Creating and maintaining a solid automated test suite is critical to an Agile strategy, but often we're just told to "Do it." In this talk we'll look at several pragmatic strategies for creating and building your suite.
       
We'll examine these strategies and then look at scenarios for using them next week. This presentation will get you started whether you're starting a new project or trying to clean up an existing one.

This talk focuses on a few technical books that have been very important to my growth as a developer/programmer. (I hope there are a few surprises in the list.) It concludes with a perspective on what I regard as one of the greatest dangers facing our profession.

Has your career been a random product of your manager’s whims or company’s needs? Never rely on your company to keep your skills current and marketable. Take control of your own career with a proven strategy.

These are solid, repeatable steps to get your career in the trajectory you want. The first step is deciding where you want to go. We’ll walk through creating a long-term plan, then break it down into manageable steps. Learn to lead within your own company, then stretch out to your local, regional and national community, building your reputation as you go. From coding to writing to speaking, each step will move you closer to where you want to be: in a position of having options and in control of your career.

The talk will cover how Data Grids can reduce the workload on backend databases and scale well beyond traditional caches. Some better known Data Grids are products like IBM's WebSphere eXtreme Scale, Oracle's Coherence, JBoss Infinispan and Terracotta.

What is it that we're really paid to do as developers? Writing code? Not a chance. Organizations pay us to deliver value. I'll be looking at three books that help us deliver more:

• The Passionate Programmer - Chad Fowler
• The Pragmatic Programmer - Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas
• The Productive Programmer - Neal Ford

This talk will give a quick overview of deploying Grails web applications to Morph AppSpace.

              You can't be agile if your code sucks. You know that you have to constantly refactor your code and design. But the questions is how? In this presentation, instead of looking at a laundry list of refactoring techniques, we will instead look at how to effectively approach refactoring and along the way discuss some core principles to look for.              

              We will take some sample code and refactor it. As we refactor, we will measure the quality of code using continuous integration. You can pick up a list of refactoring techniques from tools. However, in this section you will learn how and when to drive those tools, and more important why.                             

This talk will introduce you to the Java Message Service, part of the Java Enterprise Edition specification. We'll cover the following topics, lightly interspersed with live coding examples to show the concepts in action:

• Introduction to Messaging
• JMS Message Types
• The JMS API
• JMS Configuration
• Sending and Receiving Messages
• Request/Reply Messaging
• Using Spring's JMS Support

Are you considering migrating off more expensive and heavyweight application servers?

Do you need additional enterprise class server capabilities that Tomcat can’t provide?

Historically stand alone Tomcat requires Administrators to develop a custom framework to handle installations. If configuration changes are required, the management framework has to be expanded to handle these changes for existing instances. Custom installation methods combined with custom management, monitoring and config. methods are time consuming and laborious.

Enterprise Tomcat is here! Join us for a live seminar outlining SpringSource tc Server, an enterprise version of Apache Tomcat. This 1.5 hour seminar will cover tc Server capabilities for:

• Managing large scale deployments
• Controlling distributed groups of
• Tomcat instances
• Deploying enterprise applications reliably to production systems
• Identifying, diagnosing, and resolving server problems quickly and efficiently 

Busy developers don't always have time to sit down and read a book from cover to cover.  I'll discuss three books that present Java-related concepts in small, easily-digestible chunks.  

Reading the books straight through will enlighten you, but picking tips to follow at random will make you a better developer too.

Books covered include:

• Effective Java by Joshua Bloch
• Refactoring:  Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler
• Practices of an Agile Developer by Venkat Subramaniam
• Bonus book: Groovy in Action by Dierk Koenig

Slides are available at www.crazysmoove.com/memjug/javabooks-slides/javabooks.html