After hosting the Spring Experience in Miami December last year, this year Interface21 is organizing yet another conference focused on everything Spring. With speakers such as Gregor Kiczales, Gregor Hohpe, Patrick Linskey, Cameron Purdy and of course the usuall Interface21 suspects, SpringOne is promising to be an exciting event packed with in-depth talks on Spring, AspectJ, Spring WebFlow and several other things related to Java and J2EE.
The conference is going to be held in the same location as JavaPolis which is the Metropolis movie theatre in Antwerp. So besides some good technical content, you’ll also be able to enjoy Belgian beer and I can tell you, Belgian beer is pretty good!
The conference is a joint effort of Interface21 and the Belgium Java User Group (BeJUG). More information can be found on the SpringOne website, at www.springone.com
While discussing the conference internally, more and more we came to the conclusion that it shouldn’t be focused entirely on Spring. That is why we didn’t not only approach the Spring experts in the field, but also on software development with Java in the enterprise in general. So we ended up with an impressive list of people to come and speak at SpringOne, ranging from the father of AOP Gregor Kiczales to SOA expert Gregor Hohpe.
A short introduction to some of the sessions we’ll be having:
Adrian Colyer – AOP in the Enterprise: Spring AOP has been greatly improved in Spring 2.0 and is now both simpler and more powerful than the AOP support offered by Spring 1.x. In this session Adrian will cover the new AOP support in Spring 2.0, integration with AspectJ, and where these technologies fit in enterprise application development. The talk includes a number of demonstrations and examples.
Eberhard Wolff – Spring Patterns: Patterns are widely accepted as a means to describe common ways of architecture and design. In the book “Server Component Patterns” (Wiley, 2002) we described component-oriented systems like EJBs as a set of Patterns. This talk presents how Spring implements these patterns and illustrates the new approach Spring takes towards components. Also new Patterns in Spring like Exception Translator or Template are presented. This shows the principles Spring uses for the integration of different APIs and makes the design of Spring easier to understand.
Ramnivas Ladded – Domain Driven Design with AOP and DI
Domain Driven Design (DDD) suggests dealing with complex software system using a domain model and preserving the model in implementation. Since domain model entities have rich behavior, so should their software implementation artifacts. A direct mapping between domain model and software artifacts create simple-to- understand, inexpensive-to-implement, and easy-to-evolve systems.
While the idea behind DDD isn’t new and the value is easily understood, many implementations do not adhere to its principles. This disconnection may be due to many obstacles in implementing it. Combining Dependency Injection (DI) with a full-fledged aspect-oriented programming (AOP) system such as AspectJ help overcome many obstacles.
The traditional DI mechanism allows injecting dependencies into coarse-grained objects such as services exposed to the application level. However, it cannot do the same for fine-grained domain objects, which are not exposed in the same manner. The DI and AOP combination overcomes this limitation allowing creation a web of domain objects mirroring the model. Now domain classes can implement rich behavior by collaborating with dependent objects, instead of acting as mere data carriers. Further, domain concepts such as security, change tracking, and business rules are crosscutting in nature. AOP allows expressing these concepts directly using aspects.
In this session, we will examine the need for domain driven design, obstacles in achieving it, the basics of enabling behavior-richness for domain objects, and patterns of usages. This session will also present several examples that show the power behind the techniques. The knowledge gained through this session will enable you to readily apply domain driven design in your systems.
