NFJS, The Magazine

I recently attended New England Software Symposium in Boston. I spoke on Architecture Enforcement and Domain-Driven Development topics at the conference.

On the flight back to Detroit, I read the inaugural issue of NFJS magazine which is very interesting. It was full of technical information just like the NFJS conference, no fluff and a lot of technical stuff.

This issue has the following technical articles:

• A Case For Continuous Integration by Jared Richardson (author of Career 2.0 book)
• So you want to be Agile? by Venkat Subramaniam
• Introduction to Functional Languages by Ken Sipe
• Message Driven POJOs - Messaging Made Easy by Mark Richards

All are excellent articles and very informative with sample code explaining the concepts.

With the new magazine, Jay Zimmerman, Andrew Glover (Editor of the magazine) and NFJS team have done an excellent contribution to Java and Agile development communities.

SATURN 2009 Conference Presentation

I will be speaking at the upcoming SATURN 2009 conference organized by Sofware Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The conference starts on 4th and ends on 7th of May.



Here is a statement from their website that describes the main theme behind this year's conference:

SATURN 2009 is expanding to cover architecture ranging from enterprise to system and software architectures. To reflect this expansion, the theme of the SATURN 2009 Conference is “architecture at all scales.”'

My presentation will be on Architecture Governance and Enforcement using Aspects which is based on my recent work on using Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) techniques to enforce the architecture and design policies in J2EE applications.

I have done the same presentation at ITARC Conference in Atlanta back in February and again at New England Software Symposium in Boston last month. The response and feedback from the attendees was excellent. Architecture Policy Enforcement is definitely a very promising application of Aspects and AOP in enterprise software applications.

I am looking forward to speaking at SATURN conference and meeting other architects from different backgrounds and experiences.

New England Software Symposium Presentations

I recently spoke at New England Software Symposium in Boston. The conference was excellent, my talks were very well received. It was a great opportunity to network with other speakers and share my ideas with the attendees.

At the conference, I gave 3 presentations:

• Architecture Rules Enforcement using Aspects
• Domain Driven Design & Development with Spring Portfolio
• Application Architecture Trends - Where We Have Been, Where We Are Going

The sessions on "Architecture Enforcement using Aspects" and "Domain Driven Development" drew bigger crowds than I anticipated. The attendees asked good questions and expressed interest in the architecture enforcement framework I discussed and demonstrated in the presentation. I am still getting e-mails from the attendees with follow-up discussion on the talks. I also got couple of suggestions on improving the presentation. I am updating the presentations to focus on the parts that were more interesting to the audience.

I want to thank every one who attended my sessions and gave valuable feedback and comments on the presentation topics.

This was my first trip to the city of Boston. It's an excellent city. I enjoyed my short stay and looking forward to visiting there again in the future.

Interview and Book Excerpt: Jaroslav Tulach's Practical API Design

Jaroslav Tulach's latest book Practical API Design covers the topic of API design of software projects. Jaroslav discusses the importance of API design in the modern software applications, what are the different factors that make a good API, and how to go about implementing API frameworks. He brings his experience as the architect for NetBeans IDE project to the writing of this book. In the book, Jaroslav talks about several real-world examples of how to (and more importantly how not to) use Java API based on his experiences working on NetBeans project.

I published an interview with Jaroslav on InfoQ on various design and architecture topics. Check it out.

Jaroslav also maintains an excellent wiki site where he writes about his book and other API design topics.

Architecture Enforcement and Governance Using Aspects - ITARC Conference Presentation

I was at IT Architect Confrence (ITARC) 2009 in Atlanta last week. The conference was a great event. It offered a great opportunity to talk to other architects (of all specializations, Information, Solutions, Data, and Enterprise) about their architecture experience and frameworks and technologies they are currently using in their projects.

Here are some of the highlights of the conference:

• It was a non-vendor driven event organized by IASA (a non-profit organization focused on the Architecture profession). Paul Preiss and his team at IASA are helping the architecture community through education, consulting, and conference events such as ITARC.
  
• Conference main focus was on Architecture and Architecture only, so there were no different tracks on Java, Ruby, SOA, and Agile topics to attract as many people to attend the conference as possible.
• It was also more than just one kind of Architecture conference. The key-notes, technical sessions and round-table discussions included other architecture specializations like Data, Information, Infrastructure, and Enterprise Architecture which helped the attendees to put these specializations in perspective and see architecture as a whole solution for the enterprise business and IT needs.
• There was a dedicated Architecture Career Mentoring track which I thought is an innovative idea and real help to the architecture professionals who are looking for some guidance from the experienced architects. Architecture is an art, not a science, so the advice from a senior architect is of a great value to the new architects.
  
• And finally the Open Spaces track, hosted by Steven "Doc" List included two 1-hour open spaces sessions. This was a conference in itself and very informative; I learned a lot of new "open spaces patterns" in attending this event. I will be blogging more about those patterns in the future blog entries.

At the conference, I gave a presentation on "Architecture Enforcement using Aspects" topic. The presentation was very well received. There were both JEE and .NET IT professionals in the room and there was good interest on the topic of using Aspects and AOP to enforce the architecture and design policies.

I have uploaded to SlideShare web site. If you want to check out the presentation slides, here is the link. Let me know if you have any suggestions and feedback for improvement of the presentation.

This presentation has also been accepted for the upcoming No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) New England Software Symposium. Check out the symposium schedule.

Let me know if any of you will be attending the NFJS symposium.

Domain Driven Design and Development with Spring Portfolio

I gave a presentation at Ann Arbor Java User Group (AAJUG) last Tuesday on "Domain Driven Design and Development with Spring Portfolio". The presentation went very well with great discussion and feedback from the attendees.

David at AAJUG has been leading the user group meetings, speakers, and presentation. AAJUG has been an active Java user group for last several years. I want to thank David and the group members for the opportunity to speak at JUG meeting.

In the presentation, I focused on the Domain-Driven Design (DDD) implementation aspects using Spring projects like Spring IoC, Spring AOP and Spring Security. I also talked about enforcing architecture rules in DDD applications. I briefly talked about the role of code generation in a DDD application which included a quick demo using tools like Eclipse EMF and openArchitectureWare (oAW).

Here are some of the items I talked about:

• Domain Driven Design & Development
• Spring Portfolio
• Dependency Injection (DI)
• Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP)
• Role of Custom Annotations in DDD
• Spring Security
• Architecture Enforcement (Demo)
• Code Generation (Demo)

I have uploaded to SlideShare web site. You can view the presentation slides on the site. Let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback for improvement of the presentation.

I will be speaking at ITARC Architect Conference

I will be speaking at the upcoming IT Architect Regional Conference in Atlanta later this month. My presentation is in the Enterprise Architecture track of the conference schedule.

Topic:
Architecture Enforcement and Governance Using Aspects and SonarJ

Abstract:
In this presentation, I will talk about the significance of enforcing the architecture rules and standards and how to actually enforce them in software development projects. Architecture governance ensures that the Implementation (Code) does match the Requirements (Reference Architecture). It can help with clear and cycle free dependency structures as well as improve testability and reusability of code.

Enforcing Reference Architecture guidelines promotes consistency and modularity in the System. It also helps in detecting structural complexity and preventing it earlier in the software development process. As a result, the application code is modifiable, portable, and testable.

Most of the presentation will focus on using Aspects and AOP techniques to define architecture rules and use them for policy-enforcement in Java applications. I will briefly discuss how tools like SonarJ and Structure 101 can help the architects integrate architecture analysis and management earlier in the development process.

The session will include several demo's of how to enforce the architecture rules using frameworks like AspectJ and SpringAOP.

Check out more details of the ITARC conference, event schedule and my presentation. Let me know if you live in Atlanta area and if you are going to be attending the conference.