Ben Alex

Creator of Spring Security, Spring Roo & SpringSource Principal S/W Engineer

Dr Ben Alex is a Principal Software Engineer with SpringSource, and has been working professionally in software since 1995. Ben founded the Spring Security project in 2003 and led its development into a popular, open-source security framework that is used in numerous government, banking and military installations. More recently Ben founded and serves as lead of the Spring Roo and Spring Shell projects, both of which deliver significant productivity and usability benefits to those using Spring technologies.

Ben's career history also includes other roles in software development and business. From 2005 until 2008, he led the establishment and exponential growth of SpringSource's operations in Asia-Pacific. Prior to SpringSource, Ben founded and grew a successful Australian software company, Acegi Technology Pty Limited. He has been a director and advisor to businesses in diverse industries including business services, intellectual property licensing and ecommerce.

In recent years, Ben has presented at technology conferences including JavaOne, The Server Side Java Symposium, JAOO, Oredev, SpringOne and The Spring Experience. He is a regular guest presenter at user groups across the world, with recent appearances in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Singapore, Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch and Stockholm. He also authored the security chapter of the Wiley book, "Professional J2EE Development with Spring Framework," and maintains a blog at http://blog.springsource.com/main/author/bena/.

Presentations

Introduction to Spring Roo

Delight your customers and impress your colleagues by delivering enterprise Spring applications faster than ever before. In this session we'll introduce Spring Roo, an open source tool that makes it easy to build applications using the Java language, standards and technologies you already know. We'll also be showing you an exciting new feature which lets you update running Java applications without restarting the server and the considerable time-savings that this provides.

In this demonstration-oriented session, we will show you how Spring Roo delivers:

* Support for Java standards including JPA, Servlet Spec, JSP, JavaBean Validation, JavaMail, JMS etc
* Transparently reverse engineering and synchronising database schemas
* Scaffolded UIs in Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Adobe Flex and Spring MVC
* Automatic JUnit tests, Maven builds, JSP pages, toString() methods etc
* Deploying to clouds such as Google App Engine
* Extending Roo with add-ons
* Removing Roo from your project in four clicks
  This session will also highlight what's new in Spring Roo 1.1 and preview other in-depth sessions at SpringOne that cover Spring Roo.

Hello, RooBot: Writing and Distributing Your Own Spring Roo Add-Ons

One of the most exciting improvements in Spring Roo 1.1 is the addition of a powerful OSGi-based add-on discovery and distribution feature. This new feature allows anyone to write Spring Roo add-ons and have them immediately and easily made available to the entire Spring Roo community. In this session we will introduce RooBot, the automatic provisioning server which underpins this new feature. We'll then write a Spring Roo add-on and make it immediately available to all the Spring Roo installations on attendee laptops. Also in this session we'll explore some of the architectural background necessary to write add-ons, plus offer practical advice and time-saving hints for those wanting to extend Spring Roo into new capability areas.

Session Detail

How to build business applications using Google Web Toolkit and Spring Roo

Who says you can't build rich web apps for your business? Follow along in this session to learn how you can use the latest integrated set of tools from Google and VMware to take your internal business apps into the cloud. We'll cover how to get started using GWT with Spring Roo and SpringSource Tool Suite (STS), as well as the new data presentation widgets and MVP framework that will be available in the 2.1 release of GWT.

This talk shows how to quickly build a GWT application using Roo. After a demo of a Roo-generated GWT app, the talk takes a deep dive into the architecture of the generated GWT app. The generated GWT app follows the best architectural practices of Google AdWords front end, the poster child GWT app. The talk covers the main components of the architecture framework that GWT 2.1 introduces, using actual code samples. The main components covered are: RequestFacotry (the new RPC mechanism), Activities (the pattern to organize the presenters of an MVP pattern), Places (a bookamarkable URL), Editor support (support to generate the views), cell widgets (the new data presentation widgets for displaying large amounts of data), and logging and monitoring. A theme of the talk is how GWT and Roo combine to simplify the developer's task, enabling them to just write non-boiler-late code.