Sessions at ÜberConf 2012 on Thursday 21st June

You don't need to "do scrum" or "implement lean" to be agile.

This pragmatic session shows how specific agile software development techniques can be adopted individually to solve particular problems. If you've wondered how to get started with agile or are not getting the benefits you'd expected from agile, this session will show you a way of thinking to make agile work for your organization - along with plenty of proven patterns for improving the effectiveness of your agile initiatives.

You don't need to "do scrum" or "implement lean" to be agile.

This pragmatic session shows how specific agile software development techniques can be adopted individually to solve particular problems. If you've wondered how to get started with agile or are not getting the benefits you'd expected from agile, this session will show you a way of thinking to make agile work for your organization - along with plenty of proven patterns for improving the effectiveness of your agile initiatives.

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is a new way of looking at messaging that is quickly gaining in popularity and use, particularly in the financial services industry. Unlike JMS, which defines a standard API across platforms, AMQP defines a standard wire-level protocol across languages and platforms, finally making true cross-platform messaging a reality. In this session I will start by describing exactly what AMQP is and what problems it specifically solves (that JMS can't!). I will then describe the basic architecture and how AMQP routes messages, and then, through live interactive coding, demonstrate how to build a simple producer and consumer using RabbitMQ to send and receive AMQP messages. We will then take a brief look at other aspects of AMQP such as performance, load balancing, and implementing publish-subscribe messaging.

Agenda: - What is AMQP and what problems does it solve? - How AMQP works: exchanges, bindings, queues, and routing - AMQP exchange types - AMQP message structure - Sending and receiving messages using RabbitMQ - AMQP Performance characteristics - Load balancing - Pub/Sub in AMQP

Key/value stores are the most common storage offerings in the cloud today. While conceptually similar, BlobStores present different programming models and consistency models that must be considered in application design. After this session, you'll understand these differences, and know how to use jclouds to avoid cloud lock-in and increase testability without restricting access to cloud-specific features.

We'll start by comparing public cloud services like Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure and private cloud software like OpenStack Swift or Eucalyptus Walrus from a feature and code/API level. We'll then review java and clojure calls to the open source jclouds BlobStore API, abstracting away these differences. We'll finish with a review of integration patterns in production today you can consider while designing your cloud architecture.

The Spock framework brings simple, elegant testing to Java and Groovy projects. It integrates cleanly with JUnit, so Spock tests can be integrated as part of an existing test suite. Spock also includes an embedded mocking framework that can be used right away.

In this presentation, we'll look at several examples of Spock tests and review most of its capabilities, including mock objects and integration with Spring.

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in how data is stored. Although RDBMS has long been treated as a one-size-fits-all solution for data storage, a new breed of datastores has arrived to offer a best-fit solution. Key-value stores, column stores, document stores, graph databases, as well as the traditional relational database are options to consider.

With these new data storage options come new and different ways of interacting with data. Even though all of these data storage options offer Java APIs, they are widely different from each other and the learning curve can be quite steep. Even if you understand the concepts and benefits of each database type, there's still the huge barrier of understanding how to work with each database's individual API.

Spring Data is a project that makes it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data, offering a reasonably consistent programming model regardless of which type of database you choose. In addition to supporting the new "NoSQL" databases such as document and graph databases, Spring Data also greatly simplifies working with RDBMS-oriented datastores using JPA.

In this workshop, we'll dig in with a hands-on exploration of a variety of data stores, including Redis, MongoDB, Neo4j, and traditional RDBMS. In doing so, you'll experience first-hand how Spring Data simplifies working with these data stores.

In this session, Grails core developer Jeff Brown will deliver an update on the latest and greats features of the Grails framework - a dynamic, web application framework based on the Groovy language and designed for Spring.

Jeff will cover all the new features of Grails 2.0 including agent-based reloading, unit testing mixins, really powerful new ways to express GORM queries and more. Attendees will gain key knowledge of the latest techniques for building Grails applications on the Spring platform.

Grails represents technology that offers great flexibility and power without the complexity introduced by other Java web application frameworks. Custom tag libraries are a snap. GSP Templates provide a simple mechanism for reusing UI elements. Sitemesh is integrated to help provide a consistent presentation across the entire application. GORM is super powerful ORM. Grails provides simple mechanisms for leveraging the power of Ajax.

This session will cover all of the fundamentals of the framework and will serve as a thorough introduction to developers not familiar with the framework and also include a number of tips and tricks for developers who do have experience with the framework.

Grails represents technology that offers great flexibility and power without the complexity introduced by other Java web application frameworks. Custom tag libraries are a snap. GSP Templates provide a simple mechanism for reusing UI elements. Sitemesh is integrated to help provide a consistent presentation across the entire application. GORM is super powerful ORM. Grails provides simple mechanisms for leveraging the power of Ajax.

This session will cover all of the fundamentals of the framework and will serve as a thorough introduction to developers not familiar with the framework and also include a number of tips and tricks for developers who do have experience with the framework.

Whether it's HBase, Cassandra or one of the many others, you've probably already heard about NoSQL. Perhaps you have a continuous test flow dependency, yet are concerned about learning curve or infrastructure required for the NoSQL store you need.

During this talk, you'll see how you can transform infrastructure clouds such as Amazon EC2 or GoGrid into your data cluster using Apache Whirr.

We'll start by reviewing cloud provisioning and how Whirr adds service management to the underlying jclouds ComputeService API. You'll then learn whirr syntax and how to use it from the commandline or via a Java API. Finally, we'll discuss patterns for workflow integration. When you leave, you'll know how to setup and use NoSQL stores with a lot less work.

Whether it's HBase, Cassandra or one of the many others, you've probably already heard about NoSQL. Perhaps you have a continuous test flow dependency, yet are concerned about learning curve or infrastructure required for the NoSQL store you need.

During this talk, you'll see how you can transform infrastructure clouds such as Amazon EC2 or GoGrid into your data cluster using Apache Whirr.

We'll start by reviewing cloud provisioning and how Whirr adds service management to the underlying jclouds ComputeService API. You'll then learn whirr syntax and how to use it from the commandline or via a Java API. Finally, we'll discuss patterns for workflow integration. When you leave, you'll know how to setup and use NoSQL stores with a lot less work.

If you need your messaging-based systems to be fast - really fast - then this is the session to attend. In this session I will introduce and demonstrate some relatively simple tips and tricks to get the best performance and throughput from your messaging system. Through live code demonstrations I will show the impact of both configuration and design changes using ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, and ZeroMQ. So buckle up those seat belts - its going to be a fast ride.

If you need your messaging-based systems to be fast - really fast - then this is the session to attend. In this session I will introduce and demonstrate some relatively simple tips and tricks to get the best performance and throughput from your messaging system. Through live code demonstrations I will show the impact of both configuration and design changes using ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, and ZeroMQ. So buckle up those seat belts - its going to be a fast ride.

This session shows you how to use some of the hottest technologies today to build a webapp, an API and a mobile application to track fitness workouts. Using HTML5 technologies (specifically geo and local storage), I’ll show you how you can track the time, distance and music you listened to while exercising. Play with Scala is used for the backend and services, while CoffeeScript and Jade are used for the front-end templating and Ajax communication.

This session will explain limitations encountered with HTML5 and discuss when native apps might work better.

Technology changes, it's a fact of life. And while many developers are attracted to the challenge of change, many organizations do a particularly poor job of adapting. We've all worked on projects with, ahem, less than new technologies even though newer approaches would better serve the business. But how do we convince those holding the purse strings to pony up the cash when things are "working" today? At a personal, how do we keep up with the change in our industry?

This talk will explore ways to stay sharp as a software professional. We'll talk about how a technology radar can help you stay marketable (and enjoying your career) and how we can use the same technique to help our companies keep abreast of important changes in the technology landscape. Of course it isn't enough to just be aware, we have to drive change - but how? This talk will consider ways we can influence others and lead change in our organizations.

So you already know and love Spock, the Enterprise ready testing framework, but want to know how to make the most of it and take your testing to the next level? Then this talk is for you. Even if you're new to Spock, but are interested in making your testing more effective this talk is for you.

We'll start with how the combination of Spock and the Groovy language makes it easy to bring the concept of “executable specifications” to the realm of unit testing, without the ceremony but with all of the benefits, and why this is so important to the health of your system.

From there we'll discuss extending Spock through its own Extension API and support for JUnit rules, which is one way to make your tests much more expressive and maintainable.

We'll close with Spock's seamless integration with Grails 2.0, and some hidden Spock treasures that help you get even more out of your testing.

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in how data is stored. Although RDBMS has long been treated as a one-size-fits-all solution for data storage, a new breed of datastores has arrived to offer a best-fit solution. Key-value stores, column stores, document stores, graph databases, as well as the traditional relational database are options to consider.

With these new data storage options come new and different ways of interacting with data. Even though all of these data storage options offer Java APIs, they are widely different from each other and the learning curve can be quite steep. Even if you understand the concepts and benefits of each database type, there's still the huge barrier of understanding how to work with each database's individual API.

Spring Data is a project that makes it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data, offering a reasonably consistent programming model regardless of which type of database you choose. In addition to supporting the new "NoSQL" databases such as document and graph databases, Spring Data also greatly simplifies working with RDBMS-oriented datastores using JPA.

In this workshop, we'll dig in with a hands-on exploration of a variety of data stores, including Redis, MongoDB, Neo4j, and traditional RDBMS. In doing so, you'll experience first-hand how Spring Data simplifies working with these data stores.

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in how data is stored. Although RDBMS has long been treated as a one-size-fits-all solution for data storage, a new breed of datastores has arrived to offer a best-fit solution. Key-value stores, column stores, document stores, graph databases, as well as the traditional relational database are options to consider.

With these new data storage options come new and different ways of interacting with data. Even though all of these data storage options offer Java APIs, they are widely different from each other and the learning curve can be quite steep. Even if you understand the concepts and benefits of each database type, there's still the huge barrier of understanding how to work with each database's individual API.

Spring Data is a project that makes it easier to build Spring-powered applications that use new data, offering a reasonably consistent programming model regardless of which type of database you choose. In addition to supporting the new "NoSQL" databases such as document and graph databases, Spring Data also greatly simplifies working with RDBMS-oriented datastores using JPA.

In this workshop, we'll dig in with a hands-on exploration of a variety of data stores, including Redis, MongoDB, Neo4j, and traditional RDBMS. In doing so, you'll experience first-hand how Spring Data simplifies working with these data stores.

Grails represents technology that offers great flexibility and power without the complexity introduced by other Java web application frameworks. Custom tag libraries are a snap. GSP Templates provide a simple mechanism for reusing UI elements. Sitemesh is integrated to help provide a consistent presentation across the entire application. GORM is super powerful ORM. Grails provides simple mechanisms for leveraging the power of Ajax.

This session will cover all of the fundamentals of the framework and will serve as a thorough introduction to developers not familiar with the framework and also include a number of tips and tricks for developers who do have experience with the framework.

For our production code we apply a wealth of design values and principles. Currently this is rarely done for our builds. Yet the project automation domain, specially in the enterprise, is often at least as complex as the business domain.

The design of your build is heavily influenced and possibly constrained by the design of the build system you are using. The main focus of this talk is to evaluate those design forces of the build systems. Mostly with the help of two books: Refactoring by Martin Fowler and Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans.

The build systems under review are dramatically different and thus the design of the corresponding builds. We will talk about best practices for build design and how different build systems might support that or stand in the way, thus preventing expressive, maintainable and easy to use builds. Those differences should be a major factor when you are choosing a build system appropriate to your needs.

The speaker is the founder of Gradle. So there might be some bias :). But the design principles referred to are core principles fully accepted by the Java community. The way they are violated is astonishingly obvious once pointed out. Production code would not get away with this and neither should builds.

Whether you are just getting started, or you’ve made an attempt and well… it could be better… a lot better, this session is for you. Ken has been working on Agile projects as a coach and mentor for a number of years. Come discover the common reasons teams fail to get it right. Bring your own challenges and lets discuss. This is set to be an engaging and illuminating discussion.

This can be a dynamic discussion where challenges facing attendees may have us to focus on some areas and tips of agile development. We will certainly talk about how team or management choices to deviate from core agile practices add risk to a project with suggestions on how to resolve many of these challenges.

Git is a version control system you may have been hearing a bit about lately. But simply hearing more about it may not be enough to convince you of its value. Getting hands on experience is what really counts. In this workshop, you'll bring your Windows, Mac or Linux laptop and walk through downloading, installing, and using Git in a collaborative fashion.

The workshop style of this class will allow you to observe and discover the value of this new version control tool first hand. You'll be cloning, creating, commiting, and pushing repositories by the conclusion of this session.