Class loaders are at the core of the Java language. Java EE containers, OSGi, NetBeans modules, Tapestry 5, Grails and many others use class loaders heavily. Yet when something goes wrong, would you know how to solve it? In this session we will take a tour of the Java class loading mechanism, both from JVM and developer point of view. We will look at typical problems that you get with class loading and how to solve them. ClassNoDefError, IncompatibleClassChangeError, LinkageError and many others are symptoms of specific things going wrong that you can usually find and fix. For each problem we'll go through a hands on demo with a corresponding solution. Why is this important? Understanding the core of the JVM is critical to any Java developer so they understand how their java applications run and how that can differ in web application examples. This session will also help developers in the debugging of classpath issues and exceptions relating to classloader issues.

Have you ever wondered if the way you were conducting your jobs search was in line with what experts would consider to be “Best Practices”? Have you committed a major Faux Par? There are lots of opinions about things you absolutely should do while conducting a job search but we would like to share the top 10 Don’ts. Three experts from WinterWyman have been asked to talk about the major No-No’s when searching for a change in your career. Their sage advice will run the gamut from the fairly obvious to things you probably would not have thought about. Following the top 10 Don’ts we will have a lively discussion about other job search practices and answer any questions you may have about to go about an effective job search.

Most books, resources, and presentations tend to focus on a single technology or, at best, a single layer of web application development. In other words, most resources take a front-end (UI development) or back-end (server-side development) perspective. This is rightly so, since the entire spectrum of web application development is as wide and as deep as the Amazon river. It is, therefore, nearly impossible to maintain a key eye on all of the important technologies involved in the end-to-end delivery of a web application. It just so happens that I focus on just such a breadth-first perspective and would like to share a bit of what I have learned by taking a broad view of web application development. 

Contents

+++

• HTML5
  • When to use Element, ID, Class
• CSS3
  • Multi-column layouts and more
• JavaScript
  • Hard like algebra
• jQuery
  • Easy like Sunday morning
• Java
  • Are you still using JSPs?
• Spring MVC
  • Leverage JSON

This session will provide a high level basic overview of the Android Application Framework, its Intent messaging facility, and how simple TextToSpeech can be implemented by using an Intent to find and make use of app resource already installed on the phone. It is a condensed version of a portion of the speaker's Introduction to Android Application Framework and APIs continuing education class for IEEE Boston Section. Code snippets from a demo app will be shown. We will touch on the life cycle of an Activity, which is one of the four core application components of the Android Application Framework, and see how widgets can be laid out and instantiated for an Activity's UI screen. We will see how an Intent object is used to activate certain operations, and how to take advantage of the intent mechanism to implement TextToSpeech. The demo app is taken from "Learning Android" by Marko Gargenta and published by O'Reilly.

This session will explore the big data scene as it relates to business intelligence. We will explore who’s using Big Data for BI, what applications are being created, and what benefits are being realized. We’ll go hands on with the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project, which now offers native support to Hadoop through Hive queries. We’ll also cover how BIRT can access other Big Data sources such as Cassandra and MongoDB so developers can display their data in a stylized tabular or graphical nature which is extremely customizable using the BIRT designer. These reports can include dynamic drill through, interactivity, and can be exported to various formats, such as PDF, HTML, XLS, and ODT. This session will cover in detail how to retrieve and visualize data from Big Data sources using BIRT.

Spring Batch provides the ability to build scalable, mission critical applications for the bulk processing of data. The cloud provides processing power in bulk for use in almost any way needed. This talk will demonstrate how to bridge the two to provide cloud based scalability in batch processing.

"This presentation introduces the audience to the power of Gradle through many real-world examples that are demonstrated. By the end of the presentation, you'll understand how Gradle helps to elegantly solve the challenges that we face in our daily builds. We'll go through such powerful concepts as: advantages of declarative over imperative build systems, convention over configuration without rigidity, the Gradle plugins, deep multi–project support, performance optimizations through partial builds and incrementalness, harvesting existing functionality through Ant and Maven integration, as well as migration strategies for migrating from these build tools. We will demonstrate many of the innovative goodies that come with Gradle out–of–the–box, like the Gradle Daemon, the Gradle Wrapper, easy administration of your build environment, building Android apps and libraries, Eclipse integration, and other new plugins."

Do you feel like your project is under control?  Feel like you are trying to go against the current?  The problem with successful software projects is that they grow and gain complexity with time. This often means wasting time trying to figure out how to add features, getting others up to speed, and making sure that the code is not brittle. This can also result in delays shipping updates and bug fixes.  And worst of all, you might be the one asked to migrate or modularize such a project.


Working with large codebases can be a nightmare. In this talk we discuss some of time the small steps that can be taken to help eliminate productivity waste and bring your code base under control.  We will discuss tips for thinking about when modularizing a project, and tips for gradually improving the architecture of a codebase. We will demonstrate some tools that we have used successfully in the past and discuss results from both talking to team members and analyzing code of multiple projects.  
 

A fast paced overview of the “*-as-a-Service” space, including infrastructure, platform, and software as services followed by a focused discussion of advanced topics in that space with an extended Q&A after the break.  The planned sub-topics include: standards (or their lack), portability vs. proprietary, how to choose between “*aaS” providers, tool support, business level considerations, impact on project management, and more!
 
This two-hour presentation can serve both as an introduction to the “*-as-a-Service” space and as continuation of the NEJUG/GBC-ACM workshop of Sept 22, 2012 (also lead by Mark Prichard).
 
Members are encouraged to visit http://www.cloudbees.com/signup and test drive their PaaS product for free.  Follow Mark’s excellent tutorials at http://blog.cloudbees.com/2012/07/getting-started-with-cloudbees-and.html and then come to the meeting with questions – it’s what he’s waiting for!

The session will cover various GC tuning techniques, in particular focus on tuning large scale JVM deployments.  Come to this session to learn about GC tuning recipe that can give you the best configuration for latency sensitive applications.  While predominantly most enterprise class Java workloads can fit into a scaled-out set of JVM instances of less than 4GB JVM heap, there are workloads in the in memory database space that require fairly large JVMs.  In this session we take a deep dive into the issues and the optimal tuning configurations for tuning large JVMs in the range of 4GB to 128GB.  In this session the GC tuning recipe shared is a refinement from 15 years of GC engagements and an adaptation in recent years for tuning some of the largest JVMs in the industry using plain HotSpot and CMS GC policy.  You should be able to walk away with the ability to commence a decent GC tuning exercise on your own.  The session does summarize the techniques and the necessary JVM options needed to accomplish this task.  Naturally when tuning large scale JVM platforms, the underlying hardware tuning cannot be ignored, hence the session will take detour from the traditional GC tuning talks out there and dive into how you optimally size a platform for enhanced memory consumption.