Ted Neward

Android Training - Full Day

9:00 AM MDT

First there was iPod. Then iPhone. Then iPad. And with each new release, the mobile device market grew hotter and hotter. Now, as Google’s entry into this race, the Android system, begins to hit its stride as a competitor platform to the iOS, as a Java developer you’re intrigued—it’s Java (well, assuming you ask anybody except Oracle), and it’s a mobile device, and it’s open source, and…. What’s not to love?

In this all-day workshop, we’re going to turn you into a journeyman Android developer. This is a Java-based platform, so we’ll have a leg up on those other “Java-free” environments where you’ll have to spend half the day just learning how to count from 1 to 10 and print it to the console all over again. We’ll start by looking at the Android toolchain and how it integrates with your existing toolchain (Eclipse or otherwise). We’ll get your hands dirty writing some code to the Android emulator, then (for those of you who have Android devices handy) push it to a device. We’ll write some unit-tests for testing an Android application. We’ll look at how to store data to the device, both in a SQLite database as well as to a straight file. We’ll look at how to make Internet calls to remote services, and when all is said and done, we’ll have an application that Really Works ™. Bring a laptop, your Java skills, an Android device if you’ve got one, and buckle in, because it’s going to be a straight-from-the-firehose kind of workshop.

Pragmatic Architecture

5:00 PM MDT

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.

Architectural Kata Workshop

8:30 PM MDT

Fred Brooks said, “How do we get great designers? Great designers design, of course.” So how do we get great architects? Great architects architect. But architecting a software system is a rare opportunity for the non-architect.

The kata is an ancient tradition, born of the martial arts, designed to give the student the opportunity to practice more than basics in a semi-realistic way. The coding kata, created by Dave Thomas, is an opportunity for the developer to try a language or tool to solve a problem slightly more complex than “Hello world”. The architectural kata, like the coding kata, is an opportunity for the student-architect to practice architecting a software system.

In this session, attendees will be split into small groups and given a “real world” business problem (the kata). Attendees will be expected to formulate an architectural vision for the project, asking questions (of the instructor) as necessary to better understand the requirements, then defend questions (posed by both the instructor and their fellow attendees) about their choice in technology and approach, and then evaluate others' efforts in a similar fashion. No equipment is necessary to participate–the great architect has no need of tools, just their mind and the customers' participation and feedback.

The Busy Java Developer's Guide to Akka

11:00 AM MDT

With the rise of multi-core processors, and their growing ubiquity (on client machines, to say nothing of the server machines on which Java applications most frequently execute), the need to “program concurrently” has risen from “nice-to-have” to “mandatory” requirement, and unfortunately the traditional threading-and-locking model is just too complicated for most Java developers–even the brightest of the lot–to keep track of with any degree of reliability. As a result, numerous new solutions are emerging, each of them with their own strengths and weaknesses, leaving the Java developer in a bit of a quandary as to which to examine.

In this presentation, we'll look at Akka, a framework/platform specifically aimed at building high-throughput, concurrency-friendly applications in either Java or Scala (or both), with a slew of additional add-on modules to handle issues like persistence, communication (pub-sub, REST, and more), and more. By the time we're done, you'll be able to start looking into using Akka on your own projects, and have a good feel for what your projects would look like when Akka-ized.

Busy Java Developer's Guide to Guava

1:30 PM MDT

“The Google Guava project contains a host of new features/classes for use by the Java programmer. Intended as a drop-in supplement for the standard JDK APIs, Guava provides features like immutable and forwarding collections, some concurrency utilities, more support for primitives, and so on.

In this session, we'll go over the Guava library, looking at what it provides, when you might seek to use it, and what the overheads and consequences of using it would be.”

Busy Developer's Guide to CouchDB

5:00 PM MDT

With the rise of the NoSQL movement, a whole new crop of different ways to store data suddenly became available to the Java developer. Unfortunately,what didn't come with them was an owner's manual. CouchDB, for example, was the first of the NoSQL databases to be named as such, and offers features not found in the traditional RDBMS: A distributed, robust, incremental replication document-oriented database server with bi-directional conflict detection and management, accessible via a RESTful JSON API, stored ad-hoc and schema-free with a flat address space, that is both query-able and index-able, featuring a table oriented reporting engine that uses JavaScript as a query language. (With a list of buzzwords like that, what's not to love?)

In this session, we'll look at CouchDB, how to set it up, store data to it, retrieve data from it, and in general figure out where it fits within your next project.

Busy Java Developer's Guide to Physics Engines

1:30 PM MDT

“From Wikipedia: “A physics engine is computer software that provides an approximate simulation of certain simple physical systems, such as rigid body dynamics (including collision detection), soft body dynamics, and fluid dynamics, of use in the domains of computer graphics, video games and film.
Their main uses are in video games (typically as middleware), in which case the simulations are in real-time. The term is sometimes used more generally to describe any software system for simulating physical phenomena, such as high-performance scientific simulation.”

In this presentation, we'll look at some of the physics engines available, and how to use them from within Java for a variety of purposes (most of which will be game-oriented, but can easily be extrapolated into other, more business-focused, scenarios).

Busy Java Developer's Guide to Games

3:15 PM MDT

Games? What do games have to do with good business-oriented applications? Turns out, a lot of interesting little tidbits of user-interface, distribution, and emergence, found normally in the games we play, have direct implications on the way enterprise applications can (or should) be built.

Come to this session, find out some intriguing things about what’s going on in the game industry, but more importantly, how ideas from the gaming world can turn around and answer some thorny problems in the business world.