Hadoop is a MapReduce framework that has literally sprung into the vernacular of “big data” developers everywhere. But coding to the raw Hadoop APIs can be a real chore. Data analysts can express what they want in more English-like vocabularies, but it seems the Hadoop APIs require us to be the translator to a less comprehensible functional and data-centric DSL.

The Cascading framework gives developers a convenient higher level abstraction for querying and scheduling complex jobs on a Hadoop cluster. Programmers can think more holistically about the questions being asked of the data and the flow that such data will take without concern for the minutia.

We'll explore how to set up, code to, and leverage the Cascading API on top of a Hadoop sample or production cluster for a more effective way to code MapReduce applications all while being able to think in a more natural (less than fully MapReduce) way.

During this presentation, we'll also explore Cascading's Clojure-based derivative, Cascalog, and how functional programming paradigms and language syntax are emerging as the next important step in big-data thinking and processing.

You're serious about improving the quality of your code base, but with 10,000 lines of code, where do you start and how do you ensure the greatest ROI for the re-work your team members will perform?

Sonar is an open source tool that brings together the best of breed static and dynamic analysis of Java projects. The result is a unified view of problematic areas of your code on a time-line basis, allowing the team to attack the problems with the best ROI, and maintain a more watchful eye for positive and risky trends in the codebase in the future.

This talk will show you Sonar from the ground up and explain 10 critical metrics that affect your code's flexibility, stability, and durability.

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.

Quite a few languages have raised to prominence on the JVM. A frequently asked question is “How do I integrate my Java code with these?” This session answers that very specific question.

Learn how to integrate code written in Java, Clojure, Scala, and Groovy. We will discuss both language level integration and architectural boundaries.

This session will survey a wide range of tools across the Java space. We'll look at utilities such as VisualVM, jstatd, jps, jhat, jmap, Eclipse Memory Analyzer, jtracert, btrace and more.

Open Source is not just a suite of libraries you consume within your application, but now reaches into the space of tools to help you troubleshoot and improve your applications. The price of these tools eliminates barriers to their use and their open source nature allows you to mix and match them into compositions that work well for your application's unique debugging needs.

These tools will help you peel away layers of your application to expose bugs and performance ceilings. We'll interactively analyze the heap and garbage collection cycles of both local and remote applications, take snapshots of heap, query the heap for heavy usage, leaks and augment running code without a reboot and without breaking a sweat. After attending, you'll never look at Java debugging the same way again.

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

In today's data-sensitive and news-sensationalizing world, don't become the next headline by an inadvertent release of private customer or company data. Secure your persisted, transmitted and in-memory data and learn the terminology you'll need to navigate the ecosystem of symmetric and public/private key cryptography.

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

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

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

Jasypt, BouncyCastle and KeyCzar are three open source frameworks that bring unique new crypto algorithms such as elliptic curve cryptography to the enterprise developer, remove repetitive ceremonious setup and tear down coding, and add high level adapters to the Spring and Hibernate frameworks.

Many development shops have made the leap from RCS, Perforce, ClearCase, PVCS, CVS, BitKeeper or SourceSafe to the modern Subversion (SVN) version control system. But why not take the next massive stride in productivity and get on board with Git, a distributed version control system (DVCS). Jump ahead of the masses staying on Subversion, and increase your team's productivity, debugging effectiveness, flexibility in cutting releases, and repository redundancy at $0 cost. Understand how distributed version control systems are game-changers and pick up the lingo that will become standard in the next few years.

In this talk, we discuss the team changes that liberate you from the central server, but still conform to the corporate expectation that there's a central master repository. You'll get a cheat sheet for Git, and a trail-map from someone who's actually experienced the Subversion to Git transition.

Lastly, we'll even expose how you can leverage 75% of Git's features against a Subversion repository without ever telling your bosses you are using it. Be forewarned that they may start to wonder why you are so much more effective in your checkins than other members of your team.

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

The workshop style of this class will allow you to observe and discover the value of this new version control tool first hand. You'll be cloning, creating, commiting, and pushing repositories by the conclusion of this session.

Workshop Requirements

• Please bring a Windows, Mac or Linux laptop
• Please have administrative privileges on the laptop for installing software
• Please install Git 1.7.10 or higher and ensure git is on your PATH (in the environment variable list of paths)
• Please set up Git according to http://teach.github.com/articles/github-class-prerequisites

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.)

JavaScript is one of the most widely used languages around and yet its also one of the most misunderstood. With Ajaxified UIs becoming the norm, this humble language is once again at the forefront.

In this talk, we'll go beyond the basics of JavaScript delving into the mysteries of prototype inheritance, objects, language edge cases and the importance of testing.

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

keynote

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.

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!

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.

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

In this session, we'll take a look at:

• pages
• toolbars
• buttons
• form elements
• list views

You don't need to be Amazon or Google to take advantage of NoSQL data stores. Whether you want to develop applications more quickly or scale them more effectively, there are a range of NoSQL data stores that could help. This introductory session cuts through the NoSQL hype to look at the practical use cases for key value, document, column and graph data stores.

We'll also look at specific NoSQL engines like Riak, CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra and Neo and look at how you'd select a NoSQL data store for a given use case.

MongoDB is a popular NoSQL document data store. In this session we'll look at how to install and work with Mongo. We'll then look at some of the differences when architecting applications for document databases.

Whether you are interested in the scalability of NoSQL solutions or just want to check out schemaless document stores for quicker application development, MongoDB is a great ways of getting your feet wet with NoSQL and this session will cover everything you need to get started.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In just 90 minutes, we'll install Gradle and develop a range of build scripts. Whether you're just looking to improve your builds or to create sophisticated project automation scripts, get some hands-on experience with the framework that won a Springy at SpringOne2GX for “Most Innovative Product/Project”.

Gradle is a Groovy based convention over configuration build/project automation framework that allows you to develop elegant, powerful build scripts quickly and efficiently. This will be a chance to get some hands-on experience so you can compare Gradle to your current build tool.

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.

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.

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.

You've got your build automated using Ant/Maven/Gradle and you're building and running your unit test suite every time you check-in. That's easy. In fact, with Jenkins you can do this in under 5 minutes.

However, if we want to move beyond “mere” Continuous Integration to Continuous Delivery, there are many other areas in which we need to achieve “push button” automation. This talk will survey many of these areas and tie everything together with an integrated case study at the end.

In this talk, we'll look at:

• Automated Provisioning with tools like Vagrant, Chef and Puppet
• Automated Database Migrations with Liquibase
• Automated Deployment with Capistrano
• Automated User Acceptance Testing with Selenium 2, Geb and Spock
• Using Jenkins to orchestrate the entire delivery process

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.

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

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

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

Come to this session, find out some intriguing things about what’s going on in the game industry, but more importantly, how ideas from the gaming world can turn around and answer some thorny problems in the business world.

“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.”

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.

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

In this session we will look at the elements of StonePath. We will work through an example application, modeling the flow of various kinds of work through an example 'back office' application, and look at several real-world applications based on these ideas.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The seventh 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.

While there is a lot of interest in using Semantic Technologies in the Enterprise, there is very little guidance on how to go about doing so. It sounds like a scary Big Bang change, but the truth is, there are incremental steps that can be adopted gradually.

This talk will be an introduction of how you can begin to advocate and apply Semantic Web technologies iteratively both internally and on the public Web.

Topics will include:

How to explain Semantic Web technologies to various stakeholders
Difficulties/processes faced when adopting new technologies
Mapping these technologies into existing industry trends
Adopting a Resource-Oriented view of the world
Data Integration strategies
Using RDFa
Building and extending metadata repositories that unify your documents, data and services

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.

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.

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'.

Agile software development isn't just about the development team or managers… the customer has an active role too. The customer should be prioritizing the stories in each release, potentially working onsite in constant contact with the development team, and even participating in daily status meetings.

Done well, the customer's presence has a positive influence on the development iteration. Done poorly, the customer detracts from the team's focus. So how do you be the customer of an agile team? How do you teach someone to be that customer?

In this session we will look at an overview of agile methodologies and the role of the customer, customer proxy, and other versions of the “product owner”, and their responsibilities in ensuring the success of an agile software development project.