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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Functional Programming has been gaining popularity in recent times. If you've wondered what functional programming is or how you can make use of it, this session is for you.

Learn what functional style is and how you can make use of that in languages like Scala and Groovy. You will also learn how you can structure your Java code to make use of this style of programming to the extent possible.

HTML5 wants to make some major changes to the way we deliver media over the web and the way we mark up our pages, but it also gives us a bunch of new stuff in the browser's programming model. To ignore these new JavaScript APIs is to give up on a richer browser UI and a lot of fun.

In this session, we'll cover the geolocation API, local storage, the client-side SQL database, support for offline applications, in-browser threading, web sockets, and more. We'll look at the real, working code for as many features as we can manage, and discuss cross-browser compatibility issues as well. HTML5 is not an optional skill for web developers in 2011. Don't miss it!

You've read that the relational model is old and busted, and there are newer, faster, web-scale ways to store your application's data. You've heard that NoSQL databases are the future! Well, what is all this NoSQL stuff about? Is it time to ditch Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server in favor of the new guard? To be able to make that call, there's a lot you'll have to learn.

In this session, we'll take a whirlwind tour of several representative non-relational data stores, including Cassandra, MongoDB, and Neo4J. We'll learn the very different ways they represent data, and we'll see their unique strengths and weaknesses in various kinds of applications. Along the way, we'll learn why new technologies must be introduced to address today's scaling challenges, and what compromises we'll have to make if we want to abandon the databases of our youth. We'll review what ACID means, think about query idioms, and talk about the CAP theorem. It's an exciting time to be storing and retrieving data, and the opportunity is now before us to learn things we could ignore just a few years ago. Come to this session for a solid introduction to a growing field.

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.

Want to go deep on a popular NoSQL database? Cassandra is a scalable, highly available, column-oriented data store in use at Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, Rackspace, and other web-scale operations. It offers a compelling combination of a rich data model, a robust deployment track record, and a sound architecture, making it a good choice of NoSQL databases to study first.

In this session, we'll talk about Cassandra's data model, look at its query idioms, talk about how to deploy it, and look at use cases in which it is an appropriate data storage solution. We'll study its origins in the Amazon Dynamo project and Google's BigTable, and learn how its architecture helps us achieve the gold standard of scalability: horizontal scalability on commodity hardware. You'll leave prepared to begin experimenting with Cassandra immediately and planning its adoption in your next project.

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.

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.

Waterfall, Scrum, XP, Crystal… there are a lot of software methodologies on sale in the world today, but Lean Software brings something different to the table. This session uses practical examples to explain what makes software valuable and which parts are waste. Come explore how systems thinking can lead your team to deliver faster, create knowledge, and eliminate waste, and return to work Monday with news ideas about delighting your customers.

Waterfall, Scrum, XP, Crystal… there are a lot of software methodologies on sale in the world today, but Lean Software brings something different to the table. This session uses practical examples to explain what makes software valuable and which parts are waste. Come explore how systems thinking can lead your team to deliver faster, create knowledge, and eliminate waste, and return to work Monday with news ideas about delighting your customers.

Left unattended software can expand into a complex, brittle maintenance nightmare. But don't despair! This session teaches strategies for modernizing even the most horrid code swamps, examining incremental refactorings and the dos and don'ts of testing legacy code. We'll also tackle the harder, cultural issues: how to inspire your co-workers and keep your moral high even on the dirtiest jobs.

Left unattended software can expand into a complex, brittle maintenance nightmare. But don't despair! This session teaches strategies for modernizing even the most horrid code swamps, examining incremental refactorings and the dos and don'ts of testing legacy code. We'll also tackle the harder, cultural issues: how to inspire your co-workers and keep your moral high even on the dirtiest jobs.

Java has a reputation for boilerplate code: ubiquitous getters and setters, a verbose anonymous class syntax, and redundant declarations to name a few. It doesn't have to be this way! There are many ways to bust the boilerplate and this session provides a solid understanding of the most modern techniques. Come learn about inversion of control idioms, Proxy objects, code generation tools, and the latest libraries that both create and manage boilerplate code so you don't have to. A leaner, meaner codebase is yours for the taking.

Java has a reputation for boilerplate code: ubiquitous getters and setters, a verbose anonymous class syntax, and redundant declarations to name a few. It doesn't have to be this way! There are many ways to bust the boilerplate and this session provides a solid understanding of the most modern techniques. Come learn about inversion of control idioms, Proxy objects, code generation tools, and the latest libraries that both create and manage boilerplate code so you don't have to. A leaner, meaner codebase is yours for the taking.

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

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

With the rise of 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.)

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.

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.

“Effective Java” by Joshua Bloch is the gold standard for how to write correct and idiomatic Java code. Wouldn't it be great if the same thing existed for Groovy? Well here it is. This interactive, live coding session discusses what separates good Groovy code from the bad, what makes some code great, and how best to use the many available libraries. We'll also look at several static analysis tools for Groovy that aid in these pursuits. This session appeals to both those with a Java knowledge looking to learn Groovy and advanced Groovy programmers looking to learn more.

“Effective Java” by Joshua Bloch is the gold standard for how to write correct and idiomatic Java code. Wouldn't it be great if the same thing existed for Groovy? Well here it is. This interactive, live coding session discusses what separates good Groovy code from the bad, what makes some code great, and how best to use the many available libraries. We'll also look at several static analysis tools for Groovy that aid in these pursuits. This session appeals to both those with a Java knowledge looking to learn Groovy and advanced Groovy programmers looking to learn more.

“The Pragmatic Programmer” admonished us all to “write code that writes code”: use code generators to increase productivity and avoid duplication. Today's language communities have clearly caught on, as more and more frameworks generate code at compile or runtime. This session covers Project Lombok, Cofoja, Spring Roo, GContracts, Groovy++, and more. We'll reviews the different approaches, including examples of how and why we'd want to do this. Come see how these frameworks are using things like Java and Groovy AST Transformations, AspectJ intertype definitions, and ASM bytecode generators. You'll get an in-depth look at language tools and production deployed AST Transforms and code generators. Audience: developers searching for cutting edge solutions to increasing team velocity.

“The Pragmatic Programmer” admonished us all to “write code that writes code”: use code generators to increase productivity and avoid duplication. Today's language communities have clearly caught on, as more and more frameworks generate code at compile or runtime. This session covers Project Lombok, Cofoja, Spring Roo, GContracts, Groovy++, and more. We'll reviews the different approaches, including examples of how and why we'd want to do this. Come see how these frameworks are using things like Java and Groovy AST Transformations, AspectJ intertype definitions, and ASM bytecode generators. You'll get an in-depth look at language tools and production deployed AST Transforms and code generators. Audience: developers searching for cutting edge solutions to increasing team velocity.

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

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.

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.

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.

Most teams manage database change using an ad-hoc system of SQL migration scripts manually applied to various development, staging, and production servers. Some even contrive automated processes, but rarely does this surplus build engineering deliver value directly to the customer. We should be writing applications, not build tools.

In this session, we'll take a look at a ready-to-use, open-source database refactoring tool called Liquibase. Liquibase enables developers to make database changes with confidence, share those changes in a predictable way with other team members, and apply them to automated QA builds, staging servers, and production environments. It provides a credible path to agile database development, and it integrates well into popular build tools. It's a key enabler of the culture of database responsibility that most teams are missing.

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.

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.

Grails is emerging as a standard JVM web framework in environments ranging from startups to the enterprise. It's a full-stack solution build on rock-solid components, fully relying on convention over configuration, and using the best application language the JVM has yet seen: Groovy. This is the place to be for web apps on the JVM.

In this introductory talk, we'll get a whirlwind introduction to Grails, visiting seven things you need to know about the framework to get started.

1. Programming in Groovy
2. Creating an app
3. Interacting with the database
4. Building your UI
5. Processing web requests
6. Tapping the huge plugin community
7. Deploying to production

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

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

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

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

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