Craig Walls

Presentations

Introducing Spring Roo: From Zero to Working Spring Application in Record Time

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In this example-driven session we'll see how to swiftly develop Spring applications using Spring Roo. We'll start with an empty directory and quickly work our way up to a fully functioning web application. You'll see how Roo handles a lot of heavy-lifting that you'd normally have to do yourself when working with Spring. And we'll stop at a few scenic points along the way to see how Roo accomplishes some of its magic.

In recent years, rapid application development frameworks such as Rails and Grails have earned a lot of attending. By employing code generation, convention-over-configuration, and the dynamic capabilities of their core languages (Ruby and Groovy) to offer unparalleled productivity, helping get projects off the ground quickly.

As awesome as these frameworks are, they do have one negative mark against them. Although developers love working with them, convincing the "boss" to build mission-critical applications in a relatively new development style based can be difficult. The mere mention of a word like "Groovy" conjures up images of tie-dye shirts and VW vans. Risk-averse project managers often think that free love may have been a big thing in the 70s, but it has no place in serious business.

If psychedelic frameworks are a tough-sell in your organization, then you can still feel much of the same productivity gains while developing Spring applications. Spring Roo mixes Spring and Java with a little code generation and a dash of compile-time AspectJ to achive a rapid development environment that resembles Rails and Grails. But instead of producing Ruby/Rails or Groovy/Grails code that may make your manager twitch, Roo produces Java-based projects that use the Spring Framework--which is already accepted in many organizations.

Building Social Web Applications

Do you know what your application's users are doing when they're not using your application? Odds are good that they're spending time on Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other social network sites that are so prevalent today. If only your application could somehow go with them into those sites, adding value to their experience in both places.

In this session, you will learn how to build rich web applications that interact with the major social networks. We will highlight the open source technology available for simplifying social media integration, and will show you how to add social features to your own applications.

Spring Roo Workshop

In this hands-on workshop, we'll work together developing a Spring application using Spring Roo.

To fully benefit from the workshop, you should bring your computer loaded with Java 6 and Spring Roo 1.1.0 and SpringSource ToolSuite 2.5.1.

Spring MVC Workshop

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For as long as there has been a Spring Framework, there has been Spring MVC, a web framework built around the principals of Spring. Although it was originally designed around a deep hierarchy of controller classes and focused on HTML-oriented views, Spring MVC has evolved in the past few years to embrace an annotation-oriented model and RESTful web development.

In this workshop, we'll use Spring MVC to build the web front-end of an application. We'll start with the essentials and work our way up to try out the latest Spring MVC features in Spring 3.1. We'll explore the following Spring MVC topics:

• Spring MVC essentials (request mapping, controllers, and views)
• Field formatting and validation
• Spring's JSP tag libraries
• Handling file uploads
• Content negotiation and non-HTML views
• Request and response body conversion
• Advanced request mapping
• And much more!

Whether you're a Spring newbie or a long-time Spring veteran, this is your chance to get a hands-on experience with everything Spring MVC can do.

IMPORTANT!!! PRE-WORKSHOP SETUP INSTRUCTIONS!!!

In order to ensure a successful workshop, it is imperative that you arrive with the following installed on your computer:

• Java SDK 1.5 or higher (not the JRE!)
• Maven 3.0.3 (or newer): http://maven.apache.org/
• SpringSource Tool Suite (2.8.0 or higher): http://www.springsource.com/developer/sts

Also, before arriving, it will save time if you have already verified this setup. As part of the verification, perform the following steps:

1. Start SpringSource ToolSuite
2. Create a new Spring MVC template project (File->New->Spring Template Project, then select "Spring MVC Project"). Name the project "SpringMVC". (Note that if this is the first time you've created a Spring MVC template project, it may take some time to download the templates.)
3. Once the project has been created and has had a chance to build in the IDE, drag the project into the tcServer instance ("VMWare vFabric tc Server Developer Edition v2.6") in the "Servers" tab.
4. Start tcServer
5. After the server starts fully, point your browser to http://localhost:8080/SpringMVC and verify that you are greeted with a "Hello World!" message along with the current time.

We will not have time during the workshop to setup your environment, so please arrive having performed these setup steps. If you need any help getting started, feel free to email craig-mvcws@habuma.com and I'll do my best to help out.

Building Social Web Clients

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You see them everywhere: "Like" buttons, "Tweet" buttons, and now there are "+1" buttons. The social networks have extended their reach beyond their own websites and into almost every web site you visit. But did you know that these simple little buttons are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to adding social features to your website?

Several of the popular social networks (including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) provide client-side APIs that enable you to build social capabilities into you application. With these APIs, your application can not only show a simple button for your users to express their opinion, but can also let you query information about their profile, friends, interests, and much more.

In this example-driven presentation, we'll examine the client-side APIs offered by Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We'll dig even deeper than the "Like" button as we see how the APIs can be used to build rich social applications.