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Craig Walls

Author of 'Spring in Action' and 'Building Talking Apps'

Craig Walls is a Principal Engineer, Java Champion, Alexa Champion, and the author of Spring AI in Action, Spring in Action, and Build Talking Apps. He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring. When he's not slinging code, Craig is planning his next trip to Disney World or Disneyland and spending as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 1 bird and 2 dogs.

Presentations

Next Gen Spring Boot 2023 Edition featuring Spring 6

8:30 AM MDT

The Spring Framework transformed enterprise Java development nearly two decades ago, making it easier to achieve common things such as transactions, security, loose-coupling, and much more Over the years, Spring has continued to rise to every challenge Java developers face, most recently addressing subjects such as reactive programming, cloud computing, and container deployment in Kubernetes. Meanwhile, Spring Boot makes easy work of Spring by employing (among other things) auto-configuration, runtime insight and management, and a practical convention for specifying application properties.

The releases of Spring Framework 6 and Spring Boot 3 bring exciting and useful new capabilities. With features like native compilation, improved observability and tracing, support for HTTP problem details, and declarative HTTP clients, as well as baselining on Java 17 and Jakarta EE 9, Spring is ready for a new generation of application development.

In this workshop, you'll start with a very simple Spring Boot application and learn to grow it into a fully functional application including a web front-end and data persistence. And you'll get hands-on experience with some of the most exciting new features in Spring 6 and Spring Boot 3.

Next Gen Spring Boot 2023 Edition featuring Spring 6

10:30 AM MDT

The Spring Framework transformed enterprise Java development nearly two decades ago, making it easier to achieve common things such as transactions, security, loose-coupling, and much more Over the years, Spring has continued to rise to every challenge Java developers face, most recently addressing subjects such as reactive programming, cloud computing, and container deployment in Kubernetes. Meanwhile, Spring Boot makes easy work of Spring by employing (among other things) auto-configuration, runtime insight and management, and a practical convention for specifying application properties.

The releases of Spring Framework 6 and Spring Boot 3 bring exciting and useful new capabilities. With features like native compilation, improved observability and tracing, support for HTTP problem details, and declarative HTTP clients, as well as baselining on Java 17 and Jakarta EE 9, Spring is ready for a new generation of application development.

In this workshop, you'll start with a very simple Spring Boot application and learn to grow it into a fully functional application including a web front-end and data persistence. And you'll get hands-on experience with some of the most exciting new features in Spring 6 and Spring Boot 3.

Event-Driven Spring for the Win!

1:00 PM MDT

At its core, Spring is built on a dependency injection framework that enables (among other things) loose coupling of application components. But dependency injection is not the only way to achieve loose-coupling. Event-driven design, as its name implies, enables components to react to events, not knowing where they came from, process those events, and then publish new events not knowing who (if anybody) will be handling those events.

In this session, you'll learn how to apply events in Spring applications to achieve looser coupling of components. We’ll start by looking at some fundamental abilities that the core framework offers for handling events. Then we'll quickly move into a higher-level form of event-driven architecture where events aren’t just handled within a single deployment, but span across multiple microservices by employing Spring Cloud Stream and Spring Cloud DataFlow. And then we’ll see how, when paired with serverless functions based on Spring Cloud Function, we can achieve not only loose-coupling of microservices, but also an efficient yet scalable use of resources in our event-driven architecture.

Spring into K8s: Deploying Spring Application in Kubernetes

3:00 PM MDT

Although Java originally promised write once, run anywhere, it failed to fully deliver on that promise. As developers, we can develop, test, and build our applications into WAR or executable JAR files and then toss them over the wall to a Java application server and Java runtime that we have no control over, giving us zero confidence that the application will behave the same as when we tested it.

Containers fulfill the write-once, run anywhere promise that Java wasn't able to, by packaging the runtime and even the operating system along with our application, giving greater control and confidence that the application will function the same anywhere it is run. Additionally, containers afford several other benefits, including easy scaling, efficiency in terms of resource utilization, and security by isolating containers from their host system and from other containers.

While deploying Spring applications in containers has always been possible, Spring Boot makes it easier to containerize our applications and run them in container architectures such as Kubernetes. Spring Boot's support for containerization includes two options: Creating containers based on buildpacks or using layers as a means of modularizing and reducing the size of our application deployments. Moreover, new components in the Spring ecosystem can make your Spring applications Kubernetes-savvy so that they can take advantage of what a containerized architecture has to offer.

In this example-driven session, we're going to look at how to create and deploy Spring applications as container images and deploy them into a Kubernetes cluster. Along the way, we'll also get to know a few of the most useful tools that a Spring developer can employ in their development workflow when building containerized Spring applications. We'll also see how to apply patterns of Spring Cloud–such as configuration, service discovery, and gateways–using native Kubernetes facilities instead of Spring Cloud components. And we'll look at how components of the Spring ecosystem can work with your Spring applications to enable them to thrive in a Kubernetes cluster.

The Talking App: Applying AI to create natural conversational interactions with Alexa

7:30 PM MDT

The interactions between Alexa and her human users are significantly more natural than typing, clicking, and swiping. But without significant effort, they still feel somewhat stilted compared to human-to-human communication.

However, by applying a little bit of AI, trained with some predefined example dialogs, conversations with Alexa can seem just like you're talking to a friend or family member.

In this session, we'll explore Alexa Conversations, a new technology for creating conversational dialogs that aren't stiff and scripted. We'll build a simple Alexa Conversations-enabled skill to get started and then explore a complete (and award-winning) Alexa skill that is built on Alexa Conversations.

Extreme Spring Testing

1:30 PM MDT

In this session, we'll look at various ways that the latest features of Spring and Spring Boot can help with testing the tough-to-test portions of an application.

TBD

Extreme Spring Data

3:15 PM MDT

In this session, you'll see how to take Spring Data's automatic repository generation to a whole new level. We'll look at ways to model data and manipulate Spring Data to produce repositories and APIs that are more than just CRUD layers on top of a database.

TBD

Books

Spring AI in Action

by Craig Walls

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT cause an immediate jaw drop for almost everyone who encounters them. Until recently, though, Java developers have had few good tools for adding AI features to existing and new applications. Spring AI, an exciting new extension for Spring and Spring Boot, changes the equation. Spring AI provides generative AI capabilities natively within the framework, so you can stick with Java end-to-end. Spring AI in Action shows you how!

Spring in Action, 6th Edition

by Craig Walls

A new edition of the classic bestseller! Spring in Action, 6th Edition covers all of the new features of Spring 5.3 and Spring Boot 2.4 along with examples of reactive programming, Spring Security for REST Services, and bringing reactivity to your databases. You'll also find the latest Spring best practices, including Spring Boot for application setup and configuration.

Build Talking Apps for Alexa

by Craig Walls

Voice recognition is here at last. Alexa and other voice assistants have now become widespread and mainstream. Is your app ready for voice interaction? Learn how to develop your own voice applications for Amazon Alexa. Start with techniques for building conversational user interfaces and dialog management. Integrate with existing applications and visual interfaces to complement voice-first applications. The future of human-computer interaction is voice, and we’ll help you get ready for it.

Spring in Action, 5th Edition

by Craig Walls

Spring Framework has been making Java developers more productive and successful for over a dozen years, and it shows no signs of slowing down!

Spring in Action, 5th Edition is the fully-updated revision of Manning's bestselling Spring in Action. This new edition includes all Spring 5.0 updates, along with new examples on reactive programming, Spring WebFlux, and microservices. Readers will also find the latest Spring best practices, including Spring Boot for application setup and configuration.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.