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.

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.

.

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.

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.

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)

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.

This presentation seeks to provide a solid introduction to the fundamentals of DDD. Learn why modeling a complex business domain in software is so advantageous to your business and ways in which your team can go about delivering software models to give your business a competitive edge.

The philosophy of domain-driven design (DDD) – first described by Eric Evans in his book [of the same name – is about placing our attention at the heart of the application, focusing on the complexity that is intrinsic to the business domain itself. We also distinguish the core domain (unique to the business) from the supporting sub-domains (typically generic in nature, such as money or time), and place appropriately more of our design efforts on the core.

Domain-driven design consists of a set of patterns for building enterprise applications from the domain model out. In your software career you may well have encountered many of these ideas already, especially if you are a seasoned developer in an OO language. But applying them together will allow you to build systems that genuinely meet the needs of the business.

The premise of domain-driven design is two-fold:

For most software projects, the primary focus should be on the domain and domain logic; and
Complex domain designs should be based on a model.

Domain-driven design is not a technology or a methodology. It is a way of thinking and a set of priorities, aimed at accelerating software projects that have to deal with complicated domains.

Note: Laptops are not required - there is no hands-on coding for this workshop.

Workshop Requirements

This workshop consists of lecture and participation exercises.

Note that there is no hands-on coding for this workshop so laptops will not be required. Bring materials for taking notes.

Not every part of a software system will be well-designed. How do you know where to put the time and effort to refine the design, or refactor existing code? Learn how strategic Domain-Driven Design (DDD) patterns can show you how to know which parts of your system matter most to your business and how to focus your team's design efforts most effectively.

Context mapping and Core Domain are key concepts in DDD, providing valuable techniques and insights into where to focus your design attention, yet most developers have never heard of them. This session will introduce the tools of strategic DDD and show you how they can shine a light on your design challenges.

Come on a guided tour of how applying Domain-Driven Design (DDD) building block patterns can make your code cleaner, more expressive, and more amenable to change. We cover examples of DDD patterns such as entities, value objects, closure of operations and side-effect-free functions. We will focus particularly on how implementing value objects can lead to more supple design.

When good design really matters, DDD building block patterns enable your design to model the business domain you are working with more richly. They allow you to collaborate with domain experts to build deep, useful models of the domain in your code that solve difficult business problems with elegance and simplicity.

This is a highly interactive modeling session which walks through diagrams and code samples to demonstrate how the application of these patterns to modeling can make writing and reading coding fun again, while improving the effectiveness of the code you write. Come prepared to think, ask and answer questions, and learn how to write the best code where it matters most.

Many of the problems encountered in scaling, parallelizing and distributing systems that tend to be addressed in ad-hoc ways are actually deeply connected with the manner in which the business domain has been modeled. Domain-Driven Design (DDD) has rich modeling resources for tackling concurrency, transactional and distribution boundary issues within the domain model itself, enabling teams to be more effective in dealing with business complexity and change.

Learn about how aggregates can enrich your domain models, improve system performance and loosely couple your systems. We will give examples of how aggregate design choices are manifested in NoSQL data schemas, focusing particularly on MongoDB, and the consequences of making these choices for domain modeling, performance, and scaling.

Google “MongoDB is Web Scale” and prepare to laugh your tail off. With such satire, it easy to pass off MongoDB as a passing joke… but that would be a mistake. The humor is in the fact there seems to be no end to those who parrot the MongoDB benefits without a clue. This session is about getting a clue.

Get past the hype and hyperbole associated with NoSQL. This session will introduce MongoDB through live working sessions demonstrating the pros and cons of MongoDB development. The session will then focus on a recent short project focused on large scale. We’ll discuss database design to support high scale read access. Throughout this case study we will discuss the consequences of the MongoDB choice. The session will finish with a review of the production topology to support growth in scale.

The word just came down from the VP - you need a mobile app and you need it yesterday. Wait, you've never built a mobile app…it's pretty much the same thing as you've built before just smaller right? Wrong. The mobile experience is different and far less forgiving. How do you design an application for touch? How does that differ from a mouse? Should you build a mobile app or a mobile web site? This talk will get you started on designing for a new, and exciting, platform. Whether that means iPhone, Android, Windows Phone or something else, you need a plan, this talk will help.

Mobile is the next big thing and your company needs to there. But what does there actually entail? Should you build a native app? On which platforms? Do you have the skills for that? What about the web? Can you deliver an awesome experience using nothing but a mobile web browser? This talk will help you navigate these treacherous waters. We'll discuss the pros and cons of the various approaches and give you a framework for choosing.

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.

In the words of John Gage, “The network is the computer”. At the heart of everything we do is a complex system of infrastructure from which we are often abstracted. For general application development this abstraction provides the convenience of simplifying our efforts. With a growing number of mobil applications with intermittent connectivity and higher latency, and with increased hostility on the network from a security standpoint, there is great value in pulling back the curtain and understanding the details of this computer.

This session will start with the underlying understanding of networking at a low level. At this level we will discuss, IP, MAC, ARP, DNS and DHCP. As we walk up an abstraction level, we discuss sockets, NAT, gateways and firewalls along with the use of TCP and UDP. Spending some time at this layer can make network developers more productive, as we look at tools which help us answer the question, “who owns this port?“, “where is this packet going?” and “What is my latency and why?“.

The session will end with a little fun looking at wifi, where will we sniff, snort, crack:) From a security stand point we will look at the challenges of wifi and how it has become the weakest component on the net.

This session is extremely fast-pace. The attendees will come away with a more enhanced understanding of the this thing we call the internet. It will include through discussion or demonstration tools such as tcproute, tcpdump, nemesis, nmap, tcpmon and wireshark.

Robert Martin assembled the SOLID family of principles to provide a useful guide to help us create object-oriented software designs that were resilient in the face of change. In recent years, the need to write highly-concurrent software in order to leverage increasingly ubiquitous multicore architectures, as well as general interest in more effectively controlling complexity in large software designs, has driven a renewed interest in the functional programming paradigm. Given the apparent similarity in their goals, “What is the intersection of SOLID with functional programming?” is a natural question to ask.

In this talk, we'll explore this intersection. We'll begin with a tour of the evolutionary patterns associated with enterprise software and programming paradigms, as well as take a look at the ongoing quest for best practices, the goal being to elucidate the motivation for examining this intersection of SOLID and functional programming. We'll then walk through each of the SOLID principles, examining them in their original object-oriented context, and looking at example problems and solutions using the Java language. Then for each principle, we'll examine its possible intersection with the functional programming paradigm, and explore the same problems and solutions using the Clojure language. We'll close by examining the transcendent qualities of the SOLID principles and how they can make any design simpler, regardless of the programming paradigm employed.

As a web application developer, most of the focus is on the user stories and producing business value for your company or clients. Increasingly however the world wide web is more like the wild wild web which is an increasingly hostile environment for web applications. It is absolutely necessary for web application teams to have security knowledge, a security model and to leverage proper security tools.

This training workshop on security will provide an overview of the security landscape starting with the OWASP top ten security concerns with current real world examples of each of these attack vectors. The first session will consist of a demonstration and labs using hacker tools to get an understanding of how a hacker thinks. It will include a walk through of the ESAPI toolkit as an example of how to solve a number of these security concerns including hands-on labs using the OWASP example swingset.

The workshop will include several hands on labs from the webgoat project in order to better understand the threats that are ever so common today.

Attendees will come away with the following skills / capabilities:

threat modeling
security audit plan
introduction to Pen testing
key / certificate management
fixing web application security issues

Don't be the weakest link on the web!

As a web application developer, most of the focus is on the user stories and producing business value for your company or clients. Increasingly however the world wide web is more like the wild wild web which is an increasingly hostile environment for web applications. It is absolutely necessary for web application teams to have security knowledge, a security model and to leverage proper security tools.

This training workshop on security will provide an overview of the security landscape starting with the OWASP top ten security concerns with current real world examples of each of these attack vectors. The first session will consist of a demonstration and labs using hacker tools to get an understanding of how a hacker thinks. It will include a walk through of the ESAPI toolkit as an example of how to solve a number of these security concerns including hands-on labs using the OWASP example swingset.

The workshop will include several hands on labs from the webgoat project in order to better understand the threats that are ever so common today.

Attendees will come away with the following skills / capabilities:

threat modeling
security audit plan
introduction to Pen testing
key / certificate management
fixing web application security issues

Don't be the weakest link on the web!

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.

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.

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.

Of all the non-functional requirements of software development, complexity receives the least attention and seems to be the most important from a long term standard point. This talk will look at some of forces that drive complexity at the code level and at a system level and their impact. We will discuss what causes us to over look complexity, how our perception of it changes over time and what we can do about it?

In this session we will break down the meaning of complexity and simplicity and measure the application of those means against the common software development dogma. Looking at common development trends and pressures, we'll discuss where simplify does and doesn't help. We will examine areas of development which at first glance seem to be simple (such as the creation of an equals method in Java), that end up being difficult or impossible based on normal constraints. We will example the drivers of complexity with some discussion on what you can do about it. This session will finish with a discussion around several challenges to high scale software architectures and how to keep it simple.

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.

This session assumes some understanding of testing and junit and builds on it. We will introduce and dig deep into Spock as a test specification and mocking tool.

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.

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.

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.

Have you looked into Scala? Scala is a new object-functional JVM language. It is statically typed and type inferred. It is multi-paradigm and supports both object oriented and functional programming. And it happens to be my favorite programming language.

If you are interested in Scala, how you are planning to learn Scala? You probably are going to pick up a book or two and follow through some examples. And hopefully some point down the line you will learn the language, its syntax and if you get excited enough maybe build large applications using it. But what if I tell you that there is a better path to enlightenment in order to learn Scala?

Scala Koans, a set of test cases that will teach you Scala language. The Scala koans will help the audience learn the language, syntax and the structure of the language through test cases. It will also teach the functional programming and object oriented features of the language. Since learning is guided by failing tests it allows developers to think and play with the language while they are learning.

Workshop Requirements

Namaste,

For those planning to attend the Scala Koans…

Welcome to Scala Koans!

Scala Koans is an interactive session that puts the programming and learning in your hands. Therefore, a laptop is required by all participants. If you do not have a laptop, then perhaps you have a friend with a laptop, is so, well, that would work too. In order to participate in the Scala Koan endeavor, a few things are required:

A laptop
A modern JDK installation. JDK 1.6+ will suffice. Remember that it should be a JDK and not a JRE!
Your JDK should be mapped properly to JAVA_HOME and your PATH variables.
An installation of your favorite IDE or editor.
An inquisitive mind.

The process of actually running the koans will be covered during the session. Unfortunately, Internet connectivity is sometimes a dicey affair and at times it can rain on our parade. To avoid having to wait for the install at the conference you can prepare for the koans before the conference! If you don't have the opportunity to do this, we will have either memory sticks or private networks at the conference.

If you want to get started with the set up:

Download the koans by visiting https://bitbucket.org/dmarsh/scalakoansexercises and click on the download link on the right hand side of the page. (or you can clone the bitbucket project)
Unzip the koans: dmarsh-scalakoansexercises-#####.zip
cd into the dmarsh-scalakoansexercises-#### folder
If you are in Linux or MacOSX run: ./koans, on Windows ./koans.bat
After some initialization, you are now in the koans/sbt shell (you should see a > prompt)
In the shell run the following commands:
a. test:compile
b. eclipse (if you are planning to use Eclipse)
c. gen-idea (if you are planning to IntelliJ Idea)
Exit the shell by typing exit

Before attending the koans session, you may want to take the opportunity to load some Scala Plugins onto your favorite IDE and Editor. Below is a list of resources that you can use to enhance your environment so that you can enjoy Scala syntax highlighting and other helpful tools like refactoring, debugging and analysis.

Eclipse - The Eclipse has an IDE plugin for Scala called aptly scala-ide. All the information about the plugin can be found at http://scala-ide.org including an easy to follow along video located at http://scala-ide.org/docs/current-user-doc/gettingstarted/index.html

IntelliJ - IntelliJ has a Scala plugin that can be found by going to Settings -> Plugins, clicking on 'Browse Repositories' button and searching for the 'Scala' plugin on the left. Right click on the 'Scala' and choose 'Install'. IntelliJ will prompt you to restart the IDE, do so, and enjoy.

NetBeans - Currently, Github user 'dcaoyuan' hosts a NetBeans Scala plugin at the address: https://github.com/dcaoyuan/nbscala. I have not tried this out since the number of NetBeans users has shrunk in recent years. If you are an avid NetBeans user, and wish to try it, you can let me know the results during the session. There is additional information at: http://wiki.netbeans.org/Scala

Emacs - Github user 'aemoncannon' has created 'ENSIME' (ENhanced Scala Interaction Mode for Emacs) at the address and has a great following. https://github.com/aemoncannon/ensime with some documentation at http://aemoncannon.github.io/ensime.

VIM - For VIM users you can use https://github.com/derekwyatt/vim-scala as a VIM plugin that offers Scala color highlighting

That is it. Hope to see you soon.

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.

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.

We've come a long way down the JavaScript road. Gone are the days of 'just hack it' for the web - architecting even a small project in JavaScript can be a challenge. Thankfully, there are several frameworks to help you; the most popular currently is Backbone.js. In this session, we'll assume you know nothing of Backbone.js, and we'll build a small application using Backbone.js as the foundation. We'll also build the same app using Ember.js, another popular JavaScript framework.

Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface.
Ember.js is another popular framework that provides client-side code structure. It takes a different approach than Backbone.js, but provides more features. Ember.js came out of the SproutCore project and emphasizes bindings.

Time is very precious and is often threatened by phone calls, emails, co-workers, bosses, and most of all, yourself. The Pomodoro Technique reigns in unfocused time and gives your work the urgency and the attention it needs, and it's done with a kitchen timer.

In this presentation we discuss how to set up, estimate time, log time, deal with interruptions, and integrate with Agile as a team. We discuss timer software and even some of the great health benefits of the Pomodoro Technique.

This presentation covers the Guava library developed by Google (http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/). Guava provides collection extensions to the Java Collection API and, along with this, a cornucopia of time-saving utilities that bring Java as close as possible to some of the more functional and dynamic language competitors like Scala, Ruby, and Clojure.

This presentation focuses on the following topics: how to make Predicates and Functions; how to use new collection constructs that make life easier, including MultiMap, BiMaps, and MultiSets; how to set up and use Guava preconditions; and how to create truly immutable collections, and more. All of this is done with Java.

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 Web is changing faster than you can imagine and it is going to continue to do so. Rather than starting over from scratch each time, it builds on what has succeeded already. Webs of Documents are giving way to machine-processable Webs of Information. We no longer care about data containers, we only care about data and how it connects to what we already know.

Roughly 25% of the Web is semantically marked up now and the search engines are indexing this information, enriching their knowledge graphs and rewarding you for providing them with this information.

In the past we had to try to convince developers to adopt new data models, storage engines, encoding schemes, etc. Now we no longer have to worry about that. Rich, reusable interface elements like Web Components can be built using Semantic Web technologies in ways that intermediate developers don’t have to understand but end users can still benefit from. Embedded JSON-LD now allows disparate organizations to communicate complex data sets of arbitrary information through documents without collaboration.

Perhaps the concepts of the Semantic Web initiative are new to you. Or perhaps you have been hearing for years how great technologies like RDF, SPARQL, SKOS and OWL are and have yet to see anything real come out of it.

Whether you are jazzed or jaded, this workshop will blow your mind and provide you with the understanding of a technological shift that is already upon us.

In this workshop, we will:

Explain the Web and Web architecture at a deeper level
Apply Web and Semantic Web technologies in the Enterprise and make them work together
Integrate structured and unstructured information
Create good, long-lived logical names (URIs) for information and services
Use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to integrate documents, services and databases
Use popular RDF vocabularies such as Dublin Core, FOAF
Query RDF and non-RDF datastores with the SPARQL query language
Encode data in documents using RDFa and JSON-LD
Create self-describing, semantic Web Components
Model and use inferencing with the Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Workshop Requirements

Laptop
Java 7/8

The Web is changing faster than you can imagine and it is going to continue to do so. Rather than starting over from scratch each time, it builds on what has succeeded already. Webs of Documents are giving way to machine-processable Webs of Information. We no longer care about data containers, we only care about data and how it connects to what we already know.

Roughly 25% of the Web is semantically marked up now and the search engines are indexing this information, enriching their knowledge graphs and rewarding you for providing them with this information.

In the past we had to try to convince developers to adopt new data models, storage engines, encoding schemes, etc. Now we no longer have to worry about that. Rich, reusable interface elements like Web Components can be built using Semantic Web technologies in ways that intermediate developers don’t have to understand but end users can still benefit from. Embedded JSON-LD now allows disparate organizations to communicate complex data sets of arbitrary information through documents without collaboration.

Perhaps the concepts of the Semantic Web initiative are new to you. Or perhaps you have been hearing for years how great technologies like RDF, SPARQL, SKOS and OWL are and have yet to see anything real come out of it.

Whether you are jazzed or jaded, this workshop will blow your mind and provide you with the understanding of a technological shift that is already upon us.

In this workshop, we will:

Explain the Web and Web architecture at a deeper level
Apply Web and Semantic Web technologies in the Enterprise and make them work together
Integrate structured and unstructured information
Create good, long-lived logical names (URIs) for information and services
Use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to integrate documents, services and databases
Use popular RDF vocabularies such as Dublin Core, FOAF
Query RDF and non-RDF datastores with the SPARQL query language
Encode data in documents using RDFa and JSON-LD
Create self-describing, semantic Web Components
Model and use inferencing with the Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Workshop Requirements

Laptop
Java 7/8

Have you ever wondered what goes on inside the virtual machines and
interpreters that we use every day?

In this session, you'll see some of the inner workings of Python, PHP, Java, and JavaScript and learn that at the lowest level these languages really are not as different as they may seem.

An overview of the basic parts of a virtual machine and interpreter that compares and contrasts the different approaches taken by different modern languages.

In part II of VMs and Interpreters, you'll dive into the inner workings of the Java Virtual Machines. You'll learn how your Java code is translated from Java source code to byte code and ultimately machine code.

You'll also see tools for viewing Java byte code and measuring performance changes caused by VM optimizations.

This session will cover the…

Java class file format
Java byte code
JVM Compiler & Runtime Optimizations

You can program higher order functions in Groovy quite easily using closures. But the benefits of closures go far beyond that. Groovy has a variety of capabilities hidden in closures.

In this presentation, we will unlock that treasure and explore ways in which we can design applications using Groovy closures, to apply different design patterns, to create fluent interfaces, and even program asynchrony.

Android is gaining popularity rapidly, but why does Android use its own implementation of Java?

In this presentation, we'll dig into the details behind Android's Dalvik VM. Along the way, you'll learn about
Android' s service architecture, Dalvik's byte code format, and the surprising details of how Android installs, launches, and executes your applications.

Most of us don't want to go back to the days of malloc and free, but the garbage collector isn't always our friend.

In this presentation, you'll learn about the different garbage collection strategies used in JVMs, how to monitor garbage collection, analyze memory dumps, and why you might want to use one collection strategy instead of another.

“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” – Aristotle

This talk is a fun look at what is true, or what we think is true… how we know what we know or think we know and what it depends on. Through the evening we will learn about every day dichotomies that can lead to black and white thinking. We will use a dichotomous key to learn such things as; is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit? Is a carrot a vegetable or a fruit? As we reveal the truth, we will see how the perceived norms of the world are broken and in what way they are broken. With this new found knowledge we will discuss how to detect it and correct it. These are the foundational skills of the master craftsman… and that's the truth!

Successful software development is about building the right product at the right time for your customers. This means focusing attention on the right places in the portfolio of projects and products that your company provides, and optimizing the entire value stream from “concept to cash” for your customers and the development teams.

Agility is more than just adopting Scrum or some other agile process framework; it involves adopting a new set of Lean-Agile values, principles and practices through the entire software development lifecycle and beyond in order to provide value to customers earlier and more often.

Lean-Agile software development consists of frequent feedback loops, intense team collaboration, continuous improvement, business and customer involvement, baking quality in and consistent delivery of valuable software. Learn how these Lean principles and practices transform software development and the radical difference it can make in your development work and wider organization.

This presentation explores the nature of motivation and the place of metrics and measurement in software development, and how lean software development principles and practices shed light on motivation and metrics and how they can be used to support deep organizational improvement.

We will examine the nature of motivation in terms of the four intrinsic rewards that drive positive engagement, and also how certain approaches to measuring and managing performance lead to organizational dysfunction. We will also show how the application of lean principles such as building quality into the product, respect for people and optimizing the whole enable more effective approaches to motivation and metrics in software development.

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.

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.

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.

Format: Combination of presentation and hands-on exercises

Synopsis: Introduction to the Git DVCS (Distributed Version Control System) Participants should bring a Windows or Mac laptop to use during the workshop exercises.

Notes:
1) Choose a Windows, Linux, or Mac laptop that you'll be bringing to the workshop (we have some downloads and installs that are better to do before the event). Ensure you have admin or sudo privileges on the machine.
2) If possible, please have Git installed prior to attending the workshop. There's no need to “configure it” beyond the basic install. Installation instructions can be found via operating-system specific pages at:
http://help.github.com/win-git-installation/
http://help.github.com/mac-git-installation/
http://help.github.com/linux-git-installation/
3) Test your git setup is working by running git --version at your terminal prompt on Mac or Linux or at your “Git Bash Prompt” on Windows. Verify the output says Git is version 1.7 or higher.
.

Topics covered:
· What Git is
· How it differs from traditional centralized source control systems
· Local user configurations
· The git “promotion model”
· Local repositories
· Basic source control operations
· Branching and merging
· Interfacing with remote (server-side) repositories

Prerequisites:
No previous knowledge of GIT is assumed or required.

Format: Combination of presentation and hands-on exercises

Synopsis: Introduction to the Git DVCS (Distributed Version Control System) Participants should bring a Windows or Mac laptop to use during the workshop exercises.

Notes:
1) Choose a Windows, Linux, or Mac laptop that you'll be bringing to the workshop (we have some downloads and installs that are better to do before the event). Ensure you have admin or sudo privileges on the machine.
2) If possible, please have Git installed prior to attending the workshop. There's no need to “configure it” beyond the basic install. Installation instructions can be found via operating-system specific pages at:
http://help.github.com/win-git-installation/
http://help.github.com/mac-git-installation/
http://help.github.com/linux-git-installation/
3) Test your git setup is working by running git --version at your terminal prompt on Mac or Linux or at your “Git Bash Prompt” on Windows. Verify the output says Git is version 1.7 or higher.
.

Topics covered:
· What Git is
· How it differs from traditional centralized source control systems
· Local user configurations
· The git “promotion model”
· Local repositories
· Basic source control operations
· Branching and merging
· Interfacing with remote (server-side) repositories

Prerequisites:
No previous knowledge of GIT is assumed or required.

Technological change happens regularly these days – and with it – opportunity. Yet, most people work automatically towards building up comfort zones and work hard to stay within them. Being able to grow in our jobs and increase our skill set and sphere of competency/influence is essential for progress and overall well-being. We may not always like or agree with change, but often there are opportunities within it and the way we respond makes all the difference in the world.

In this presentation, we’ll look at how change impacts us and ways to deal with change and technical evolution so we don’t have to be afraid of it but come to expect and embrace it – and get to a point where we use it to our advantage – in short, getting comfortable being out of our comfort zones.

Format: Combination of presentation and hands-on exercises
Synopsis: Introduction to some advanced and useful Git concepts and functions.

Participants should bring a laptop for purposes of running Git and doing the hands-on exercises.

Notes:
1) Choose a Windows, Linux, or Mac laptop that you'll be bringing to the workshop (we have some downloads and installs that are better to do before the event). Ensure you have admin or sudo privileges on the machine.
2) If possible, please have Git installed prior to attending the workshop. There's no need to “configure it” beyond the basic install. Installation instructions can be found via operating-system specific pages at:
http://help.github.com/win-git-installation/
http://help.github.com/mac-git-installation/
http://help.github.com/linux-git-installation/
3) Test your git setup is working by running git --version at your terminal prompt on Mac or Linux or at your “Git Bash Prompt” on Windows. Verify the output says Git is version 1.7 or higher.
.

Topics covered:

   Understanding more about remote branches

   Using the bisect function for locating problems and debugging

   Further interacting with the GitHub model

```
   Interactive rebasing
```
```
   Cherry-picking commits
```

   Creating/emailing/incorporating patches

   Advanced diffing with the gitattributes file

Prerequisites:
Either attendance at the Introductory Git session or regular use of Git for at least one month.

Format: Combination of presentation and hands-on exercises
Synopsis: Introduction to some advanced and useful Git concepts and functions.

Participants should bring a laptop for purposes of running Git and doing the hands-on exercises.

Notes:
1) Choose a Windows, Linux, or Mac laptop that you'll be bringing to the workshop (we have some downloads and installs that are better to do before the event). Ensure you have admin or sudo privileges on the machine.
2) If possible, please have Git installed prior to attending the workshop. There's no need to “configure it” beyond the basic install. Installation instructions can be found via operating-system specific pages at:
http://help.github.com/win-git-installation/
http://help.github.com/mac-git-installation/
http://help.github.com/linux-git-installation/
3) Test your git setup is working by running git --version at your terminal prompt on Mac or Linux or at your “Git Bash Prompt” on Windows. Verify the output says Git is version 1.7 or higher.
.

Topics covered:

   Understanding more about remote branches

   Using the bisect function for locating problems and debugging

   Further interacting with the GitHub model

```
   Interactive rebasing
```
```
   Cherry-picking commits
```

   Creating/emailing/incorporating patches

   Advanced diffing with the gitattributes file

Prerequisites:
Either attendance at the Introductory Git session or regular use of Git for at least one month.

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 Gradle build tool is one of the most successful projects in the Groovy ecosystem because it addresses a difficult problem – every major build is a custom build. Gradle builds are written in Groovy, so the full power of the language is available if you need it. Gradle supports Maven project structure and repositories and uses Ivy dependency management without being bound by their normal constraints. With major systems like Grails, Hibernate, and the Spring Framework moving to Gradle, this is a technology worth taking the time to understand.

This talk will cover the basics of Gradle both through simple examples and by examining the build files for major open source projects.

JodaTime is Java Date/Time and Calendering done right. There are many problems with the original Date/Time API that came prepackaged in the early Java days. There are even
One of the obvious issues is that Calendar is mutable and can unintentionally be changed. Another issue is that constructing Calendars in Java involves setting certain fields at certain times during coding, but not always getting the expected result. Joda Time repairs those issues and offers a robust and immutable date, time, and duration API.

In Joda Time and a Brief History of the World, I provide a quick rundown of calendaring throughout the centuries, describe UTC, compare UTC to GMT, discuss how time is calculated, and then dive into Joda Time in every popular JVM language. The end result provides the audience with compelling proof that Joda Time should always be their Date Time API of choice.

Update: We'll be using Android Studio and Gradle for this workshop

The smartphone has been the current platform of choice for Android development but we are now in the “year of the tablet” and it is time to upgrade your skills. Even though you think you know Android programming, you still need to learn the unique techniques for developing for tablet.

We'll analyse the UI patterns important on tablets (like Action Bars). And you'll learn how to use the specialized classes (like Fragments) that were created especially for tablets.

The following topics are included in this presentation:

The Tablet Marketplace
Tablet UI design
Optimizing layouts for larger screens
Dips, Sips and pixels
Action Bars
Fragments
Side Navigation
3rd Party Libraries

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.

Great Lakes Software Symposium

November 9 - 11, 2012

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

Workshop Requirements

TEST