Sessions at JaxDays 2012 on Tuesday 3rd April

This half-day tutorial provides an introduction to NOSQL in general, and to the Neo4j graph database in particular. For many of today's complex data problems, NOSQL technologies provide a compelling alternative to mainstream relational databases. We'll look at the history behind NOSQL, and then describe the several flavours of NOSQL in use today, together with their pros and cons. Neo4j is a powerful and fast JVM-based graph database. Its expressive graph data model captures the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of a complex, densely connected domain. For highly connected data, Neo4j is thousands of times faster than relational databases, making it ideal for managing complex data in domains as diverse as finance and social, telecoms and geospatial. This introductory tutorial covers the core functionality of the Neo4j graph database. With a mixture of theory and entertaining hands-on coding sessions, you'll quickly learn the basics of the Neo4j API and its fluent query language, and in so doing discover how easy it is to develop a Neo4j-backed application.

For unknown reasons many projects are already starting with expensive (in any direction), unsuitable, bloated and even unusable tools, architecture and processes. In this workshop we will discuss the following best practices for the Java EE 6/7 platform during a development of an end-to-end Java EE 6 application:
CAP and BASE
Mixing CDI, JPA, EJB, JSF, and JAX-RS to save code
Mocking, unit testing, stress testing, system testing, and integration testing
DevOps and Java EE or Continuous integration and build (Maven 3, Git)
Efficient data access without DAOs
Asynchronous CDI events for decoupling and pub/sub
Pro-active JMX monitoring instead of logging
Minimum Layers Architecture
Configuration of Java EE Applications
Comet-style communication
REST vs. SOAP
Plugins, Schedulers, Aspects, Security Enhancements, (…)
We will also prove that most of the J2EE and GoF Patters are either superfluous or became just part of the Java EE 6 platform. Please also prepare some questions--I would like to answer them with working code. Requirements: A modern Laptop with > 2 GB RAM and installed JDK 1.6 / 1.7. I will use NetBeans 7.1 Java EE edition (http://netbeans.org/downloads/in...). It comes with everything you need and can be installed in 5 minutes.

Building an application is not the straightforward exercise it used to be. Decisions regarding which architectural approaches to take (n-tier, client/server), which user interface approaches to take (Smart/rich client, thin client, Ajax), even how to communicate between processes (Web services, distributed objects, REST)... it's enough to drive the most dedicated designer nuts. This talk discusses the goals of an application architecture and why developers should concern themselves with architecture in the first place. Then, it dives into the meat of the various architectural considerations available; the pros and cons of JavaWebStart, ClickOnce, SWT, Swing, JavaFX, GWT, Ajax, RMI, JAX-WS, JMS, MSMQ, transactional processing, and more. After that, the basic architectural discussion from the first part is, with the aid of the audience in a more interactive workshop style, applied to a real-world problem, discussing the performance and scalability ramifications of the various communication options, user interface options, and more.

This half-day session gives you the advanced skills necessary to build and deploy large Neo4j-based systems. We'll dig deep into the Cypher query language, using it infer knowledge from a complex, densely-connected domain. We'll discuss several different recommended solution architectures, as well as clustering and high availability, scaling for large datasets, and deployment and operations. The session is a mixture of theory and practice, all of which assumes a basic understanding of Neo4j and its APIs.