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Session Descriptions

Ron Bodkin - Chief Software Architect, Quantcast

AJAX Performance and Scalability

You know AJAX can improve Web application usability, but only if designed properly. How do you deploy and manage responsive rich client networked applications that scale? If you are using services from multiple sources, how can you identify bottlenecks?

Effective AOP

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) allows better application architectures by centralizing scattered and tangled code for prolems like security, error handling, testing, policy enforcement and feature variations across a product line. The recent releases of Spring 2.0 and AspectJ 5 illustrate the maturing options for Java projects.

Scott Davis - Author of "Groovy Recipes" & TDD Expert

Easing into Agile

How do you get started with an Agile development methodology? Everyone has been talking about eXtreme Programming for years, but how do you get it introduced to your team? Many times, you're not simply transitioning from from one methodology to another -- you're introducing a methodology for the first time. Adding structure to a previously unstructured endeavor. Adding a touch of discipline where programmers once roamed free.

Groovy: The Next Generation of Java

This is the year of the dynamic scripting language. Ruby (and Rails) has won the hearts and minds of many independent software developers. JavaScript is experiencing a renaissance thanks to the wild success of AJAX and websites like Google Maps. And Groovy (JSR-241) brings the same level of excitement and "scripting goodness" to the Java platform.

Guerrilla Web Techniques

Frameworks? We don't need no stinkin' web frameworks. OK, so maybe that's overstating the case. Web frameworks do plenty of good things, but sometimes they can also be golden handcuffs. Too many web developers fall into the trap of thinking, "If it can't be done by my web framework, then it simply can't be done."

Holistic Testing

Mark Twain once said, "Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Do you feel the same way about Unit Testing? Are you actively testing your code, or are you just thinking about testing your code... some day... once you get some more free time...

Real World Web Services

In this talk, we'll survey the web services exposed by leading websites (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay) and discuss how they are driving the AJAX revolution. You'll see examples of RESTful, SOAP, and JSON web services, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.

Clean Up Your Code: 10 Java Coding Tricks, Techniques, and Philosophies

This session delivers 10 techniques for improving your code, whether you are freshly graduated or a grizzled veteran.

Regular Expressions in Java

Regular expressions should be an integral part of every developer?s toolbox, but most don?t realize what an important topic it is. Regular expressions have existed for decades, but many developers don't understand how to take full advantage of this powerful mechanism, either through command line tools and editors or in their development.

SOA: Next Wave of Enterprise Development or Return of the Son of CORBA?

Is Service Oriented Architecture the next wave of distributed computing or just the same old crap in a shiny new package? This session provides an overview of what most people agree is the definition of SOA. I talk about SOA, ESB, CORBA, your MOM, and a bunch of other acronyms.

Testing with Selenium

This session describes the use and workings of Selenium, the open source web user interface testing tool.

The Productive Programmer

This session shows you how to become a more productive programmer every day by using tools that you didn't know you already had.

David Geary - Author of Graphic Java and co-author of Core JSF

Ajaxian Faces

JavaServer Faces is a perfect platform for implementing Web 2.0 interfaces with Ajax. This session explores how you can use these two potent technologies--JSF and Ajax--together to create applications that look and behave like desktop applications but run in the browser.

JSF: State of the Art

In 2005, JSF hit its stride, as evidenced from overwhelming support from both vendors and the open-source community. JSF 1.0 had plenty of holes, but open-source projects have arisen to address those needs. This session takes a look at three of those projects: Tomahawk (MyFaces component library) FaceletsSeam

JavaServer Faces: A Whirlwind Tour

In April 2005, annual growth rates for jobs in JavaServer Faces, Struts, and Ruby on Rails were all at about 0%. Today, Struts' growth rate still hovers around 0%, but JSF and Rails have taken off. At the end of 2007, both JSF and Rails were growing at a rate of between 400-500% annually (according to indeed.com).

JSF has passed the adoption tipping point, and is now the Java-based framework of choice, as is evidenced by its ecosystem. From vendors such as MyEclipse and RedHat to open source projects such as Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4JSF, JSF is where the action is.

Come see why JSF is so popular. In this code- and demo-intensive session, I'll show you the fundamentals of JSF.

Prerequisite: Some knowledge of Java-based web applications, such as Struts, is a plus, but is not required. If you have a significant experience with JSF, you probably already know most of what's covered in this session.

Shale: Turbo-charge your JSF Apps

JavaServer Faces is a well designed user interface framework, but it lacks a number of features you might otherwise expect out of the box; for example, JSF does not explicitly provide support for client-side validation.

So, from the folks that brought you Struts, comes Shale, a collection of useful enhancements to JSF. A top-level Apache Software Foundation project, Shale adds some really cool features to vanilla JSF, including:

Web flow: script dialog flow
Remote Method Calls: easily call JavaBean methods from JavaScript
Tapestry-like views: code views in pure HTML
Use Apache Commons Validator validators on the client or server, or both
JSF testing framework: mocks for easy JSF testing

There's a lot of cool stuff in Shale that makes JSF a much more compelling proposition. Come see what it's all about.

Justin Gehtland - Founder of Relevance, co-author of Better, Faster, Lighter Java

Ajax Architecture

Ajax applications have unique architectural challenges and opportunities. This presentation will show you how to take advantage of the Ajax's strengths, and work around its quirks.

JRuby

JRuby is not one, but two great technologies: the Ruby language, and the Java Virtual Machine and libraries. In this talk you will learn the basics of programming JRuby, and how to integrate JRuby code into existing Java projects.

JavaScript for Ajax Programmers

This presentation covers JavaScript from the perspective of an Ajax programmer. We assume that you may be using an Ajax toolkit, but still need to be able to read, modify, and test the JavaScript code in your application. You will learn the common idioms of JavaScript by looking at working code from the Ajax toolkits themselves.

Prototype: Ajax and JavaScript++

Learn to simplify Ajax development with Prototype through a series of real-world examples. Along the way, learn to code in Prototype's modern JavaScript style, taking advantage of Prototype's extensions to JavaScript's object model

Spring Dependency Injection

Dependency Injection (DI) is the cornerstone of Spring. The core concept is quite simple, but (surprise!) actual practice can become complex. To take full advantage of Spring DI, you need to understand not only the basics on configuration, but also the container lifecycle model and the various hooks provided by the framework.

Spring Intro

The Spring framework is one of the fastest growing open source frameworks. New job postings are gaining rapidly, and many customers are adopting Spring instead of heavier alternatives. In this session, we’ll introduce Spring. You’ll see how Spring can give you much of the power of EJB, without the complexity or pain.

Spring uses concepts like dependency injection and aspect oriented programming to ease standard enterprise development. Spring developers write plain, ordinary Java objects (POJOs), instead of sophisticated components. In this session, you’ll see a basic Spring application. You’ll also see some details about some of the enterprise integration strategies, including:

• Spring AOP
• Transactions
• Persistence
• Model/view/controller

When the session is over, you won’t be an expert, but you should have a much clearer understanding of what Spring does, what it doesn’t do, and why it’s growing so rapidly.

Spring Security with ACEGI

Spring offers developers a simpler, more robust method for configuring applications. These benefits extend to security through the ACEGI framework. ACEGI makes the otherwise daunting task of securing your application logical and straightforward. More importantly, through its support for single sign-on provision through Yale's CAS system and its ability to provide instance-level authorization, Spring extends the common security model of most J2EE apps beyond what they are traditionally capable of.

Jason Hunter - Author of Java Servlet Programming

Extreme Web Caching

Web Caching is very important for high traffic, high performance web site but few people know all the professional-level strategies. In this talk I'll share some of the tricks of the trade, including advanced tips from Yahoo's Mike Radwin.

We'll start with the basics: using client-side caches, conditional get, and proxies. Then we'll talk about more advanced features: how best to handle personalized content, setting up an image caching server, using a cookie-free domain for static content, and using randomization in URLs for accurate hit metering or sensitive content.

Forgotten Algorithms

There are many interesting and useful algorithms that people just don't remember or never learned. The Boyer-Moore string search algorithm is one prime example. The randomized skip list is another. Both solve common problems with wonderful flair and finesse -- and performance-wise
they blow the pants off brute force solutions. This session covers these two algorithms plus several others. It's like your college algorithms course but with a practical bent and absolutely zero proofs. Extra bonus: The Google PageRank algorithm.

Open Source from the Inside

Open source isn't about a license, it's about human interaction and individual motivation. I've seen open source from all sides. I've been an individual contributor and a project leader. I've worked on commercial and open source efforts, and have both helped commercial projects go open and designed ways for open projects to absorb commercial codebases. I've been on the front lines in the Apache/Sun negotiations on open source Java that ended on the JavaOne keynote stage with Scott McNealy. In this talk, I'd like to share my favorite stories in and around open source and the lessons they teach us.

Nick Lesiecki - Co-Author Mastering AspectJ and Java Tools for Extreme Programming

Enhance Design Patterns with AOP

Design patterns have long been part of the experienced developer's tool chest. However, design patterns can affect multiple classes and this makes them invasive and hard to (re)use. This presentation will discuss how AOP solves this problem by fundamentally transforming pattern implementation. The class will examine examples of various traditional design patterns (including some of the famous GoF patterns) and discuss the practical and design benefits of implementing them with aspect-oriented techniques. This session will be of interest to anyone who has struggled with design patterns. It is also the perfect session for a programmer interested non-trivial applications of AOP, or who wishes to see aspect-oriented design in action.

Ted Neward - Enterprise, Virtual Machine and Language Wonk

Java5: The Language, The Libraries, The VM

Java5 introduced a whole slew of new features, including annotations (JSR 175), new language features (the enhanced for loop, generics, static imports, and more), new library support (java.lang.instrument, among others), and some interesting enhancements to the virtual machine itself.

Effective Enterprise Java: State Management

Managing state--both transient state (like your shopping cart) and your durable state (like your order placements, your inventory management forms, and so on)--is tricky in an enteprrise application. In this talk, we'll examine some of the trickiness, both high-level and low-.

Essential db4o

Tired of writing object-table mappings? For years, Java developers have wrestled with the problems of storing objects into relational format and retrieving them back again; for all that Hibernate and JDO and other O/R tools make it easier (though not easy) to do, isn't there another way? In this presentation, we'll explore an alternative approach, real object persistence, using the db4o toolkit (www.db4objects.com).

Java6: Exploring Mustang

Mustang, the Java6 release, is out, and even if you're not looking to adopt the new platform right away, it's important to know what's there so you can start to plan for it. In this presentation, we'll go over the major new features of the Java6 platform, including the new integrated XML services capabilities (JAX-WS and JAXB), dynamic/scripting language support (javax.script), new JVM "attach" capabilities, new annotations supported by the javac compiler, and more.

Pragmatic XML Services

There's a lot of talk about web services, and most of it falls into one of two categories: lots of low-level talk about vendor-specific tools and extensions, or lots of high-level talk that never shows you a line of code. XML services aren't that hard, and in this talk, we'll see how, why and when to do one.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Annotations

Want to get the soup-to-nuts story on Java annotations? In this presentation, we'll first talk about what annotations provide to the Java language. After setting ourselves a conceptual basis to operate from, we'll look at the language definition for Java annotations, from how to use them to how to define them. Finally, we'll take a look at the other side of annotations, consuming them at source-level (using "apt", the annotation processing tool), class-level (using a bytecode toolkit such as BCEL), and at runtime (using enhancements to the Reflection API made in Java5).

Chris Richardson - Author of POJOs in Action

Comparing EJB 3 with Spring and Hibernate

The limitations of EJB2 led to the development of the extremely popular Spring and Hibernate frameworks. These frameworks replaced the cumbersome EJB2 programming model with a nimble, non-invasive Plain Old Java Object (POJO) –based model. But, now, the EJB3 specification has embraced many of the ideas made popular by Spring and Hibernate including POJOs, transparent persistence and dependency injection.

Developing Rich Domain Models

Object-oriented design (OOD) is good way to tackle the complexity of modern applications. Yet many complex, enterprise Java applications are written in a procedural style. One reason is because EJB2 created too many obstacles to using object-oriented design techniques. Fortunately, enterprise Java technologies have improved. Plain Object Java Objects (POJOs) and object/relational mapping frameworks such as Hibernate, JDO and EJB3 led to the revival of OOD.

Jared Richardson - Agile coach and co-author of Ship It

Agile Software Testing Strategies

Creating and maintaining a solid automated test suite is critical to an Agile strategy, but often we're just told to "Do it." In this talk we'll look at several pragmatic strategies for creating and building your suite.

Continuous Integration with Cruise Control

Continuous Integration is increasingly recognized as a vital practice in an Agile software shop. Traditionally it's been difficult to set up and administer. Today, that's no longer the case.

Pragmatic Tracer Bullets

Are your product designs hit or miss? Do you have trouble building a loosely coupled system? Is your code incestuous? Refactoring not an option with your code base? Tracer Bullets help keep your project out of the fire.

Tracer Bullet Development:

* helps you create great software
* lends itself to an iterative cycle
* can be used for demos early and often
* is easily refactored
* allows your teams to work in parallel
* makes a very testable system

Software Development Techniques

Throughout our software careers we learn habits from our coworkers, from books we've read, and occasionally, from conferences we attend. Much of our competence comes from the tips and tricks we pick up as we go.

Venkat Subramaniam - Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.

Get Groovier with Grails

Inspired by the Ruby on Rails project, Grails brings the ease of web development and "convention over configuration" to the Java platform. We will learn how to create web applications using Grails, how to integrate it with Hibernate, and how to Ajax it, all using the built in features of Grails. This section assumes that you are familiar with Groovy or you have attended the “Groovy for Java Programmers” session. The session will be example driven with live coding where we will build a web application from scratch.

Groovy for Java Programmers

Object-oriented scripting languages, or agile dynamic languages, as some like to call those, are gaining programmers' attention. Groovy bring this excitement to
the Java platform with its ability to generate byte code. You can use Groovy instead of Java for some parts of your application. By learning it, you can switch between the languages where you consider fit.

Open Source Tools for Agile Development

As a Java developer, you have taken the time to learn the basics of the language and relevant parts of its rich API. However, you need more than that to develop serious industrial strength applications. In this presentation, the speaker will introduce you to a number of open source tools which you can use to improve your application quality and your development process.

Practices of an Agile Developer

You have worked on software projects with varying degree of success. What were the reasons for the success of your last project? What were the reasons for those that failed? A number of issues contribute to project success - some non-technical in nature. In this presentation the speaker will share with you practices in a number of areas including
coding, developer attitude, debugging, and feedback. The discussions are based on the book with the same title as the talk.

Refactoring your code - a key step in agility

Refactoring is one of the core practices in Agile Software Development. Refactoring is based on some core principles that apply to more than writing good code. But, what's refactoring? Why should you do it? How do you go about doing that? What tools are available to successfully refactor your App?

Working with Rules Engines

Rule based programming allows us to develop applications using declarative rules. These can simplify development in applications where such rules based knowledge is used for decision making.

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Ron Bodkin

Chief Software Architect, Quantcast
Ron Bodkin is the chief software architect of Quantcast, an open ratings service for Web sites. Ron is also the founder of New Aspects of Software, which provides consulting and training on aspect-oriented software development and effective architectures for Java. Ron is also the leader of the open source Glassbox application performance troubleshooting project.

Previously, Ron led the first implementation projects and training efforts for customers of the AspectJ group at Xerox PARC. Prior to that, Ron was a founder and the CTO of C-bridge, a consultancy that delivered enterprise applications using Java frameworks.

Scott Davis

Author of "Groovy Recipes" & TDD Expert
Scott Davis is an internationally recognized author and speaker. He is passionate about open source solutions and agile development. He has worked on a variety of Java platforms, from J2EE to J2SE to J2ME (sometimes all on the same project).

Scott's books include Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java, GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Web Applications, The Google Maps API, and JBoss At Work.

Scott is the Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com, a news and information website that tracks the latest developments in Groovy and Grails. He also writes a regular column for IBM DeveloperWorks -- Mastering Grails.

Scott is a frequent presenter at national conferences (such as No Fluff, Just Stuff) and local user groups. He was the president of the Denver Java Users Group in 2003 when it was voted one of the top-ten JUGs in North America. After a quick move north, he is currently active in the leadership of the Boulder Java Users Group. Keep up with him at http://www.davisworld.org.

Neal Ford

Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.
Neal Ford is an Application Architect for ThoughtWorks. He is an architect, designer, and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, and video/DVD presentations. Neal is also the author of Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques (Prentice Hall PTR, 1996), JBuilder 3 Unleashed (SAMS Publishing, 1999), and Art of Java Web Development (Manning, 2003). His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Object Pascal, C++, and C. Neal’s primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 30 developers’ conferences worldwide.

David Geary

Author of Graphic Java and co-author of Core JSF
David Geary is the president of Clarity Training, Inc. (corewebdevelopment.com), where he teaches developers to implement web applications using JavaServer Faces and the Google Web Toolkit.

A prominent author, speaker, and consultant, David holds a unique qualification as a Java expert: He wrote the best-selling books on both Java component frameworks: Swing and JavaServer Faces (JSF). David's Graphic Java Swing was one of the best-selling Java books of all-time and Core JSF, which David wrote with Cay Horstman, is the best-selling book on JavaServer Faces.

David was one of a handful of experts on the JSF 1.0 Expert Group (EG) that actively defined the standard Java-based web application framework, and he's currently helping to define the next version of JSF on the JSF 2.0 EG.

Besides serving on the JSF and JSTL Expert Groups, David has contributed to open-source projects and co-authored Sun's Web Developer Certification Exam. He invented the Struts Template library which was the precursor to Tiles, a popular framework for composing web pages from JSP fragments, was the 2nd Struts committer and contributed to Shale.

A regular on the NFJS tour, David also speaks at other conferences such as TheServerSide Symposium, JavaOne and JavaPolis. David has taught at Java University and was twice voted a JavaOne rock star, for presentations in 2005 and 2007.

Justin Gehtland

Founder of Relevance, co-author of Better, Faster, Lighter Java
Justin is the co-founder of Relevance, a consulting/training/research organization located in the Research Triangle of North Carolina. Justin has been developing applications with static and dynamic languages since 1992. He has written code with Java, .NET, C#, Visual Basic, Perl, Python and Ruby. He loves to talk, especially in front of people, but all by himself in the corner if he must. Justin is currently focused on: Rails (because its the law), Spring (because Java isn't going anywhere) and security (because paranoia is your friend).

Jason Hunter

Author of Java Servlet Programming
Jason Hunter is Principal Technologist with Mark Logic, specializing in large-scale XML content manipulation using XQuery. He's probably best known as the author of "Java Servlet Programming" (O'Reilly Media). He's also an Apache Member and as Apache's representative on the Java Community Process Executive Committee he established a landmark agreement allowing open source Java. He's publisher of Servlets.com and XQuery.com, an original contributer to Apache Tomcat (and Apache Ant committer), the creator of the JDOM open source project, a member of the expert groups responsible for Servlet, JSP, JAXP, and XQJ API development, and was recently appointed Sun Java Champion. In 2003, he received the Oracle Magazine Author of the Year award, and in both 2005 and 2006, the JavaOne Outstanding Talk award. His largest audience was 15,000 at a JavaOne conference keynote.

Nick Lesiecki

Co-Author Mastering AspectJ and Java Tools for Extreme Programming
Nicholas Lesiecki is a recognized expert on AOP and agile development. In addition to coauthoring Mastering AspectJ (Wiley, 2003) and Java Tools For Extreme Programming (Wiley, 2001), Nick is a member of AspectMentor, a consortium of experts in aspect-oriented software development. He has spoken about applying AspectJ to testing, design patterns, and real-world business problems in such venues as SD West, OOPSLA, and AOSD. He currently serves Google as a Software Engineer and Programming Instructor.

Howard Lewis Ship

Creator of Tapestry and HiveMind
Howard Lewis Ship is the creator and lead developer for the Apache Tapestry project, and the creator of the Apache HiveMind project. He has over fifteen years of full-time software development under his belt, with over nine years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard is the author of Tapestry in Action for Manning Publications (which covers Tapestry 3.0), and is currently the Director of Open Source Technology for Formos Software Development. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, a novelist.

Howard is steaming ahead with Tapestry 5.1, now that Tapestry 5.0 final release is available.

Kito Mann

Editor-in-chief of JSF Central and the author of JSF in Action
Kito D. Mann is editor-in-chief of JSF Central and the author of JavaServer Faces in Action (Manning). He is a member of several Java Community Process expert groups (including JSF and Portlets), and an internationally recognized speaker. Kito is also the Principal Consultant at Virtua specializing in enterprise application architecture, training, development, mentoring, and JSF product strategy. He holds a BA in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.

Ted Neward

Enterprise, Virtual Machine and Language Wonk
Ted Neward is a Principal Consultant with ThoughtWorks, an international consulting firm, where he specializes in high-scale enterprise systems, working with clients ranging in size from Fortune 500 corporations to small 20-person shops. He speaks on the conference circuit, including the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium tour, discussing Java, .NET and XML service technologies, focusing on Java-.NET interoperability, programming languages, and virtual machine technologies. He has written several widely-recognized books in both the Java and .NET space, including the recently-released "Effective Enterprise Java" and "F# in a Nutshell". He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Chris Richardson

Author of POJOs in Action
Chris Richardson is a developer, architect and mentor with over 20 years of experience and is the author of the recently published book "POJOs in Action". He runs a consulting company that helps development teams become more productive and successful by adopting POJOs and lightweight frameworks. Chris has been a technical leader at a variety of companies including Insignia Solutions and BEA Systems. Chris has a computer science degree from the University of Cambridge in England. He lives in Oakland, CA with his wife and three children.

Jared Richardson

Agile coach and co-author of Ship It
Jared Richardson, co-author of Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful
Software Projects, is a speaker, consultant, and mentor with NFJS One. Jared has been in the industry for more than fifteen years as a consultant, developer, tester, and manager.

Jared can be found online at Agile Artisans.

Venkat Subramaniam

Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. He is author of ".NET Gotchas" (O'Reilly), coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf), and author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

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