Remaining conference performances 2009

The remaining months of 2009 I will have a different activities focus than conference performances. Nevertheless, there are a few talks I will give and events you can see me 2009:

- Agile 2009, August 24-28, as being the responsible stage producer for the Tools for Agility track.
- Java User Group Munich, October, 12th, "Simplifying Development and Testing of GUIs with the Swing Application Framework (JSR 296) and FEST"
- Devoxx, November, 19th, Methodology talk, details will follow ..

This list is limited to conferences where I will appear. It does not include Java User Group Cologne events I organize myself, seminars/workshops and similar.

JavaOne 2009

TS-4421 "Simplifying Development and Testing of GUIs with the Swing Application Framework (JSR 296) and FEST"; June 05 2:50 PM - 3:50 PM, together with Alex Ruiz, Oracle

BOF-5394 "Improving the Java User Groups (JUGs)" June 04 7:30 PM - 8:20 PM, together with Dan Sline and John Yeary

Technical session at Jazoon

I will give a technical long talk about "Simplifying Development and Testing of GUIs with the Swing Application Framework (JSR-296) and FEST" at Jazoon, June 22-25, 2009 in Zurich.

Devoxx 2009 conference report

The current issue 2/2009 of JavaSPEKTRUM contains my conference report about Devoxx 2008.

JavaOne 2009 proposal accepted: SAF and FEST

The technical submission Alex Ruiz and me submitted for JavaOne 2009 was accepted. So please stop by and enjoy the session "Simplifying Development and Testing of GUIs with the Swing Application Framework (JSR 296) and FEST". I will post further details on the exact location and time as soon as the program is finalized.

JUGC, GeeCON, SQS Conference, Javamagazin, Agile 2009 ...

My last post was some days ago .. so here I catch up with a couple of news. The last Java User Group Cologne event on February, 9th was a big success. We had an advanced talk about AOP. Additionally I managed to get Corneliu Vasile Creanga from Adobe to Cologne to talk about Flex, Air and the integration to Java. Stay tuned for the next events and prepare yourself for some surprises. ;-)

GeeCON invited me to give a talk in Cracow in May. I will talk about "From Zero to Hero: Simplifying Development and Testing of GUIs with the Swing Application Framework (JSR-296) and FEST". Thank you, looking forwarding visiting you fantastic guys and that lovely city.

Also in May I will give a workshop about "Agile Testing of Java Rich Clients" during the SQS Software & Systems Quality Conference 2009. Beside agile concepts, functional/acceptance/component testing and general GUI testing strategies the workshop will cover a full-fledged infrastructure to test and inspect the design/code of your application. Tools discussed are Findbugs, Checkstyle, EMMA, TestNG, FEST, EasyMock, PMD, Fit, Ant, Maven, a continuous integration server and a couple of others. Beside other frameworks and solutions I will also discuss JavaFX. Looking forward giving that interactive power workshop.

The current isse 3.2009 of Javamagazin published my article about IntelliJ IDEA 8.0 and RubyMine. Check it out if you like to be informed about what is going on at the bleeding edge of IDE development.

March, 3rd the Agile 2009 will close its call for papers. I'm responsible for the Tools for Agility track. Many good submissions already went in .. expect a great program.

I'm in the program committee of JavaOne 2009. A bunch of talks were already accepted, many are still in review. It is hard to filter the best and most interesting talks out of those billions submissions. You can already register for the worlds best and biggest Java conference -- sorry, Stephan ;-) -- taking place in San Francisco beginning of June.

Session proposal "Refactoring from Visio to Powerpoint, and Prefactoring to Code"

Recently the following proposal for Agile 2009 come to my mind:

“Refactoring from Visio to Powerpoint, and Prefactoring to Code” — A practical guide for an agile architect. The presented patterns and Web 2.0 tools show how architects can cope with recent challenges in designing complex n-tier, scalable systems and generating code seemlessly. The automated process transforms design artifacts from PowerPoint to Visio (extended pattern catalogue for roundtrip-engineering in progress) and prefactors the artifacts to working Assembler code. This process is fully SOA enabled.

Process/Mechanics
We will finish with a real world cloud computing demo.

Learning outcomes
* learn how to refactor from Visio to Powerpoint
* learn how to prefactor to working code

Level: Expert

If you also have a paper you want to propose, perhaps a more realistic one, go to the agile tooling track and submit your paper .. looking forward seeing your submissions! :-)

Agile 2009's Tools for Agility Stage: CfP is opened!

The Agile 2009 conference opened its CfP. I'm the responsible producer of the agile tooling track this year .. looking forward seeing your submissions! :-)

Back from Devoxx ...

Back from Devoxx! Meanwhile I returned from my journey to Devoxx, the biggest and best independent Java conference in the world hosted in Antwerp, Belgium. After four days (traditionally I skip the Friday half-day chill-out) of university sessions, tools in action talks, BOFs, conference talks and 293827 chats (estimation) I'm pretty blown up with Java - even more than I'm already normally.

Topics were well spread cross the whole stack more or less, the quality was again very good, I met a lot of old friends and got in touch with new interesting guys. Arriving on Sunday I finished preparation of my own talk I gave on Monday. I talked about the combination of TestNG, Fit and FEST for functional testing of Rich Clients and it was inspiring. Interesting a guy asking me afterwards if I see many projects testing their applications. :-) Actually, not many enough. With another guy I talked about running functional tests on a build server with the help of Xvfb.

The University session "Scrum in Practice" by Chery Sylvain and Yves Hanoulle was pretty good. Later I had some drinks with Aaron Houston, Antonio Goncalves and many others mainly French guys.

My highlight on Tuesday was Filthy Rich Clients: beyond Java by Romain Guy and Chet Haase. Later on I chatted with Mike Keith asking him if Oracle will by Sun. :-) Nice also was having a beer with Jason van Zyl, founder of Maven. He told me Sonatype will more focus on products than on services in the future. I asked Reggie from Sun for a special speaker for the JUG Cologne - secret who it is. ;-)

I also had long conversations with John Smart, author of the book "Java Power Tools". I managed to recruit him before to be assistant stage producer for the Agile 2009's Tooling track .. and he is such a nice guy!

Wednesday I had a nice "nice to see you again coffee" with Mike Wiesner after his session "Security Patterns revealed" and joined the session "Introduction to the SpringSource dm Server" by Sam Brannen. Actually the server is better than I thought the time they went live with it. A running gag was meeting Toni Epple and Sven Reimers from NetBeans DreamTeam doing some kind of IDE bashing. I really like NetBeans and tried NB 6.5 with the JavaFx bundle. To drag some basic visual types into my stage .. is this already the final version of functionality richness? Actually I told the two dream teams guys about the JetBrains MPS program which is in beta now. But Toni, I do not agree about the sizes of the companies and their team velocity. ;-) BTW, the JetBrains booth was one of the biggest this year (and I met a lot of JB and JB Academy guys), Eclipse had a small one niched. JUG Cologne speaker Frank Nimphius gave a talk about JDeveloper and JSF. In the night I was downtown with Rainer and Rene from the Struts PMC. Nice meeting you guys !!

Wednesday was also the JUG leaders BOF. About 20 up to 30 JUG leaders and some VIPs attended. We had some interesting topics especially a European JUG roadshow. But, honestly, here in Germany too many JUGs are too much isolated and only look on themselves. But there already is some kind of Roadshow approach here: If I manage to get world-class speakers to our JUG in Cologne, some other JUGs nearby ask those speakers to give a talk there too. That's of course unofficial and is not want the BOF wanted to achieve: a JUG Roadshow under a common branding where it is a giving and taking for all not only for some.

On Thursday I liked the "JavaFX: Building & Deploying JavaFX Applications" talk by Richard Bair and Joshua Marinacci very much. It was a nice contra talk to all those Flex and Android sessions. Afterwards the JavaPosse was some kind of disappointing. Is it only me or does the quality decreased over the months and years? Later on I drove back to Cologne .. did I mention that it is only two hours by car from Cologne to Antwerp? Very convenient!! Driving to Antwerp David, a guy from the JUG Cologne joined the journey ... we had some really nice discussions about what is going on in the Java ecosystem. Looking forward seeing you at the next JUGC regulars table.

A comprehensive report with details and valuations will be available soon in the JavaSPEKTRUM.

Agile 2009 - Tools for Agility Stage Producer

Next year the biggest and best dedicated Agile software development conference "Agile" will take place in Chicago, Aug 26-29 2009. It is a big honour that I'm the stage producer responsible for the tooling track. The call for submission is almost finished and will be published soon. Before I assemble a smart review team I can already announce that I will have John Smart in my team as the assistance stage producer. John is a well-known agile tooling guy. Thank you John for joining the team!

Agile Tooling talk at Devoxx

December 8th I will give a talk at the Devoxx (formerly known as Javapolis) conference in Antwerp, Belgium, about Agile Testing of Java Rich Clients. In this session we show how to test Java Rich Client applications in a comprehensive and sophisticated way. Firstly we write component tests with TestNG. Then we write functional acceptance in HTML with Fit. We bind our Fit-tests to TestNG in order to bridge the technical barrier between unit and functional tests. Visual components are driven and tested by FEST in a sophisticated fluent interface notation. These facets are part of a full-fledged infrastructure based on Maven. Practical tips and and best-practices do complete this highly interactive session.

You will also meet me at the JUG leaders event December, 10th and I think there will be a Java Champions gathering too. If you are interested in having a coffee together at European's best Java conference drop me a line! My schedule is full with official and semi-official meetings and events, but we will definitely find a minute! :-)

XPDays program online

The program of this year's XPDays. the German confernce on agile topics, is online. The happening will take place end of November and consists of three different days: November 27th, there will be a one track program with different general talks. Day two on 28th is the main conference with three parallel tracks, day three a community day with open space formats. I was part of the program organisation this year and I'm happy with the program itself and the split to three different days including the Community Day.

JUG Cologne@Javamagazin

The recent Javamagazin issue 9.2008 contains my article about the Java User Group Cologne. Have fun reading about one of the most active JUGs in Germany.

JUG Cologne - coming up ... !

Last Monday the Java User Group Cologne hosted an event consisting of two talks: GWT, the Google Web Toolkit, with Patrick Chanezon from Google and "Scrum with JSR 264: Order Management API" with Andreas Ebbert-Karroum.

After that great success the next happening is already coming. On August, 25th WebTest will be presented by its main contributor Marc Guillemot. Afterwards beginning of September we will have a double-feature again .. yes, two conferences during one week .. "Spring Security Patterns", with Mike Wiesner from SpringSource and "Scala" from Ingo Maier, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne EPFL.

The autumn is a Spring automn: October, 13th we'll have a Spring double-feature: "Dependency injection for business objects" with Nils Wloka and "Spring Source Advanced Pack for Oracle" with Stefan Glase und Stefan Scheidt. All three guys are well-known Java experts from Opitz-Consulting. Then the next highlight is on November, 3rd. There Stefan Tilkov will speak about JSR 311 / REST and Dalibor Topic about "OpenJDK".

And do not forget the regulars' table of JUGC every last Friday in the month! A lot is happening in Cologne in the Java community ecosystem.

JavaSpektrum: JavaOne 2008 report available

My JavaOne 2008 report was published in the recent JavaSpektrum edition JS 04/2008. It contains the main news and developments, comments and trends of the Java world and its community. The PDF is available here.

Java Conference Munich: September, 12th

For a pretty long time I planned to travel to Munich in summer or autumn to visit some old friends for a tasty wheat bear in some nice locations. Now we commited to September and I scheduled September, 11th to September, 13th for my journey. Actually in that week there is the Jahrestagung of the GI event including a Java Conference on September 12th. So very practical to give a talk during the day before jumping into Munich's night life. If you will be there in that time slot and want to chat a bit please let me know and we may get in touch .. ah ok, I forgot to mention that in my talk I will speak about sophisticated testing of rich clients.

Jazoon: 2008-06-25 "Agile Testing of Rich UI Swing Applications"

During Jazoon I will give the Lab "Agile Testing of Rich UI Swing Applications"

Timeline
Wednesday, 2008-06-25, 11:00 - 12:50, Arena 7
11.00 start part 1
11.50 break
12.00 start part 2
12.50 end

This is a Lab. It will not be an ex-cathedra teaching. So you are engaged to play with your sources and ask questions. I will go around for discussions and answering questions about the topic and -if you like- about the football match in the afternoon. ;-)
You may want to:
- check the infrastructure provided
- run the application
- run the tests via TestNG Eclipse plugin
- run the tests via Ant
- check the TestNG results
- check the Fit result
- modify the TestNG test
- write own TestNG component tests
- modify the Fit test
- write own Fit tests
- write own Jemmy interactions
- integrate the sources into a Continous Integration process (TeamCity)
- configure TeamCity projects and build configurations
- start builds from your TeamCity server site
- start builds from Eclipse
- check build result, examin reports and artifacts

Abstract
We will build up and use a comprehensive technical infrastructure for testing Java Rich Client applications. Based on an example Swing application we explore unit-testing components with TestNG. We discover that TestNG usage benefits especially if you want to group your tests, introduce dependencies or test concurrency.

We explore functional tests by using Jemmy for driving interactions on our UIs and Fit for writing state of the art acceptance tests in HTML syntax. We integrate Jemmy, Fit and TestNG to specify and drive our functional features. We integrate component and functional tests to overcome the technical barrier which is in place normally.

Finally we integrate all our free available tools with Ant and TeamCity. Our unit tests and functional tests run in a row continuously. Our full-fledged continuous integration and test-driven development environment gives feedback about the application quality and sync the application specification with the current application behaviour. We can trigger, monitor and react on (hopefully not broken) builds while using the TeamCity Web 2.0 UI or work seamlessly and do the same, additionally start remote runs and delayed commits from inside our IDE like Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA.

Preconditions:
Eclipse 3.3.2
JDK Java 6
TeamCity 3.1.1 "Professinal Edition"

Step 1: Install Subversion support "Eclipse Software update"
Subclipse 1.2.4 (only plugin itself)
Update site: "http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x"
(although the Subversive plugin is also ok for checking out the sources you will not gain maximum benefit in the context of the TeamCity integration)

Step 2: Checkout project "RichClientTesting"
http://87.230.78.21:4711/svn/projects/trunk
(Fit, Jemmy, TestNG artifacts already included in the project)

Step 3: Customize build.xml: Path to your home folder where your workspace is located

Step 4: Install TestNG support "Eclipse Software update"
Update site: "http://beust.com/eclipse"

Step 5: Install TeamCity Server and TeamCity build agent (running both as a service is best)
http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/download/index.html
(default configuration with bundled Tomcat and HSQLDB is enough)

Step 6: Install Eclipse TeamCity plugin
Local TeamCity site: "My settings & Tools" (http://localhost:8080)

JavaOne 2008 - revisited

There are some new pictures available from my JavaOne 2008 visit. The first picture shows four guys participating in the CommunityOne panel discussion including me the second one from right.

The second picture shows me standing beside Aaron Houston from the Technology Outreach Program of Sun Microsystems. What a great guy .. always an ear for the Java community. The picture was shot in the java.net Community Corner - once again the communication hub of JavaOne and the Java community.

JUGC: Terracotta, IntelliJ IDEA and TeamCity

The Java User Group Cologne is very active in May. Actually we have two events in one week. On Monday, 26th Jonas Boner will give a talk about Terracotta. Jonas is a well-known guy and Terracotta provides a thrilling VM clustering. So it promises to be a nice show. It will take place in the University of Cologne beginning 6.30 pm.

Some days later, on Friday, 30th Vaclav Pech from JetBrains will give a talk at Cafe Teba beginning 6.30 pm. We will speak about IntelliJ IDEA and TeamCity in this very comfortable, intimate location. For the time after the talk I organised a belly dancer .. she will give us a nice performance. The event is open end .. so we will go further to other bars later but will stay in Cafe Teba until 10 or even 11 for sure (having tasty eat and drinks). Seating is limited to 35 persons. Expect some VIPs and much fun .. the regulars table in May is cancelled!

For more details please have a look on the JUGC site. There you can also register for the talks. BTW: recently I gave the JUG web site a little lifting .. now you can find all JUGC facets very easy (hopefully) and without any knickknack. .. and especially .. I did not like the wordpress blog format any more .. and I did activate some spam bots in the past which hacked wordpress adding funny comments. I skipped upgrading to a different version of wordpress, but installed Confluence enterprise wiki now.

JavaOne 2008 .... I'm coming !!!! :-)

I'm just finishing my preparations for my journey to San Francisco where I will join the JavaOne next week. I'm excited meeting all those old friends there and having some new ones afterwards possibly. The schedule is full with sessions, dates, ..., and of course there are some required courses for the moments when Moscone Center closes its doors. Do not miss the JUG community panel session I'm part of and the Java Champions and JUG Leaders BOFs where I'm active too. If you want to meet me you have good additional chances at the java.net community booth, the JetBrains booth and local pubs. ;-)

For those of you interested in my experiences there and my opinions and an information aggregation of the JavaOne 2008 please stay tuned: I will write a report for the JavaSpektrum.

CU in SF