Abstract:
One of the best ways to introduce Groovy to new projects and teams is to use it for Unit testing Java code. Using Groovy to unit test Java code has several advantages. You can take advantage of its concise syntax for writing tests. Groovy's dynamic and metaprogramming capabilities can be exploited for mocking purposes. In this presentation, you will learn tips and techniques to use Groovy to unit test both your Java and your Groovy code.

Bio:
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. He helps his clients succeed with Agile Development and various software technologies. He is a frequent invited speaker at various international software conferences. He's author of .NET Gotchas (O'Reilly), co–author of the 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer, and author of Programming Groovy and Programming Scala (all from Pragmatic Bookshelf).

Meeting Sponsor:
Credera is a Dallas based, full-service business and technology consulting firm. Working with Fortune 1,000 companies, medium-sized businesses, government organizations and clients across a broad range of industries, we provide the experience and the commitment necessary to solve today's toughest business and technology challenges. Because it's not just about meeting expectations — it's about exceeding them.

Expect professionalism. Expect integrity. Expect excellence. Expect Credera.

Abstract:
It is a very common practice to develop web applications that are use-case-oriented. This approach has a very procedural feel to it where URLs often involve imperative verbs: "showProduct," "deleteOrder," or "updateShoppingCart." While this approach has served us well, it does lead to unnatural and difficult–to–follow URL schemes. Furthermore, the direct objects of the URLs' verbs are often specified in parameters, precluding any effective caching or indexing within search engines.

In contrast, RESTful web applications tend to be more resource–oriented. Rather than focus on verbs, REST places emphasis on the nouns. RESTful URLs tend to describe the target of an operation, and rely on a fixed set of verbs (GET, PUT, DELETE, and POST) to indicate the operation itself. Moreoever, RESTful URLs identify resources, which themselves may be represented in many forms. This means that if properly applied, REST can be used not only to create a web application, but to also define an API that can be used to access resources that are represented as JSON, Atom, RSS, XML, and/or (of course) HTML.

With the recent release of Spring 3.0, the Spring MVC web framework affords many opportunities for building RESTful applications. This includes a new set of annotations to support defining resource–oriented URLs, and a new REST client template for consuming RESTful APIs.

In this session, we'll look at the latest features of Spring 3.0's MVC framework, with an emphasis on building RESTful web applications. You'll see how Spring 3.0's new @PathVariable annotation can be used to develop controllers that respond to resource–oriented RESTful URLs, and how ContentNegotiatingViewResolver can turn a user–facing web application into a powerful web–based API. We'll explore other ways Spring 3.0 supports working with REST, including how to write REST clients.

The slides from Feb 10th are on SlideShare here. And the Roo project is here.

Bio:
Craig Walls is a Principal Consultant with Improving Enterprises, and has been professionally developing software for over 15 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is the author of Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf), and Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning).

When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 6 birds, and 2 dogs.

Meeting Sponsor:
New Relic, Inc. is the leading software–as–a–service provider of application performance management solutions that enable developers and operations teams to quickly and cost effectively monitor, troubleshoot, and tune production application performance. More than 3,000 organizations use New Relic RPM, an on–demand performance management solution for web applications developed in Java, Ruby, or JRuby. RPM is fully implemented in minutes, and provides deep, 24x7 visibility and code–level diagnostics for web applications deployed on traditional, dedicated infrastructures, private and public clouds, or any combination thereof. To learn more, visit newrelic.com.

Abstract:
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.

The slides from March 10th are here. And the demo scripts are here.

Bio:
Matthew McCullough is an energetic 12 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co–founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is a member of the JCP, reviewer for technology publishers including O'Reilly, author of the DZone Maven RefCard, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His experience includes successful J2EE, SOA, and Web Service implementations for real estate, financial management, and telecommunications firms, and several published open source libraries.

Meeting Sponsor:
TEKsystems^®
The Leading Technology Staffing and Services Company

When you turn to us, your needs are met with reliable people, dedicated teams, proven processes, and our ability to get the job done.

Abstract:
Building highly interactive software that users love to use is usually a challenging endeavor. However, the open source Flex SDK and Java are a perfect combination of technologies for building very rich and highly interactive software for the Web and the desktop. The communication between the Java back–end and Flex front–end can utilize a number of different communication protocols, but the easiest and best performing is the open source BlazeDS library. This session covers the fundamentals of using Flex, Java, Spring, and BlazeDS to build rich and highly interactive software for the Web and the desktop.

Bio:
James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe, and Adobe's JCP representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains, he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early '90s; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid '90s; then Java and many of its frameworks beginning in the late '90s. Today, he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front–ends for Java based back–ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.

Meeting Sponsor:
The Planet: Number 1 dedicated server hosting provider in the world that provides customers with the freedom to choose from the most flexible combination of hosting infrastructure and management services. Services include Dedicated Servers, Managed Hosting and Data Center Colocation. The Planet serves more than 25,000 businesses worldwide and more than 14.5 million Web sites with 40 percent of customers located outside of North America. There are more than 56,000 servers under management and six wholly owned and managed SAS 70 Type II certified data centers (2 in Houston, 4 in Dallas) with 167,000 sq. ft. of raised floor data center space. Coming May 2009, the Planet will launch a seventh data center with 86,000 sq. ft. colocation space. The Planet boasts a fully redundant, Network Operations Center capabilities from two cities, 24 x 7 x 365 monitoring and has one of the industry's fastest, most robust networks: 130+ gigabits/sec of transit network capacity to 7 Tier 1 backbone networks.

Abstract:
Ehcache is an open source, standards–based cache used in a wide array of applications to boost performance, offload the database and simplify scalability. Ehcache is robust, proven, and full–featured, and this has made it the most widely used Java–based cache.

Chris will walk through the Spring Pet Clinic as an application example and show us how to tune it for maximum performance, both when using Hibernate and when caching result sets directly.

He will show us benchmarking tests on the comparative application performance of Ehcache EX 1.8 versus MySQL, Memcached and a leading In–Memory Data Grid, including the impressive performance increases from the latest Terracotta 3.2 Server Array.

Finally, Chris will also discuss some upcoming features in Ehcache 2.0, such as JTA, bulk loading, the new Hibernate 3.3 provider, and write–behind.

The slides from May 12th are here.

Bio:
Chris Dennis works remotely from Martinsburg, WV, as a developer for Terracotta, Inc. At Terracotta, he works on both the core Terracotta platform, and also as a contributor to the Ehcache project. Prior to this, he worked on the JPC x86 emulator at Oxford University. He has spoken twice at JavaOne (receiving a speaker Rockstar Award in 2007), and also at StrangeLoop 2009. He was also a co–author for the O'Reilly book “Beautiful Architecture.”

Meeting Sponsor:

Abstract:
The Java Persistence API (JPA) has really taken over the Java development world, and is now recognized as the enterprise standard for object–relational persistence. But with so many people using JPA, the feature cracks were starting to show. Some found that pieces were either missing or not fully specified in the 1.0 release.

JPA 2.0 has filled in the feature gap, and introduced many of the additional features that developers were asking for. Mike will examine where the 1.0 standard stopped, and where the new 2.0 release continues on. He'll offer a few tricks to using some of the new features, and when it may be appropriate to use them. He'll show how to specify advanced object–relational mappings and collections, illustrate how to mix access modes, describe some new locking options, as well as explain how to create typed queries with or without the new typed criteria API.

The slides from June 9th are here.

Bio:
Mike Keith has been a distributed systems and persistence expert for 20 years, and has a great deal of teaching, research and development experience in these and many other areas. He was a co–leader of the expert group that produced the first release of the Java Persistence API (JPA), and represents Oracle on numerous expert groups and specifications. He co–authored the premier JPA reference book, Pro EJB 3: Java Persistence API, followed up with the recently released Pro JPA 2: Mastering the Java Persistence API. He currently works at Oracle as a Java and middleware architect, and as an Oracle representative to the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group creating specifications for running enterprise technologies in OSGi frameworks. He is also the project lead for the Eclipse Gemini open source project that is set to produce reusable enterprise modules supporting Java EE technology–based applications.

Meeting Sponsor:
TEKsystems^®
The Leading Technology Staffing and Services Company

When you turn to us, your needs are met with reliable people, dedicated teams, proven processes, and our ability to get the job done.

Abstract:
Java Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) is the new dependency management system introduced in JSR 299. Formerly known as Web Beans, CDI brings the pioneering work done in frameworks such as Seam and Guice into mainstream of standards–based Java development. CDI is included in the Java EE 6 platform, and serves as the unifying component management technology across the entire EE platform. In this talk, I'll introduce the basic concepts of CDI, and explain how you can get started using Weld, the CDI reference implementation.

Bio:
Norman Richards is a developer at Socialware, The Social Middleware Company. He is a contributor to the Seam and Weld projects, and author of the DZone refcard for CDI. He is also the author of several popular Java books such as JBoss: A Developer's Notebook, and XDoclet in Action. Norman can be contacted through his personal website at nostacktrace.com.

Meeting Sponsor:
Oracle is sponsoring the meeting with the the Java Road Trip. Java developers, architects, programmers, and enthusiasts: get ready for a real adrenaline rush. Check back here often to follow the Java Road Trip: Code to Coast tour as we journey to 20 cities across the United States showcasing Oracle's commitment to everything Java. Heading up the tour are key Java technologists from Oracle, who will be demonstrating the latest Java software, engaging with Java User Group (JUG) members, and meeting with enterprise developers and consumers. Better yet, join us at the Java Code to Coast bus, which will be coming soon to a city near you. This high–tech block party on wheels is your chance to share the spirit of innovation that is the essence of Java.

Abstract:
The world doesn't sit still, and modeling, once scorned by the Agile crowd, is headed back into the spotlight with a pragmatic programmer twist. Come see how the data in UML and its extensions, both your own domain specific languages (DSLs) and from standards, can change how you create and manage code, from concept to retirement. There's more fun too with Ruby and other scripting, code generated from templates and some Java annotations. There's more! See how the new standard for modeled requirements slays that monster too! This is all about standards and techniques, so most UML tools can help the job.

Bio:
Daniel Brookshier is Chief Architect at No Magic Inc. Daniel has been writing Java since the beginning, with several books, dozens of tutorials, and talks on the subject. Daniel is now working on the next generation of modeling tools with one of the biggest Java–based UML tools on the planet. Daniel also works on several of the modeling standards at the OMG. He Juggles, writes comedy, and can predict the weather with his trick knee.

Daniel will be giving away a couple of copies of MagicDraw too!

Meeting Sponsor:
TEKsystems^®
The Leading Technology Staffing and Services Company

When you turn to us, your needs are met with reliable people, dedicated teams, proven processes, and our ability to get the job done.

Abstract:
Software engineering as it's taught in universities simply doesn't work. It doesn't produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn't produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn't produce systems at all.

That's odd, because in every other field, the term “engineering” is reserved for methods that work.

What then, does real software engineering look like? How can we consistently deliver high–quality systems to our customers and employers in a timely fashion and for a reasonable cost? In this session, we'll discuss where software engineering went wrong, and build the case that disciplined Agile methods, far from being “anti–engineering” (as they are often described), actually represent the best of engineering principles applied to the task of software development.

Bio:
Glenn Vanderburg is Chief Scientist at InfoEther, a development and consulting firm specializing in high–productivity platforms, tools, and methods. He has 25 years of experience as a professional developer in enterprises large and small, and he is passionate about advancing the state of the art of software development.

Meeting Sponsor:
Paladin Consulting, Inc., is a Dallas based IT Staff Support Specialist. We match high–quality Technology professionals with companies across the nation, including multiple Fortune 100 companies! What's more, Paladin treats each staff member as an employee, providing excellent health benefits that create stability and high performance for you and our clients. Since 1983, Paladin Consulting has focused on the Human Capital industry and we are veterans in Information Technology. As a result, we can place personnel in every conceivable IT position in the marketplace today.

We match people to employers that fit their skills and personality. We place you in a position where you fit culturally, ensuring you are comfortable and happy to go to work each day. You have an opportunity to join the number of Paladin employees who are offered permanent work by our clients as well as becoming a lifelong member of the Paladin team, making you eligible for future Paladin career opportunities.

Abstract:
All designs have smells. The question is where those smells lie in the range from pleasant to putrid. Learn to apply proven object–oriented design principles to reduce the rotten and ramp up the rosy. This session will involve a review of a design known to have some problems—bad smells. As those problems are identified and evaluated by the group, one of the five SOLID principles will be applied to resolve it.

The slides from October 13th are here.

Bio:
In his role as Director of Learning Solutions at Improving Enterprises, Don McGreal is a hands–on agile consultant and instructor. As a consultant and Certified Scrum Professional, he has fulfilled many roles while ensuring that the clients get the most from each engagement: developer, business analyst, and process coach. As an instructor, he has authored and taught classes for thousands of software professionals around the globe, specializing in Scrum, Acceptance Testing, Object–Oriented–Design, and Test–Driven Development. On projects and in the classroom, Don is known for his enthusiasm and dedication. He has published articles for both the Scrum Alliance and the Agile Journal and is co–founder of TastyCupcakes.com, a comprehensive collection of games and exercises for accelerating the adoption of agile principles.

Meeting Sponsor:
No Magic, one of the most respected providers of standards–compliant architecture and business modeling offerings in the industry, celebrates the 15–year anniversary of its product and service line this year. The Cameo™ Suite supports the full enterprise application life–cycle, from business requirements/planning through and including final testing with award–winning, OMG™ standards–compliant products that efficiently model your organizational structure, business processes, applications, information, and technology. MagicDraw® supports multiple domain–specific models based on UML® including: BPMN™, SysML™, DoDAF/UPDM, MDD, SOA, unit testing, data modeling, and more. Professional services include training, consulting, custom applications, and MagicDraw® product customizations such as custom modeling domain diagrams, requirements management, team collaboration, design, and analysis. Founded in 1995, No Magic, Inc., is headquartered in Plano, Texas, with operations worldwide. More information can be found by visiting nomagic.com.

Meeting Sponsor:
Apex Systems is an IT staffing and workforce solutions firm. We specialize in providing IT professionals for contract, contract–to–hire, and direct placements. Apex also offers staffing solutions for other select professional skills and workforce needs. We serve Fortune 500, mid–market, and emerging companies from a wide variety of industries, including financial services, government services, communications, technology, healthcare, energy & utilities and others. Apex is in the top 1 percent of all staffing companies, is the 8th largest IT staffing firm in the U.S., and the 31st fastest–growing. In 2009, we placed more than 9,000 professionals with nearly 1,000 different clients.

Abstract:
Functional programming languages and concepts have been around for decades. Interest in them is experiencing a recent resurgence due to the availability of functional languages on popular enterprise development platforms, and their promise in facilitating efficient use of multi–core processors. We will explore functional programming concepts using Clojure, a Lisp–like functional programming language for the Java Virtual Machine. After the session, attendees will be able to:

• Articulate what makes functional programming different from the typical imperative languages of today
• Write simple programs using Clojure
• Describe how Clojure programs seamlessly interoperate with existing Java libraries

Bio:
Paul Holser is a Principal Consultant at Improving Enterprises, where he and his colleagues help clients adopt agile software development methods and create indefinitely sustainable software applications. He has seventeen years of software development experience, including with thought leaders such as ThoughtWorks, ObjectSpace, and Valtech. Paul's passion for sharing what he has learned shows in his previous speaking engagements at TechFest in both Dallas and Tulsa, and via his articles and blogs. He is the author of JOpt Simple, a command–line option parsing library for Java.

Meeting Sponsor:
Credera is a Dallas based, full–service business and technology consulting firm. Working with Fortune 1,000 companies, medium–sized businesses, government organizations and clients across a broad range of industries, we provide the experience and the commitment necessary to solve today's toughest business and technology challenges. Because it's not just about meeting expectations — it's about exceeding them.

Expect professionalism. Expect integrity. Expect excellence. Expect Credera.

Abstract:
A key to writing clear, expressive, maintainable code is to develop that code with tests. But if the tests themselves are not clear, expressive, and maintainable, what good are they? Our applications have complex object interactions and rich object models. Fortunately, there are frameworks available for validating these interactions and replicating these models in a clear way. We will explore how Mockito and make–it–easy can help us write tests as clean as the code they are testing.

Bio:
Ryan Breidenbach is an Application Architect at The Container Store, where he applies his passion for developing quality software. He is also the co–author of Spring in Action, and a contributor to Infinitest, a Java continuous test runner.

Meeting Sponsor:
As proponents of Blue Ocean Strategy,
Improving Enterprises challenges the basic assumptions of traditional technology service models, to create innovative solutions that provide sustainable and meaningful value to our customers. We have three flagship offerings: Rural Sourcing is a low risk, high value alternative to offshore. Certified Consulting challenges the traditional values of staffing companies by providing unconditional guarantees, measured quality, and detailed professional files. And, our Applied Training does not end in the classroom. We bridge the gap between training and application, by providing onsite, individual coaching to each of our publicly enrolled students.