Gateway Software Symposium - Day 3
Java Collection Power Techniques
By: Glenn Vanderburg
Glenn's talk covered many of the methods that live on the Collection interface which many programmers end up implementing themselves. He also showed many code examples of advanced way's to utilize decorators and adapters with Collections. I've done some of this in the past so I was pretty familiar with the concepts. Unfortunately, many of the problems he solved after this seemed to be very academic in nature and I can't say that I've run across them in the real world. That's not to say I will never, but at this point I will take them for what they are worth. The best take away from this session is to look around before implementing something yourself.
Introduction to Spring
By: Bruce Tate
I'm typically not a big fan of Bruce Tate's presentations since they are very slideshow driven but since there was nothing else of interest, I attended anyway. I've been looking at Spring for sometime now so I'm fairly well versed with what it can do. My goal was to gain some insight for his presentation and apply it to one that I will be giving soon. All in all, he did a pretty good job describing the benefits of Spring. One thing that scared me was he made the comment that Spring is similar to the BASF marketing spiel "We don't make a lot of the products you buy, we make a lot of the products you buy better". I've said this very thing several times in the past couple months. Weird!
Javascript Exposed
By: Glenn Vanderburg
All I can say is Wow. I never knew Javascript was as robust a language as Glenn portrayed. The talk started off talking about how Javascript got a bad name back in the early days of Netscape and Internet Explorer. Neither did a very good job of supporting it. The other downfall was that developers were not really learning the language either. Instead of starting from the ground and working their way up, they performed copy/paste/modify routines that quickly spread bad or inferior code world wide. The next 30 minutes or so went over the language constructs followed by a demonstration of how dynamic typing works. I got pretty lost from this point forward. The one take away I had from this was that if I ever need to do anything in Javascript moving forward, there will be a learning curve. Im interested in the upcoming release of Tiger that will introduce Dashboard widgets. These are small javascript modules do quite useful things. Looks like I will be face down in the books Glenn suggested in the near future.
Gateway Software Symposium - Day 2
Cryptography for Programmers
By: Stuart Halloway
This talk focused on everything crypto and I would recommend that anyone not familiar with it attend this session. All and all this session was par for the course for Stuart. A fantastic presentation on good detailed content. Topics covered included hashes, secret key cryptography, public key cryptography and digital signatures. OpenSSL and Java Code were both used in examples. We also discussed how many products claim to have a 128 bit hash, or 256 bit encryption, or 64 bit block cipher, but the only number that really matters is the number of bits of security. This becomes basically the lowest common denominator of your security. In other words, your system is only as secure as it's weakest link. In a nutshell this talk was everything programmers should know about security.
Test First Development
By: Venkat Subramaniam
The best part of Venkat's presentation was that there was almost no presentation at all. What I mean is that when I went to grab copies of the slides, there were only two pages. This entire session was done within IDEA and coded based on user interaction. While I appreciated the energy put forth, I think I would have better spent my time elsewhere. I've presented these kinds of things in the past to groups at work. I kind of knew this ahead of time but there wasn't much else offered during this time-slot that caught my eye. I hope to catch a more advanced session by Venkat tomorrow. He is a really good speaker.
The Fallacies of Enterprise Systems(Architecture)
By: Ted Neward
Ted's talk covered the ten fallacies of distributed computing. Upon hitting each one, he shared personal experiences where he or his team may have fallen into this trap. He also encouraged group participation around the topics. All in all it was a good interactive session.
- 1) The network is reliable
- 2) Latency is zero
- 3) Bandwidth is infinite
- 4) The network is secure
- 5) Topology doesn't change
- 6) There is one administrator
- 7) Transport cost is zero
- 8) The network is homogeneous
- 9) The system is monolithic
- 10) The system is finished