Workshops at GIDS 2012

Although Moore's law continues to hold and more transistors can be squeezed into the same space, processor clock speeds are not increasing. Today's processors now feature more 'cores', or processing units within the same physical package. Performing multiple operations in parallel is now a reality rather than a trick of time-sharing performed by the operating system. Writing software that works correctly in terms of multiple concurrent threads is notoriously difficult. Since Java SE 5 the introduction of the concurrency APIs has provided a much richer set of tools for developers to write reliable multi-threaded code. Java SE 7 introduces another advance in this area in the form of the fork-join framework. This session will take the students through the basics of concurrent programming, highlighting some of the pitfalls to avoid. We will then move on to the concurrency APIs provided in Java SE 5 giving examples of how, and when, they should be used. We will finish with a discussion of the new Fork-Join framework in Java SE 7, explaining its application and giving examples of where it is not applicable. By the end of this tutorial, students will have a clear picture of the different facilities available in Java to make writing multi-threaded code simpler.

Functional programming has been around for a while, however, it has sharply raised to prominence on the JVM with the emergence of languages like Scala, Clojure, Groovy, and JRuby. Programming in functional style is not about picking a set of syntax, it is thinking in a particular idiomatic style and programming using a set of constructs. One of the better way to learn this is by doing it. In this workshop, we will take different tasks, discuss how to do them with the all-too-familiar imperative style and then how to program it using functional style. We will then implement our design for each task using a language that provides functional style of programming on the JVM.

The Java EE 6 platform allows you to write enterprise Java applications using much lesser code from its earlier versions. It breaks the “one size fits all” approach with Profiles and improves on the Java EE 5 developer productivity features. Several specifications like CDI, JSF 2, JAX-RS, JPA 2, and Servlets 3 make the platform more powerful. It also enables extensibility by embracing open source libraries and frameworks such that they are treated as first class citizens of the platform. NetBeans, Eclipse, and IntelliJ provide extensive tooling for Java EE 6. This lab will explain the Java EE 6 key concepts by building an end-to-end application using NetBeans and GlassFish.

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