The Community Hub
Welcome to the Community Hub
The mission of TheServerSide Java Symposium is to advance the enterprise Java platform, propagate industry-wide best practices, and provide a forum for the community for forward-thinking discussions. TSSJS is a gathering place for thought leaders and innovators to disseminate information about successful implementations and new projects to Enterprise Java developers, architects and technical team leads. We seek to bring you practical, useable information that can be immediately applied to your projects, as well as give you a look to the future of Java development. We pride ourselves on being 100% community-driven.
What's NEW for the Community:
- Track Hosts
- Fireside Chats (formerly Birds-of-a-Feather sessions) - Get all of your questions answered!
Track Hosts
We are excited to announce the addition of Track Hosts to this year's Java Symposium. Track Hosts help us shape the direction of our sessions and make sure our content is as relevant and helpful to you as possible. We scoured the Java landscape to find the most resourceful people to help organize and lead our tracks. Take a moment to meet our Track Hosts:
From "Market"ecture to Architecture (SOA)
Track Host: Mark Hansen, Ph.D., Author, SOA Using Java Web Services
Mark is also the founder and president of AgileIT – a company creating virtualization software for SOAs. Mark is a content developer for Project GlassFish and a member of the JAX-RS (JSR-311) expert group. Earlier in his career, Mark was an MIT visiting scholar and a successful entrepreneur who sold his eBusiness consulting firm to PSINet in 1999. Mark earned his Ph.D. from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
Track Host: Glenn Vanderburg, Chief Scientist, Relevance, Inc.
At Relevance, Glenn helps teams improve their software development, incorporating agile practices and high-leverage technologies such as Ruby on Rails. He is constantly on the alert for tools and practices that help programmers do better work, and evaluates them with an experienced and skeptical eye.
Track Host: Justin Gehtland, President of Relevance, Inc.
With Streamlined Framework co-founder Stuart Halloway, Justin helps enterprises adopt emerging best practices such as Ruby on Rails. Stuart and Justin founded the Streamlined Framework (www.streamlinedframework.org), and authored Rails for Java Developers. Justin is also the author of Pragmatic Ajax, Better, Faster, Lighter Java, and several other books. Prior to founding Relevance, Justin was the Director of Information Services at DevelopMentor.
Track Host: Eugene Ciurana, Director of Systems Infrastructure, LeapFrog Enterprises
Eugene is Director of Systems Infrastructure at LeapFrog Enterprises, the largest educational toy company in the United States. Eugene is also a contributing editor to TheServerSide.com. In 2006, he led the first-time adoption of Linux and other open-source technologies at Wal-Mart Stores Information Systems Division as chief liaison between Walmart.com Global and the ISD Technology Council.
Eugene has contributed to Java, Linux, and OS X open-source projects and has architected main line of business applications, embedded platforms, and real-time systems for the largest companies in the world, including Wal-Mart, Bank One/Chase, National Oilwell Varco, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Univex/Celanese, Nexis/Lexis, etc. He's the author of over 50 feature articles and editorials about technology and computer programming topics for such publications as TheServerSide, Software Guru, Informatique!, Computerworld, EE Times, Byte, PC/Tips, and OMNI, and is writing a book about the Mule ESB.
Speed (High Performance Computing)
Track Host: Kirk Pepperdine, CTO, JavaPerformanceTuning.com, Sun Java Champion, and co-author of ANT Developer's Handbook (SAMS)
Kirk is the Chief Technical Officer at JavaPerformanceTuning.com and has been focused on Object technologies and performance tuning for the last 15 years. Kirk is a co-author of the book, ANT Developer's Handbook (SAMS).
Track Host: Patrick Linskey, co-leader, EJB3 and JDO spec teams
Patrick has been involved in object/relational mapping for 6+ years. As the founder and CTO of SolarMetric, Patrick drove the technical direction of the company and oversaw the development of Kodo. Now at BEA, he leads the EJB team in designing and implementation of the WebLogic Server EJB solution. Patrick is one of the leaders on the EJB3 and the JDO specification teams, and is BEA's representative on the EJB3 expert group. Patrick is involved in several industry consortia, serving as a luminary on JDOcentral and as the moderator on forthcoming JavaPersistence.com. He has been the face of standards-based persistence, having evangelized JDO and EJB Persistence in hundreds of talks throughout the world. Patrick is co-author of Bitter EJB. He has also worked for TechTrader, MIT's Media Lab and Bank One in various technical roles. Under Patrick's leadership, Kodo has become the market leading JDO implementation with over 450 customers throughout the world spanning all industries.
Track Host: Matt Raible, Java EE Developer, Founder, Raible Designs
Matt proudly resides in Denver, Colorado where he runs Raible Designs, a consultancy that specializes in open source Java frameworks and Ajax development. Matt has been surrounded by computers for most of his life, even though he grew up in the backwoods of Montana without electricity. Matt is the author of Spring Live and Pro JSP, Third Edition, and an active Java open-source contributor and blogger. He is the founder of AppFuse, a project which allows you to get started quickly with Java frameworks, as well as a committer on the Apache Roller project.
Fireside Chats
Fireside Chats (formerly Birds of a Feather sessions), are small, informal, and intimate discussions covering interests of the Java community. The goal of Fireside Chats is to give you quality time with experts in an informal discussion group setting. Fireside Chats will not include slides - They are not presentations, they are discussions. Discussion leaders will kick-start the discussion and guide the group though issues/challenges/pain-points.
Lead a Fireside Chat: Fireside Chats provide YOU with an opportunity to lead an informal discussion on a topic, pain point or area of general interest that is important to you. If you are interested in leading a group discussion on a particular subject, email us your suggestions, a brief bio and a brief description.
Fireside Chat topics:
• Beyond a DataGrid with Nati Shalom, CTO/founder, Gigaspaces, and Shay Banon, Founder, Compass open source project
In this Fireside Chat, we will discuss DataGrid usage and integration patterns that go beyond the typical Cache#put and Cache#get. Attendees will share their own experiences and we will discuss:
• How DataGrid can be used with ESB to provide a reliable and fault tolerant SEDA implementation (based on Mule);
• How a DataGrid can be used to execute dynamic jobs ala MapReduce using scripting languages;
• How a DataGrid can be used to scale Lucene index storage, as well as use Compass to index the DataGrid.
• Concurrent Programming with Java and Erlang with Dennis Byrne, Iteration Manager, ThoughtWorks
Hardware vendors are continuing to make multi-processing platforms affordable. Shouldn’t we start writing software to take advantage of this?
In this Fireside Chat, Dennis will lead a discussion on scalable development, and demonstrate how easy it can be to build highly scalable fault tolerant systems in Java. Dennis will demonstrate with JInterface, an open source bridge for Java and Erlang.
Attendees will discuss their development issues with and solutions to performance, scalability and fault tolerance, and will review the JInterface API, the Actor Model, hardware industry trends, interprocess communication and the Erlang syntax. Learn the differences between Java threads and Erlang processes. See how to write software that can take advantage of multi-core processing without locks, keys, synchronization or shared memory.
Participants should be familiar with concurrent programming, multi-core processing, Object-Oriented Programming, asynchronous Architecture and functional programming to fully participate in this Fireside Chat.
• Dynamic Scripting with Frank Cohen, Founder and CEO, PushtoTest
Java 6 introduced native support for dynamic scripting languages (JSR 223 scripting languages and the Java programming language), but there are various scripting camps using different methods. This Fireside Chat will bring together leaders, users, and critics from the Jython, Groovy, PHP, Ruby, and other scripting camps for an exchange of ideas.
We will discuss the dynamic scripting languages natively supported by Java 6; how to solve problems using dynamic scripting languages; the Benefits of JSR 292 to your Java development; and Changes in JSR 292 to a multi-language virtual machine project since transition of JSR 292 from Gilad Bracha to John Rose.
The goal of this discussion is to develop a common understanding of the state of the art and practical examples of using dynamic scripting languages to solve problems.
• Fast Mission-Critical Deployment at LeapFrog Enterprises with Eugene Ciurana, Director of Systems Infrastructure, Leapfrog Enterprises
Imagine that you have to create 4 large, mission-critical systems for your company, and are only given between 90 and 120 days from inception to deployment for each. A single development effort would normally take 12 to 18 months. Now you have to do 4 in 15 months. How would you go about doing that? Which Java technologies would you chose, and why? How would you balance time to market, the opportunity of using new technologies, open-source and commercial software, and your SLA requirements? What problems are you likely to find? This fireside chat discusses the “best of breed” strategy implemented by LeapFrog Enterprises and how their web engineering team created its world-class web infrastructure.
The aim of this discussion is to guide developers, architects and their managers to:
• Have a blueprint for rapid development and deployment in a high-stress, mission-critical environment that introduces or leverages some of the latest Java technologies;
• Learn how to balance open-source and commercial frameworks for your deployment;
• Managing your development cost;
• Identify how technology choices may affect the rest of the organization and how to differentiate between web engineering and IT deployment activities.
Challenges we will discuss include:
• How do you introduce cutting-edge Java technologies into an organization that’s adverse to change?
• Given the choices, should you use open-source or commercial software? What are the advantages of each?
• Which technologies should you use for each component in your architecture and how do you define the selection criteria?
• Where do you find the know-how for your software development and deployment effort?
• JavaFX for the Enterprise with Jim Weaver, Author, JavaFX Script: Dynamic Java Scripting for Rich Internet/Client-Side Applications
Creating and maintaining rich internet clients in an enterprise application contains inherent challenges. This fireside chat will help the attendee address these challenges with JavaFX Script, which enables development of rich internet application clients due to its simplicity, elegance, and the fact that it leverages the power of Java.
Discuss JavaFX Script's key language constructs, and learn how concepts like declarative program, triggers, and binding to a model be used to create clients that provide rich, responsive, and graphically pleasing user interfaces to the server-side components of an enterprise application.
This session will discuss 2 trends of Rich Internet Application development - deployment and the idea of rich internet applications running on the desktop (but not necessarily in the browser) and introduce participants to some of the strengths of JavaFX Script, including:
• Its simple, declarative syntax used to express user interfaces, including a very rich set of layout widgets that make easy work of laying out a user interface in a platform-independent way;
• Its innate ability to support the model-view-controller pattern because of its very powerful bind capability;
• The concept of triggers (functionality that is automatically invoked when certain conditions take place, such as when the value of an attribute changes). This enables the declarative syntax as well;
• JavaFX programs will run anywhere Java programs will run, because they run within the context of a Java Virtual Machine (JVM);
• Its very powerful syntax for defining, modifying, and querying sequences (think arrays).
• Pragmatic Web Service Solutions with Dan Diephouse, Software Architect, MuleSource, and Ryan Heaton, Senior Software Engineer, FamilySearch.org
Web service development is hard. No matter how good the Web service tools and technologies are these days, there are still deep waters that have to be charted to support a very dynamic Web 2.0 world. This discussion will be an attempt to provide a rough map for Web service developers looking to integrate into today's Web platform.
Dan Diephouse and Ryan Heaton will lead a discussion intended to surface the most relevant issues facing developers who are tracking today's rough Web services landscape. The discussion will merge the professional background of two Web service enthusiasts along with the experience of the group to determine the most effective tools and practices that provide solutions to these problems. Potential topics range from architecture discussions (service modeling service contracts, REST) to frameworks/libraries to data formats such as XML, JSON, and microformats. Participants will be given the opportunity to discuss the state of Web service development today and what will be needed to support Web service development moving forward.
In this discussion, attendees will learn best practices and specific solutions that can be used to resolve the most common problems and pitfalls of Web service development today:
• How to identify and anticipate the biggest pitfalls to developing Web services today;
• The most common problems Web service developers are wrestling with;
• The latest tools and frameworks that are being used to address these problems and pitfalls;
• The most effective architectural practices being applied to Web service application development;
• Where Web service development is headed moving forward.
Engineers and architects involved in Web service development will best contribute to and benefit from this Fireside Chat.
Attendees should be familiar with the fundamental concepts of Web services which they wish to discuss (e.g. HTTP, XML, SOAP, REST, JSON) and how they are used in practice today (e.g. Public APIs, RIAs, AJAX, ESBs). Any experience with the latest Java technologies and frameworks for Web service development would also be helpful.
• Real GWT Applications with Jeff Dwyer, Author, Pro Web 2.0 Application Development with GWT
Google Web Toolkit is one of the most interesting Ajax technologies available today. It has the full backing of Google and one of the most active developer lists around. GWT 1.5 supports full Java 1.5 capability allowing developers full access to their server side domain objects in their rich Ajax client.
Jeff Dwyer is an entrepreneur and the founder of two GWT-driven startups: ToCollege.net and MyHippocampus. In this Fireside Chat, Jeff will field questions about GWT, kicking off the discussion by covering how GWT allowed him to quickly write rich web applications in his favorite IDE without having to worry about browser quirks.
We’ll take a quick look at the basic GWT value proposition and how this has worked out in the real world. We’ll quickly move into question and answers where you can ask Jeff about his experiences integrating GWT with the modern Java stack, including: Hibernate, Spring, Spring MVC, Sitemesh, Freemarker and Maven.
Who should participate in this Fireside Chat: Developers that want to write Ajax code that can be quickly refactored and software architects uninterested in creating mountains of difficult to maintain JavaScript code.
In this discussion, we will cover:
• How GWT address the problem of Ajax development scalability;
• GWT ImageBundles;
• Search engine optimization and GWT;
• Security implications of GWT;
• Your specific questions about GWT, and what it can bring to your projects.