know agile methods are proven on small teams, but really…almost any process works with a team of one. As the team scales, however, the challenges mount. In this session, we focus on proven practices that help large software development teams in excess of 100 developers maintain agility. We also explore how to scale agile across the enterprise.

Come learn about ways to increase transparency on large projects, structure the development team, garner the important feedback you need from customers, and avoid the lack of rhythm so common on large teams. We’ll explore how large teams can conduct effective code reviews, maintain a consistent architectural vision, take advantage of automation, and build a development process that is sustainable on large teams. In lieu of focusing on specific agile methods in this session, we turn our attention to practices that the development team can leverage today to get started on the road to increased agility.

Winston Churchill famously said, “First we shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us.” He was talking about the reconstruction of the House of Parliament, which was damaged in a bombing raid in World War II. There was a debate about how to shape the chamber to best accommodate the deliberative activity of the body that met in it. Churchill was talking about buildings, but it turns out his insight is a very general one indeed.

Developers are constantly debating their choices of language, platform, editor, methodology, and even where to put the curly braces. The robust internal dialog in community is a healthy thing, but our debates are often focused on the wrong topics. Have you ever compared languages by performance benchmarks? Platforms by alleged claims of developer productivity? Methodologies by feature velocity? There is a very good chance you're doing it wrong.

Rather than focus on the material content of our debates—language performance, editor productivity, methodological velocity—we should take Churchill's advice and think about the form of our choices. How will our choice of language influence the way we solve future problems? What assumptions does our methodology make about the nature of work? How will our choice of database affect the kinds of problems we think of as solvable?

Drawing on lessons from building architecture, literature, music, the visual arts, and even software itself, we'll learn the priority of interpreting the form of things before attempting to understand their content. You may never look at software architecture the same way again.

Gradle is a compelling new build tool that incorporates the lessons learned from a decade of Ant and Maven. More than just a compromise between declarative and imperative build formats, or between convention and configuration, Gradle is a sophisticated software development platform that simple builds easy and complex, highly automated continuous software delivery pipelines possible to build. Using its extensible APIs and expressive DSL, you're equipped to build your next build.

Bring your laptop to this session for the following:

Build a Java project
Resolve transitive dependencies
Run unit tests
Build a Groovy project
Create multi-project, polyglot builds
Wrap your build with a repeatable version of Gradle
Extend Gradle with custom tasks
See the plugin architecture

Mutability is something we're quite used to in Java. Sharing is a good thing. However, shared mutability is pure devil's work. If we remove shared mutability, all the problems of concurrent go away. In practice, however, it's hard to completely get rid of shared mutability. This is where STM comes in with managed shared mutable variables. In this presentation we will take an example driven approach to dive deep into STM, look at what it has to offer, explore different implementations, and how we can design concurrent applications without any explicit locks.

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In this session, we're going to start with the basics of how to setup Spring for developing web applications. With that foundation set we'll quickly move into the nuts and bolts of developing web applications that leverage the capabilities offered by Spring MVC, including several new features introduced in recent releases, up to and including Spring 4.0.

From the very beginning, Spring has included Spring MVC, a web framework built around the Spring Framework. Originally based on a rich hierarchy of controller classes, Spring MVC served developers well, but began to look a little long in the tooth compared to other web frameworks.

Fast-forward to 2014. With Spring 4.0, Spring MVC is vastly different than its 1.0 namesake. The annotation-driven programming model has been improved, making it more powerful, more flexible, and incredibly simple to work with.

In this session, I'll show you how to secure your Spring application with Spring Security 3.2. You'll see how 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.

Although we may invite guests into our homes and give someone a ride in our car, we locks and alarms on our homes and our cars to keep uninvited and malicious visitors out. Similarly, we allow people to use the applications that we develop, but we probably want to control the access that they have.

Security is an important aspect of any application. And while we could program security rules into the web controllers and methods in our application, we'd find ourselves cluttering our business logic with repetitive security code. Security is a cross-cutting concern–begging to be handled with aspect-oriented techniques.

Spring Security is an authentication and access-control framework based on Spring that provides security aspects. With Spring Security, you can declare who is allowed to access your application and what they're allowed to see, keeping your application logic focused and uncluttered with security details.

In this session, we'll look at OAuth, focusing on OAuth 2, from the perspective of an application that consumes an OAuth-secured API as well as see how to use OAuth to secure your own APIs.

Web security is nothing new. As users of the web, we're all accustomed to entering our usernames and fumbling to recall our passwords when trying to access private data on one of the many online services we use. But while traditionally web security could be described as a two-party process between a web application and a user, the modern web involves applications that seek to access other applications on behalf of their users. This presents some new challenges in keeping a user's sensitive data secure while still allowing a the third party application to access it.

OAuth is an open standard for authorization, supported by many online services, that allows one application to access a user's data in another application, all while giving the user control of what information is shared.

Much is said today by the software methodology “talking heads” about the need for organizations to “go lean.” The question is, what does it mean to go lean? Is this the job of IT management? Or is it the job of the practicing software developer? And furthermore, does this simply mean the adoption of of another set of processes and procedures? Or is it something entirely different?

Ultimately, going lean simply means removing all of the impediments that prevent our organizations from achieving more of “the goal.” While that goal may differ from context to context, for the vast majority of us that means “making more money,” by improving our efficiency at moving from, as the Poppendieck's have so aptly said, from “concept to cash.”

While a great many of us do not have the role power necessary to spur top-down organizational change, there are many practical things each of us can do to bring the power of “going lean” to our teams. As we apply these principles and practices to our day-to-day work, we can build the credibility necessary to become change agents.

In their books, the Poppendieck's have helpfully summarized lean software development into seven principles:

Eliminating Waste
Building Quality In
Creating Knowledge
Deferring Commitment
Delivering Fast
Respecting People
Optimizing the Whole

In this talk we'll walk through each of these principles and examine how we as individual contributors and software teams can make practical, actionable changes within our own spheres of influence that will ultimately help us to deliver more value to our organizations.

We are far from the early days of ugly HTML. We have sophisticated visualization tools available to us now to help our users consume complex data in attractive and informative ways.

Come hear how you can adopt these visualization systems (calling them libraries is inappropriate) today.

This talk will introduce:

D3.js
RGraph
SVG in the Browser
Highcharts
Raphael
Reusable widgets from the Simile Project

Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.

In this talk, we will explore decision making pathologies and their remedies in individual, team, and organizational dimensions. We'll consider how our own cognitive limitations can lead us to to make bad decisions as individuals, and what we might do to compensate for those personal weaknesses. We'll learn how a team can fall into decisionmaking dysfunction, and what techniques a leader might employ to healthy functioning to an afflicted group. We'll also look at how organizational structure and culture can discourage quality decision making, and what leaders to swim against the tide.

Software teams spend a great deal of time making decisions that place enormous amounts of capital on the line. Team members and leaders owe it to themselves to learn how to make them well.

I call the JDK concurrency API as the synchronize and suffer model. Fortunately, you don't have to endure that today. You have some nice options, brought to prominence on the JVM by Scala and Clojure.

In this workshop, learn how to program with Actors and STM using Akka, a powerful and popular library created using Scala but usable from any language on the JVM. You have a choice to pick the language you like in this workshop, and learn how to use these powerful concurrency models.

Wonder what all the fuss is about HTML5? This session will show you how to leverage HTML5 in the applications you are building today. We'll start with a gentle overview describing just what HTML5 is all about and then we'll delve into the details. We'll look at the new elements HTML5 brings to the table, why canvas isn't just something you find in the art department, how geolocation can find Waldo and much much more.

After a brief overview, we'll talk all about feature detection then jump into web forms. We'll discuss the new elements that HTML5 brings to our toolbox. After a spin around the canvas API, we'll touch on geolocation, local storage/offline and finish up web sockets.

Workshop Requirements

For this workshop you should have:

Laptop (optionally with git installed)
Text editor or IDE
One or more “modern” (Chrome, Safari, etc) browser

Before the workshop, take a minute to setup the code somewhere on your laptop. The code is on GitHub:

https://github.com/ntschutta/html5_workshop

You can clone the repo from there or simply download a zip if you prefer. That's it! See you in Florida!

This session will teach you best practices and patterns for doing Continuous Delivery / Continuous Deployment in Cloud environments. You will learn how to handle schema migrations, maintain dev/prod parity, manage configuration and scaling.

This session will use Heroku as an example platform but the patterns could be implemented anywhere.

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.

We will go through a rapid overview of the language, look at its key strengths and capabilities, and see how you can use this language for your day-to-day programming. This session will be coding intensive, so be ready for some serious Scala syntax and idioms.

There's a ton of options for deploying to the cloud right now. Heroku and Engineyard are among the well known Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers. What if you don't want to use these PaaS services? What if you don't know which one is better? Are they cost effective? What about private deployments into internal infrastructure? This session answers these questions with a discussion of PaaS services and setting up your own PaaS using CloudFoundry.

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.”

In this session we will learn how to systematically explore a codebase. We'll look at what tools are available to help us out, slinging some wicked shell-fu along the way. We'll look at “code islands” and “code bridges,” and how to construct a “map of the code.” We'll also examine the wisdom that thought leaders like Michael Feathers and Dave Thomas have leant to this subject.

Once we've gained a thorough understanding of what we have in front of us, we'll learn approaches for getting the system under test and refactoring so that we can start to pick up the pace and respond to user requirements without making a bigger mess. You'll leave this session well prepared to tackle the next “big ball of mud” that gets dumped on your desk.

What is the DevOps movement? It a nutshell, it is the idea that the days of silos are over. Development, QA, and operations can no longer be thought of as separate warring divisons with their own “turfs.” Instead, we must focus on the fact that we are all part of a single value stream for the customer. By collaboration and shared expertise, we can find real overlaps between our previously segregated areas of expertise and optimize that value stream.

We'll cover the following topics:

Death to Silos: developing an culture of collaborative software delivery
Developing communication and bridge-building skills
Understanding your business and its domain
The automated “infrastructure as code” revolution
Driving performance, process, and people improvements through metrics
The DevOps' Toolkit: Puppet, Chef, Flapjack, Vagrant, and friends

Domain Specific Languages have two main characteristics, fluency and context. Creating external DSLs has the advantage of good validation. However, we have to struggle with parsers. Internal DSLs offer the benefit of using the language as the host and its compiler as the parser. For a language to be a host, it needs two important characteristics: low-ceremony and metaprogramming.

In this workshop you will learn how to create internal DSLs using Groovy metaprogramming and scripting techniques. We will start with a short warmup of metaprogramming techniques and then dive into creating DSLs.

Workshop Requirements

Attendees are expected to pair up and work on the labs. Software requirements:

Latest version of Groovy (beta version is fine).
Your favorite IDE or editor for writing and running Groovy code.

Spock is an awesome tool that exploits Groovy AST transformation to provide elegant, fluent syntax for writing automated tests.

In this presentation we will learn how to use Spock to test both Java and Groovy code. We will taken an example oriented approach to learning the strengths of this powerful testing tool.

Grails is a powerful web development framework. You've heard and seen those demos that show how simple it is to create applications with it. But, you're not convinced. Your realities are not that simple, you have existing database to integrate with, you have existing applications to run side-by-side, and you're worried how flexible Grails is to meet those needs.

In this section, we will move beyond those hello world introductions. We will use an example oriented approach to create a Grails application that integrates with existing databases and runs in parallel with other applications.

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.

Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin identified several design smells in his book Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices:

Rigidity
Fragility
Immobility
Viscosity
Needless Complexity
Needless Repetition
Opacity

We can reverse and in fact avoid these techniques by following the principles of SOLID software design:

Single Responsibility
Open-Closed
Liskov Substitution
Interface Segregation
Dependency Inversion

You'll leave this session equipped to ferret out design smells and apply these principles on your next project.

Puppet is a powerful framework for the automation of tasks typically performed by system administrators as part of software infrastructure provisioning and maintenance. Puppet adoption is rapidly increasing, boasting use by companies such as Google, RedHat, Constant Contact, Zynga, and Shopzilla.

Puppet is composed of three principle components:

a declarative language for expressing system configuration,
a client and server for distributing it,
and a library for realizing the configuration

We'll dive deeply into Puppet's architecture and features, including its idempotent configurations, cross-platform resource abstraction layer, and graph-based modeling of resources, resource providers, and resource relationships. We'll then leverage puppet to set up infrastructure of a typical JVM-based web development project with various OS, application server and datastore configurations. You'll leave a “Master of Puppet,” ready to apply it on your next software delivery effort.

Functional Programming has been around for a while, but it is gaining popularity, especially due to direct support in languages on the JVM. Writing code in functional style is not about syntax, it is a paradigm shift. In this presentation, using examples from Java, Groovy, and Scala, you will learn how to write code in functional style. We will start out discussing the elements of functional programming and then look at examples of some common operations and how you can implement those in functional style.

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Clojure is an exciting language on the JVM for several reasons. It brings the
power of functional programming and the characteristics of dynamic typing into
a single fold. It is a language that has done quite a few things right. It
is lightweight, highly expressive, concise, and offers quite an interesting,
simple, yet very powerful solution to handle concurrency. In this session you
will learn the key strengths of this language and how you can integrate
it with your Java projects.

Using Clojure
Calling Java
Collections
Functional style of programming
STM

This half-day workshop will bring you up to speed on the specifics of the Groovy programming language. We'll touch on most of the major features of the language, from collections and closures to builders, AST transformations, and metaprogramming. Specific examples will cover topics from Groovy itself and will be supported by unit and integration tests and built using Gradle.

Featured topics will include: collections, closures, operator overloading, scripts and classes, unit and integration testing, AST transformations, parsing and building both XML and JSON, and working with SQL. If time is available, other projects from the Groovy ecosystem, like Gradle, Spock, and GPars, will be included.

A minimum comfort level with Java is assumed. Some exposure to Groovy would be helpful but not required.

Workshop Requirements

JDK 1.5+
Groovy 1.8+
Eclipse with Groovy plugin (optional)

This half-day workshop will bring you up to speed on the specifics of the Groovy programming language. We'll touch on most of the major features of the language, from collections and closures to builders, AST transformations, and metaprogramming. Specific examples will cover topics from Groovy itself and will be supported by unit and integration tests and built using Gradle.

Featured topics will include: collections, closures, operator overloading, scripts and classes, unit and integration testing, AST transformations, parsing and building both XML and JSON, and working with SQL. If time is available, other projects from the Groovy ecosystem, like Gradle, Spock, and GPars, will be included.

A minimum comfort level with Java is assumed. Some exposure to Groovy would be helpful but not required.

Workshop Requirements

JDK 1.5+
Groovy 1.8+
Eclipse with Groovy plugin (optional)

The Spock framework brings simple, elegant testing to Java and Groovy projects. It integrates cleanly with JUnit, so Spock tests can be integrated as part of an existing test suite. Spock also includes an embedded mocking framework that can be used right away.

In this presentation, we'll look at several examples of Spock tests and review most of its capabilities, including mock objects and integration with Spring.

The Grails Object Relational Mapping (GORM) API is an elegant domain specific language on top of Hibernate. To really understand how it works, you need to understand how Hibernate sees the world. This workshop will explore the behavior of GORM, from following object state transitions to managing the session to fetching lazy associations and more.

While the focus will be Grails and understanding how it works, code samples will also be provided using plain Hibernate with the Spring Framework to manage the session factory and transactions. All examples will be built with Gradle and tested with both JUnit and Spock.

Lone Star Software Symposium: Austin

July 20 - 22, 2012

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