By Ben Hale

When Rod Johnson wrote J2EE Design and Development he called J2EE "the best platform for enterprise development today", claiming the problem in those days wasn't J2EE itself but that it was "often used badly". In this session attendees will leave with an understanding of the big picture--the fundamentals that make Java and JEE application development work in practice. You will learn the foundations of the Spring Framework project and the principles of the developers and community behind it.

At the heart of Rod's book were techniques that showed us how to make J2EE work in practice. And delivered with that book were 30,000 lines of code that put those techniques into action. Add Juergen, Thomas, Alef, Colin, Keith, and Rob (in that order), and one hell of a passionate user community and, well, the rest they say "is history".

In this session attendees will leave with an understanding of the big picture--the fundamentals that make Java and JEE application development work in practice.

By Ben Hale

You may have heard it before, "Spring configuration is XML hell"! This session analyzes what's behind this statement to see if it holds water. In this "MythBuster" you'll learn practical techniques for managing (and in many cases reducing) the volume of configuration information for your Spring-based application.

You'll leave with guidelines on: - What to externalize the configuration of and what not to - When to select a particular configuration medium: XML? Annotations? Java? Custom DSL? - How to effectively organize configuration information as your project grows - How to benefit from intelligent defaulting and conventions

You will also see how Spring 2 introduces the new concept of custom XML dialects for simplifying configuration. These new dialects allow you to create domain specific configuration tags for your application components. This session illustrates a business case for implementing a custom configuration dialect.

Is this myth fact or fiction? Tune in and find out!