Craig Walls

Presentations

Effective Spring Workshop

After 9 years and several significant releases, Spring has gone a long way from challenging the then-current Java standards to becoming the de facto enterprise standard itself. Although the Spring programming model continues to evolve, it still maintains backward compatibility with many of its earlier features and paradigms. Consequently, there's often more than one way to do anything in Spring. How do you know which way is the right way?

In this 2-part workshop, you'll get a hands-on feel for the current best approaches in Spring development. We'll start with a poorly written Spring application and work our way through it, bringing it up to speed with the techniques encouraged by the most recent versions of the Spring Framework and other Spring projects.

Securing the Modern Web with OAuth

Web security is nothing new. As users of the web, we're all accustomed to entering our usernames and fumbling to recall our passwords when trying to access private data on one of the many online services we use. But while traditionally web security could be described as a two-party process between a web application and a user, the modern web involves applications that seek to access other applications on behalf of their users. This presents some new challenges in keeping a user's sensitive data secure while still allowing a the third party application to access it.

OAuth is an open standard for authorization, supported by many online services, that allows one application to access a user's data in another application, all while giving the user control of what information is shared.

In this session, we'll look at OAuth, focusing on OAuth 2, from the perspective of an application that consumes an OAuth-secured API as well as see how to use OAuth to secure your own APIs.

Building Next Generation Apps Workshop

For a long while, we've built applications pretty much the same way. Regardless of the frameworks (or even languages and platforms) employed, we've packaged up our web application, deployed it to a server somewhere, and asked our users to point their web browser at it.

But now we're seeing a shift in not only how applications are deployed, but also in how they're consumed. The cost and hassle of setting up dedicated servers is driving more applications into the cloud. Meanwhile, our users are on-the-go more than ever, consuming applications from their mobile devices more often than a traditional desktop browser. And even the desktop user is expecting a more interactive experience than is offered by simple page-based HTML sites.

With this shift comes new programming models and frameworks. It also involves a shift in how we think about our application design. Standing up a simple HTML-based application is no longer good enough.

In this 2-part workshop, you'll get hands-on experience building a simple, yet complete next-generation application that can be deployed in the cloud, consumed from any device, and offers a rich experience for your users.

Spring Data Workshop

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 2-part 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.

Client-Side MVC: Web and Mobile Development with Spine.js

In this session, we'll start with an empty directory and use Spine.js to create an interactive client-side web application. Then we'll leverage what we learned to build a mobile web application with a native feel that can be deployed either through a phone's web browser or via native wrapper frameworks such as Apache Cordova (aka, PhoneGap).

Model View Controller (MVC) is often thought of in terms of server-side frameworks such as Spring MVC and Struts. But as web applications become more interactive, it becomes important to apply the same principles in the client. Roll-your-own MVC in JavaScript is possible, but as was the case with server-side MVC frameworks, it can get messy and is often better to seek out help from established frameworks.

Recently, several JavaScript-based microframeworks have emerged to address these concerns in the browser. Spine.js is one such framework that brings MVC to the client-side of web development. Based in CoffeeScript, Spine.js stands out due to its simplicity and a programming model resembling that of Rails and Grails. Also, unlike many other client-side MVC frameworks, Spine.js has a clear and well-paved path to mobile application development.