Tools & Techniques

Tools & Techniques takes a look at the proliferation of tools available to design and build high-quality applications.It focuses on using tools such as Eclipse, Maven, and Lucene to accelerate application development and automate processes. Get tips for building an effective set of tools and using those tools in the most productive manner possible.These sessions help you make choices between different tools and integrating those tools into a comprehensive development and build infrastructure.

Tools & Techniques sessions already confirmed:

• Just Tune It
• Hunting Memory Leaks
• Software Quality: The Quest for the Holy Grail?
• Testing Scripts and DSLs: A Practical Use of JSR-223

Others you might be interested in:

• A Practical Guide to DSLs for the Java Developer
• GWT fu: Going Places with the Google Web Toolkit
• Streamline Web Application Development with JSF 2.0
• Using Java Parallel Method Invocation to Accelerate Data Analysis on a Distributed Data Grid

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Just Tune it

Kirk Pepperdine, Java Performance Tuning Expert

As performance becomes more important, we need to develop more reliable and effective ways of dealing with performance. This session addresses that need. Its purpose is to introduce a performance tuning methodology that's revealed as we go through the process of tuning a Java application.

Attend and gain a firm understanding of:

• How to performance tune
• How to be methodical in tuning
• How to read key performance indicators
• And more.

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Hunting Memory Leaks

Kirk Pepperdine, Java Performance Tuning Expert

The recent trend in memory leak detection is ignoring recent, more powerful techniques supported in newer tooling.That trend must be reversed in order for distributed, server-based Java applications to perform to their potential.

This session focuses on proven techniques for finding the source of memory leaks in Java applications. The techniques rely on tooling found in the NetBean's Profiler. Kirk Pepperdine starts with a brief overview of Java memory management, followed by a brief description of some causes of memory leaks, and then solutions for quickly and reliably finding them with the NetBeans Platform profiler and VisualVM.

Attendees of this session will learn:

• How memory management works in the JVM;
• Where and when memory management breaks down;
• How to use tools to find and fix the causes of the memory issues;
• And more.

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Software Quality: The Quest for the Holy Grail?

Jesper Pedersen, Lead Developer, JBoss Tattletale project

As Java projects evolve, they become more and more complex to manage and getting a complete overview can be a painful task - especially if proper metadata about dependencies isn't available.

This session provides real-world examples for being more productive on the job in the midst of complex Java projects. Based on his experiences, Jesper Pedersen shares tools to use in specific environments and proven tips for keeping track of your dependencies and their dependencies. After attending, you will be able to list basic requirements for your build, test and dependency environments, and thereby improve the quality of your projects. You’ll gain a deep understanding of the available tools to use to increase productivity and keep your edge over time.

Topics covered in-depth include:

• Software quality: Friend or Foe?
• Defining the baseline
• Getting it right from the start
  - Build environment
  - Test environment
  - Dependency environment
• Is your project already a mess?
  - What can you do?
• Maintaining the lead.

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Testing Scripts and DSLs: A Practical Use of JSR-223

William Martinez Pomares, R&D Manager and Architect, Avantica Technologies

Everybody talks about DSLs, scripting languages and how easy they are to use, in particular for unit testing. Managing testing scripts and DSLs is important, and making it work as a whole is even more important.

JSR-223 is the spec that brought scripting languages to the JVM. The ability to execute managed scripts in popular languages like Python or Ruby in the JVM, along with other Java modules, may not seem exciting for Python, Ruby or Java core developers. But now, architects and system designers that need to deal with several code snippets have a way to coordinate them all with JSR-223.

This session shares the speaker’s experience, solutions and complications when working with the JSR-223 spec to provide a multi-user, load testing solution that reuses loose scripts, and how you can use the JSR-223 spec to create a DSL for testing.

Attend to learn:

• How to use the JSR-223 implementation to reuse loose script snippets in a collaboration suite;
• How JSR-223 works and how to allow 2 or more languages to communicate in the JVM;
• What it takes to create a DSL with JSR-223;
• Cases when reuse is not possible;
• And more.