Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is a new way of looking at messaging that is quickly gaining in popularity and use, particularly in the financial services industry. Unlike JMS, which defines a standard API across platforms, AMQP defines a standard wire-level protocol across languages and platforms, finally making true cross-platform messaging a reality. This is a two-part session. In this session (part 1) I will describe what AMQP is and what problems it solves, describe the basic architecture and how AMQP routes messages, and then, through live interactive coding, demonstrate how to build a simple producer and consumer using RabbitMQ to send and receive AMQP messages.

Agenda:

• introduction - what is amqp and what problem does it solve?
• how amqp works - exchanges, binding, queues, and routing
• amqp exchange types
• amqp basic architecture and message structure
• sending and receiving messages using rabbitmq

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is a new way of looking at messaging that is quickly gaining in popularity and use, particularly in the financial services industry. Unlike JMS, which defines a standard API across platforms, AMQP defines a standard wire-level protocol across languages and platforms, finally making true cross-platform messaging a reality. This is a two-part session. In this session (part 2) I will move beyond “hello amqp” and discuss more detailed aspects of amqp, including such topics as performance, rabbitmq administration, exchange and queue declaration considerations (that topic is really cool), load balancing, how to implement pub/sub in amqp, and how to manage undelivered messages. I will demonstrate and explain all of the examples and topics discussed in this session with hands-on live coding.

Agenda:

• amqp performance characteristics (how does it perform?)
• rabbitmq admin console commands
• pre-defining queues and exchanges
• amqp routing considerations
• load balancing
• publish-and-subscribe model
• managing undelivered messages

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.

In this presentation, we'll go over those changes, JSR by JSR, and discuss where and how they may affect your next project.

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.

In this presentation we will discuss the actor based concurrency and also the software transaction memory. We will then develop examples using AKKA and compare the power of these approaches in contrast to the traditional approach.

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.

Concurrent collections, immutable collections, operations on and performance of lists, blocking queues, and tries.

“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.

In this session, we'll go over the Guava library, looking at what it provides, when you might seek to use it, and what the overheads and consequences of using it would be.”

With the rise of the NoSQL movement, a whole new crop of different ways to store data suddenly became available to the Java developer. Unfortunately,what didn't come with them was an owner's manual. CouchDB, for example, was the first of the NoSQL databases to be named as such, and offers features not found in the traditional RDBMS: A distributed, robust, incremental replication document-oriented database server with bi-directional conflict detection and management, accessible via a RESTful JSON API, stored ad-hoc and schema-free with a flat address space, that is both query-able and index-able, featuring a table oriented reporting engine that uses JavaScript as a query language. (With a list of buzzwords like that, what's not to love?)

In this session, we'll look at CouchDB, how to set it up, store data to it, retrieve data from it, and in general figure out where it fits within your next project.

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 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.

The sixth 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.

This talk will wrap up the vision presented in the other sessions into an integrated service oriented architecture that yields results on the promises we were given a decade ago, even if we have to consider alternate technologies to get there.

We will walk through the adoption of new REST services, wrapping legacy systems, describing these services with metadata, documenting them, discovering them and binding to them in run time orchestrations.

Attendees should be familiar with the topics presented in the first four talks before attending this fifth one, although we will try to make it accessible on its face value.

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.

In this presentation, we'll look at Akka, a framework/platform specifically aimed at building high-throughput, concurrency-friendly applications in either Java or Scala (or both), with a slew of additional add-on modules to handle issues like persistence, communication (pub-sub, REST, and more), and more. By the time we're done, you'll be able to start looking into using Akka on your own projects, and have a good feel for what your projects would look like when Akka-ized.

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.

Attendees should be intermediate to advanced Java developers, as no time will be spent on Java basics, just the Android parts. Attendees are encouraged to bring laptops to the session (and your Android-based device, if you have one) to fill out code as we go, but the limited time frame means a focus on fast delivery of content and example code; have your fingers warmed up (and the SDK downloaded!) before you get here. (Latest Android SDK will also be on a USB key for attendees' use, in case attendees haven't had a chance to download & install.)

How do you spot bad code? How do you turn it into good code? We'll be looking at code examples from real applications. We'll start by identifying the problem with the code: things like maintainability, clarity, and testability. Then we'll look for ways to improve that code: perhaps introducing base classes, perhaps other refactorings based on Gang of Four Patterns.

We'll examine a number of common patterns including Builder, Visitor, Chain of Responsibility, Proxy, and Strategy. This session will offer insight into how to spot the problem how to select the solution, and how to apply the changes to get your code nice and shiny!

You've no doubt heard about Groovy before, but if you've never taken a closer look, now is your chance. Groovy is such a natural fit for a Java developer. Just adding a single extra jar to your project can make it so you can't wait to get to work on Monday.

Groovy integrates so well with Java that Dan Woods, of Forbes.com, says that it's a no-brainer for existing Java shops. ( http://bit.ly/hoJ7it ) But don't just take his, or my, word for it; get to know Groovy for yourself. You'll be glad you did.

We will take a look at the following Groovy features and how they make a Java developer's life easier:

• Properties, what Java beans should have been
• Closures, why wait for Java 8?
• The truth, the whole truth and the Groovy truth
• Enhanced Collections: this ain't your daddy's HashMap
• The amazing, the invincible, ExpandoMetaClass

And More.

The goal of this hands-on tutorial is to get started and get productive with Grails. We’ll do this by jumping right in and building an application, from design to deployment.

Rather than try to learn Grails feature by feature, we’ll let it unfold as we build the application. We’ll begin with a simple application structure that runs right out of the box, then we’ll gradually build our application while building our knowledge of Grails. Bring your laptop and be ready to code.

We will be using Grails 1.3.5 for the exercises.

In Part II of this session, we will continue the build out process with the Grails application.

When we’re done, you’ll have learned about:

• Grails Domain Classes
• Dynamic scaffolding
• Grails Controllers
• Groovy Server Pages
• GSP Tags
• Grails Object Relational Mapping (GORM)
• Dynamically Injected Service Classes
• Grails’ Javascript and Ajax Support
• URL Mapping

This is an introduction, but it is also a deep dive. So bring your laptop and be ready to code.

We will be using Grails 1.3.5 for the exercises.

Some apps are little more than CRUD. The interesting projects are those with essential complexity in the domain. In this presentation we'll show how ideas from Domain Driven Design, Domain Specific Modeling and Domain Specific Languages can be used to more effectively design, refine and maintain the code at the heart of complex applications.

As the complexity of your applications grow, how can you find, protect, refine and maintain the core of your application so that you can keep the code supple despite an ongoing onslaught of custom business requirements? From DDD to DSLs this session looks at practical strategies for keeping complex applications under control.

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.

From the technology adoption lifecycle and the importance of community to “the knowing doing gap” and technology adoption patterns, we'll look at a range of practical case studies that illustrate proven techniques for selecting and adopting new technologies for your team.

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.

It's been 8 years since Spring 1.0 was released. In that time it has gone from a modest open-source project to being a de facto standard Java application framework. Now, as Spring enters its 8th year, it continues its attack on Java complexity, packed with many new features such as:

• First-class REST support
• A new expression language
• More options for annotation-driven bean wiring
• Bean profiles
• Declarative caching abstraction
• Enhanced Java-based configuration
• A new “c:” namespace
• Unified property management
• And much more

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.

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.

After that, the basic architectural discussion from the first part is, with the aid of the audience in a more interactive workshop style, applied to a real-world problem, discussing the performance and scalability ramifications of the various communication options, user interface options, and more.

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.

In this session, attendees will be split into small groups and given a “real world” business problem (the kata). Attendees will be expected to formulate an architectural vision for the project, asking questions (of the instructor) as necessary to better understand the requirements, then defend questions (posed by both the instructor and their fellow attendees) about their choice in technology and approach, and then evaluate others' efforts in a similar fashion. No equipment is necessary to participate–the great architect has no need of tools, just their mind and the customers' participation and feedback.

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

You've been doing agile for a while and use story cards and burn down charts on a regular basis, but you'd still like to improve the quality of the applications you build and your ability to estimate the scope of those applications and manage business stakeholder expectations.

A combination of presentation and open discussion, this will be a chance to discuss and debate best practices in requirements gathering, estimating and expectation management with your peers, sharing best practices from projects large and small around the world.

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.

In this session we will look at Coffescript, write some coffeescript code, and analyze the generated Javascript. We will look at how we can use it in our existing web development stack, seamlessly compiling the coffeescript into Javascript so it works in our development environment. We will also look at seamlessly using existing Javascript libraries like Prototype, Scriptaculous, and JQuery.

Apache Solr serves search requests at enterprises and the largest companies around the world. Built on top of the top-notch Apache Lucene library, Solr makes indexing and searching integration into your applications straightforward. This talk will introduce Solr's capabilities with live demonstrations.

Solr provides faceted navigation, spell checking, highlighting, clustering, grouping, and other search features. Solr can index rich documents such as PDF, Word, HTML, and other file types. Query volume scales with replication and collection size with distributed capabilities including the power of the new SolrCloud near-real-time distributed indexing.

You’re Solr powered, and needing to customize its capabilities. Apache Solr is flexibly architected, with practically everything pluggable. Under the hood, Solr is driven by the well-known Apache Lucene. Lucene for Solr Developers will guide you through the various ways in which Solr can be extended, customized, and enhanced with a bit of Lucene API know-how. We’ll delve into improving analysis with custom character mapping, tokenizing, and token filtering extensions; show why and how to implement specialized query parsing, and how to add your own search and update request handling.

Apache Solr uses Lucene under the hood for its searching power

How does Solr work with Lucene already?

• Standard query parsing differences
• Filter and function queries
• Caching
• Replicated and distributed search

Solr can be customized in amazingly powerful ways with some Lucene API know-how:

• Write your own analyzer components for character mapping, tokenizing, and filtering tokens
• Customize query parsing
• Add your own search-time request components
• Hook into Solr startup, commit, and optimize events
• Adapt Solr’s response writing to your needs

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!

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.

I commonly think of those of us in the IT industry as problem solvers. Whether developer, designer, or architect, we are all presented with problems and work to find a way to solve them, usually through technology. In my opinion this is what makes this industry so much fun. Let's face it - we all love challenges. Sometimes, however, the problems we have to solve are hard - really hard. So how do you go about solving really hard problems? That's what this session is about - Heuristics, the art of problem solving. In this session you will learn how to approach problems and also learn some the common techniques for solving them effectively. So put on your thinking cap and get ready to solve some easy, fun, and hard problems.

Agenda:

• the checklist
• visual representations
• you know what happens when you assume…
• you gotta start somewhere
• hey! keep it clean!
• working backwards
• we should take the trail to the left…I think…
• the world is flat

None of us want to think of ourselves as “cowboy coders”, but what does it mean to be a software craftsman, and is it a useful distinction? If so, what are some of the best patterns for honing our craft?

Starting with both sides of the recent debate on software craftsmanship from leaders in the SC movement to David Harvey and Dan North, we'll look at what software craftsmanship is and isn't, and then we'll explore specific patterns and practices that can help us to be better coders - whether or not we want to adopt the craftmanship moniker.

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.

We will work with real code covering:

The new input elements
Editable content
Canvas Element and its related 2D APIs for drawing and animation
Audio and Video elements and how to use fallbacks for codec coverage
Browser native drag and drop
Local storage
Web Workers
Websockets
The Geolocation API
Web DB (SQL in the browser!)
This workshop will assume no special knowledge of HTML 5 and should be accessible to any web developers.

Bring your laptops. This is a hands-on workshop.

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.

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.

We will take an example oriented approach to learning the strengths of this powerful testing tool.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is one of the most misunderstood terms in our industry. Ask 10 people what EA is and you will get 10 different answers. To better understand what EA is and how it impacts your company (and you!) we will go back in time to maritime Britain in the late 1700's. Through exercises in designing a fleet of war ships and making decisions about what to do with the fleet you will understand the various approaches, directions, and implications of EA and how necessary EA is to achieve any company goal. So put your admirals hat on and climb aboard for a maritime adventure you won't forget!

Agenda:

• Introduction: What is Enterprise Architecture?
• EA approaches (Designing the fleet)
• EA direction (Deploying the fleet)
• Enterprise architecture references
• Summary and QA

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.

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?

Executable web application specifications are within your reach through the combination of Spock, a testing and specification framework written for the JVM in Groovy, and Geb, an elegant Groovy wrapper around the powerful WebDriver browser automation framework. In this session we'll take a close look at Spock specifications for describing and verifying the behavior of our applications. We'll then examine how we can use Geb's implementation of the Page Object pattern and its “jQuery-ish” API for interacting with our web applications in WebDriver's range of supported browsers. Finally, by gluing these two technologies together via Geb's Spock integration, we'll automate the requirements specification for a simple web app.

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? Have you ever been the 'new guy' on a project where it seems like the code grew more like weeds and brambles than a well-tended garden? With a few good 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.

In this talk we will look at PMD, FindBugs, Macker, JDepend, and several other tools that can help us analyze source code and find problems we need to fix. We will cover each tool in enough depth for you to know what it does and how it can help you, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and see how it would fit in your personal development processes.

How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a build process that mysteriously fails, a bunch of 'TODO' and 'FIXME' comments in the source, and problems that come and go because “it works on my machine”? Does your project have a little bit of 'folk wisdom' that isn't well-known, but is necessary to get things done? How easily could you recreate your development environment if you got a new machine today?

In this session we will talk about some tried and true favorites like Ant, Maven, Subversion, and Eclipse, cover tools like diff, patch, difftools, and diffj for teasing apart changesets, and talk about measuring and managing complexity with tools like cobertura, JavaNCSS, XRadar, CodeStriker, and Jupiter. We will cover each tool in enough depth for you to know what it does and how it can help you and your team, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and see how it would fit in your team's development processes.

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.

The seven wastes:

• Partially Done Work
• Relearning
• Extra Features
• Handoffs
• Delays
• Task Switching
• Defects

In this session, we'll examine each of these wastes and look at some of their common manifestations, both in our coding practices and in our development methodologies. We'll also examine strategies for eliminating each of these wastes from our development efforts.

Compass is a tool that can help you build cleaner, better structured, and less error-prone CSS. Semantic CSS is a technique where your CSS vocabulary describes WHAT things are on your page, rather than WHERE they are. Together, this tool and this concept can radically improve the structure of your html.

With compass, your CSS is written in a CSS superset called SCSS which can include variables, math, and method calls that evaluate to CSS. The end result is pure CSS - so you don't need to worry about anything 'funny' on the browser side. This lets us write cleaner CSS that documents the intent of our design, not just the 'end result'.

Are you in one of those situations where you want to use an agile methodology such as Scrum or Kanban but find yourself stuck in a company with a non-agile mentality? Or, are you using Scrum or Kanban and it simply isn't working? If so, this session is for you. In this session we will explore Feature Driven Development (FDD) in depth, with a particular focus on using it to make non-agile projects more agile. FDD is a highly iterative agile-like methodology that can be used to augment or replace traditional waterfall based approaches, particularly for those projects using remote or offshore teams. In this session you will learn what FDD is, how it is like agile, how it is not like agile, and how (and why) to integrate it with your traditional waterfall-based methodology (or replace your current agile methodology) to become more agile-like.

Agenda:

• Introduction: Is this your world?
• FDD overview - structure and approach
• The good, the bad, the ugly: Analyzing Agile and Waterfall Approaches
• How FDD fits into the picture
• When not to use FDD

There are a lot of things we can measure about our source code, but what about the “project as a whole” and its overall health? Are there ways of measuring the effectiveness of our processes? Are there things we can measure that would point to project automation wins? Is there a way to measure team 'morale'?

While we can gather a lot of metrics from automated source inspection tools, those can make us focus on the wrong “problems to solve”… There are a lot of personal, team, and project-level things we can measure and tune that can lead to big wins. Using advice from an obsessive-compulsive numbers collector, the Personal Software Process, Scrum, the Pomodoro Time Management Technique, and Personal Kanban, we will discuss ways of effectively measuring aspects of our team and our productivity, and actions we might take based on what we learn.

Most good developers eventually have the opportunity to be managers. Whether they call you the “project manager”, “Technical Lead”, “Lead Developer”, or some other classic middle-management title, you become the 'goto' guy between management and developers. You're the guy who is expected to keep the project in-line, track a schedule, and occasionally answer the question “How's it going?“, and perhaps still contribute at a technical level. So how do you do that?

So what do you do next? How do you plan what needs to be developed? How do you know if you are 'on schedule' or heading off-track? Using good ideas from a bunch of successful projects (but no methodology in particular), you will learn the basics of good project planning, execution, and tracking.

While this talk as management methodology agnostic, many of the ideas are tracable directly back to concepts from XP, SCRUM, and even RUP and CMMi. Whether you are following a management methodology or not, the ideas in this talk will be applicable to technical managers.

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.

Over 10 years ago, Spring entered the enterprise Java scene, bringing a simpler development model rooted in dependency injection, the notion of assembling application components in a loosely-coupled way. With it, however, came a flood of XML configuration, required to declare how those components were to be assembled.

For a variety of reasons, XML has fallen out of favor with much of the development community. Now that there are other frameworks that offer dependency injection without all of the XML, some are suggesting that Spring's heavy use of XML has it destined for the scrap heap.

They don't know Spring.

Although XML-based Spring configuration is still available and still has a place in many Spring applications, it is no longer the only way to do dependency injection in Spring. The past few releases of Spring have brought us new ways of assembling our application objects, including annotation-driven options such as Spring's @Autowired and JSR-330's @Inject and Java-based configuration with Spring JavaConfig. There's even a way to express Spring configuration in Groovy.

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.

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.

Session Detail

Keynote on lessons we can learn from our civilizations and evolution.

keynote

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)

Ever been envious of how easily Python, Ruby and even JavaScript can “meta-program”? It’s like magic: seemingly simple or innocuous code takes over big responsibilities; new methods and behaviors appear out of thin air. Your code, your primary code, stays simple and easy to follow. Now, we know you can do that for scripting languages, but what do we do about Java? With the proper component-focused context, it is possible to emulate many of those same capabilities, by applying a simple set of code transformations at runtime.

In this session you’ll learn about meta-programming and how it can apply to traditional Java. You’ll learn about the techniques needed to transform classes at runtime, adding new behaviors and addressing cross-cutting concerns. The presentation will discuss a new framework for this specific purpose, but also draw examples from the Apache Tapestry web framework, which itself is rich in meta-programming constructs.

Apache Tapestry is a fast, easy to use, high-performance, general purpose web framework. Tapestry eschews heavy XML configuration, base classes, and boilerplate code: instead it embraces convention-over-configuration, letting you build your application from simple, concise POJO (Plain Old Java) page and component classes. Tapestry is laser-focused on giving you maximum bang for your programming buck, and this shows up as a broad range of well-integrated features, including extensive Ajax support. Don't let unfamiliarity get in the way of learning this powerful, friendly tool.

Tapestry is different from traditional action-oriented frameworks, such as Struts and SpringMVC, because it is component-based: it organizes the overall application into pages, and builds pages from reusable components. Tapestry leverages this overall map of the application to take over many responsibilities normally tossed in the developer's lap, such as building and dispatching on URLs, and managing server-side state.

Tapestry is very easy to get started with: a few seconds using Maven and you'll have a template project ready to customize. In this session, we'll start with that template, add in some database support, and have a somewhat polished application that includes client-side and server-side input validation and basic Ajax support. Along the way we'll learn a bit about what Tapestry is doing under the covers to support you as a developer: obsessive attention to exception reporting, live reloading of classes, the ease with which reusable components can be created, and lots of meta-programming. We'll also touch on what makes Tapestry great in production: its terrific performance, its approach to organizing and deploying JavaScript, and how it exposes other assets to the client in a scalable, efficient way.

What is a graph database, why would you use it, and how do you get started? In this session we'll look at the kinds of problems that graph databases can solve and will run through the process of getting started with neo4j

By the end of this session you'll have all of the information required to get started with neo4j on your projects.

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.

Kanban. What is it? It is most certainly not just moving sticky notes around on a board. Far from that, it is a method for gradual, evolutionary improvement of existing software processes. That's right, existing software processes. There is no “Kanban Development Process.” Think you're “doing Kanban?” Think again.

In this session we'll examine the byproducts of the “Kanban method” and its use of a WIP-limiting, pull-based mechanism for managing a software team's work. Next, we'll examine “A day in that Kanban life” in order to get our minds around how a Kanban system works. We'll then step back in time and examine the roots of Kanban in the lean manufacturing methods used at Toyota. We'll also walk through a little queuing theory to understand why Kanban systems work. Finally, we'll walk through Kanban thought-leader David Anderson's “Principles of the Kanban Method.”

You'll leave this session equipped to start a Kanban change initiative in your team, along with the tools to make it successful.

What is the essence of programming? How close do popular languages such as Java bring you towards that essence? In this session, we'll discuss Clojure, a language for the Java Virtual Machine that builds on a 40+ year history of Lisp: the programming language that's also a programming language toolkit.

Clojure combines the best features of Lisp with the breadth and power of the Java Virtual Machine and the Java infrastructure; it allows you to build expressive, beautiful code … without sacrificing any of Java's processing power. Once you embrace Clojure's odd (to our eyes) syntax, you'll find that its interoperability with Java, its pragmatic approach to functional programming, and its advanced concurrency capabilities are all easily approachable. Clojure turns traditional object-oriented programming on its head: separating data from the functions that operate on that data, with the end result being more concise, more performant, more testable, more readable code: code that gets to the essence of programming.