Sessions at CodeMash 2012 on Friday 13th January in Aloeswood / Leopardwood

The Java SE 7 release is the result of nearly five years of industry-wide development involving open review, weekly builds and extensive collaboration between Oracle engineers and members of the worldwide Java community via the OpenJDK project. Over the past year the OpenJDK community has continued to grow, including the addition of major vendors such as IBM and Apple. In June Oracle announced that the Java SE 7 Reference Implementation will be based entirely on the OpenJDK open source code.

The Java SE 7 release includes new features such as small language changes for improved developer productivity, a new Filesystem API, support for asynchronous I/O, a new fork/join framework for multicore performance, improved support for dynamic and script languages, updates to security, internationalization and web standards and much more.

In this session, we'll provide an overview of the these new features and highlight the major improvements.

As developers, we are asked to absorb even more information than ever before. More APIs, more documentation, more patterns, more layers of abstraction. Now Twitter and Facebook compete with Email and Texts for our attention, keeping us up-to-date on our friends dietary details and movie attendance second-by-second. Does all this information take a toll on your psyche or sharpen the saw? Is it a matter of finding the right tools and filters to capture what you need, or do you just need to unplug. Is ZEB (zero email bounce) a myth or are there substantive techniques for prioritizing your live as a developer? Join Scott Hanselman as we explore this topic…perhaps we’ll crowd-source the answers!

It's time to write client side code we can love every bit as much as our server side code. After years of missteps and bad ideas, things are finally taking shape to let us do it. Coffeescript provides a beautiful syntax for writing javascript that causes the noise to fade away and our intent to shine through. Backbone.js gives us an elegant MVC framework that provides just enough structure and guides our client side code towards the kind of clean, reusable codebase we are used to from server side frameworks. Combining these with practices we know work such as Test Driven Development, there's no longer any excuse at all for ugly front end code. In this session I'll share my experience writing real applications this way and show how these excellent technologies fit together.

The use of non-relational databases is a growing movement, and can be a great solution in some scenarios. RavenDB is the foremost document database for .NET, and offers support for JSON, LINQ, a REST-ful API, automatic indexing, transactions, horizontal scalability, and many more features. In this talk we'll discuss the pros and cons of non-relational databases, explore features of RavenDB, and walk through some examples of putting RavenDB to work.