Alex Marinacci

The future is smartphones and other alternative computing devices, but there are so many platforms and specifications to develop for? How can a developer create apps and websites for all of these various devices without exceeding the budget or schedule? The answer is mobile web. Modern HTML, JavaScript, and CSS form the basis of apps and websites that can be deployed to a variety of devices, providing a positive experience for both users and developers.

In this session, Josh will provide an introduction to the Mobile Web, provide real-world examples, and then delve into the technologies available to assist you in bringing your content to mobile devices. This presentation is not specific to Palm webOS, but will cover webOS phones and other mobile devices.

Rich Internet Clients: A moderated but open discussion regarding the “appropriate technology” for an internet application.

The moderator is Brian Mason

Bring your opinions, experiences, and personal biases to a lively discussion on a topic that is highly relevant.

Among the pertinent questions are, but not limited to:

HTML, CSS, and Java Script (DHTML) applications have some advantages, but what requirements, if any, would steer a project towards Flash, Applets, or Java F/X?

Exist significant differences between consumer and business applications that would necessitate the use of a particular technology?

Are Flash’s days numbered, or is the current trend towards pure DHTML doomed due to browser market fragmentation?

Object-Oriented Ant Scripts for Business Applications

David Douglas Bullard

Ant build scripts are an integral part of constructing and deploying numerous Java-based applications, but they are frequently customised for each project and vary across the enterprise. This presentation demonstrates how Nike, Inc. reduced its Ant build scripts to almost nothing while maintaining the functionality required to perform highly customised builds for everything from small batch jobs to large enterprise projects.

This topic will be of interest to developers who create and maintain Ant build scripts for multiple applications and are looking for ways to reduce the time and number of new scripts they must write.

The session discusses:

How to write Ant scripts in an object-oriented paradigm, including inheritance, extending, and overriding. How to make the majority of application build scripts ten lines or less.

How to test build scripts individually

How to version construct scripts

Programming WebSockets (PDF)

– Sean Sullivan

WebSockets is an innovative new technology that allows web applications and server-side processes to communicate in both directions. Google’s Chrome browser already supports WebSockets, and developers can expect other browsers to adopt the technology in 2010. This presentation will cover the WebSocket and JavaScript API protocols. In addition, we will discuss the Jetty WebSocketServlet API and demonstrate how to use WebSockets in a GWT application.

Teaching Girls and Boys Computer Programming –

Jeffrey Abrams

Why is the percentage of women graduating with degrees in computer science around 50 percent in countries such as Sweden, China, and India, but less than 20 percent in the United States? As a father who identifies as a “Geekdad” and has a daughter, I found this unacceptable and decided to take action… I returned to elementary school in order to teach programming to the students. My objective was to find an environment and a style that would encourage girls who are naturally inquisitive to enjoy controlling computers in inventive ways, while simultaneously encouraging and involving every child.

My presentation discusses the process of developing a curriculum for teaching programming that is so gender-neutral that boys would not notice any difference. Then, I demonstrate some of the newest “Integrated Learning Environments,” including Alice, E-Toys, and Scratch. Finally, I provide a summary of my “Computer Club” and explain how others can use what I’ve done to teach others.

Brian Panulla presents An Argument for Semantics: Why Developers Should Care About OWL.

In the rush to implement tagging and other forms of user-driven information architectures, developers have neglected the importance of adding semantics, or contextual meaning, directly to the data that powers websites and applications. The addition of Microformats to the markup of a website can facilitate the exchange of semantic data, such as contact information for people and events. However, the majority of websites and applications are still populated with largely nonsemantic text organised in large HTML blocks or generated from relational databases and data warehouses.

In recent years, a number of Web Standards have emerged to aid application developers in storing, serving, and distributing information with ever-increasing levels of semantics and significance. The current apex of the Semantic Web Standards pyramid is OWL, the Web Ontology Language developed by the W3C. In this presentation, I will discuss the origins and fundamentals of OWL and how it can be leveraged to power the next generation of data-enabled, intelligent Web applications.

The Spring Insight console and Roo are available.

Steve Mayzak

As part of tc Server Developer Edition, the Spring Insight console provides a dashboard view of real-time Spring application performance metrics. Developers can use Spring Insight from their desktops to detect, analyse, and diagnose application performance issues without modifying their code.

Within Spring Insight, application performance is graphically displayed via response time charts and histograms, providing developers with an easily comprehensible view of where processing time is being spent.

Expandable call trees allow developers to drill down into application requests and controller actions, facilitating the identification of the underlying causes of problems.

By integrating SpringSource tc Server Developer Edition with SpringSource Tool Suite, developers gain a deeper understanding of how the application is functioning and performing by isolating a transaction trace and quickly navigating to the portion of code that is causing a problem.