The Spring Experience - Day 3

Started off day three with Spring Security directly from it's creator, Ben Alex. The session provided a good intro to Spring Security but I felt bad for Ben as he got peppered with 4011 questions during the talk. Even with all of the tangents, Ben did a good job of presenting the core benefits of Spring Security. An example of it's power is to have a configuration that intercepts a method, say getEbayItemListing() and checks to see before execution if the user is authorized to perform this action. This can be a complex check that even validates if the current requester is actually seller of the item (instance level authorization). Then upon method completion, the after advice will mask the minimum sale amount by nulling it out on the object if the requester is not the original seller. With this being performed at the method level, it doesn't matter if the request comes from a website, web service, or other Java program. Very powerful.

Rob Harrop gave a talk on concurrency in Java that was very in depth coverage of the Java 5 concurrency objects. There was a ton of info in that session that I'll not cover here other than to say if you are developing in a multi-threaded environment in Java 5, please review the docs in the java.util.concurrency package.

The third session I attended was from one of my favorite tech speakers Venkat Subramaniam. Venkat covered Spring's facilities for integrating dynamic language objects like Ruby and Groovy classes into your Java framework as plain beans. I had no idea that this facility existed and as with most things Spring, it is accomplished very painlessly with a little configuration. A great use case for this is on the fly loading of dynamic processing logic (like rules) without stopping your application or server. Want some small dynamic rules processing without dealing with a full blown rules engine like JRules or JBoss rules? Here's your answer (and you don't need to wait for your company to deploy Java6). The second half of his talk covered using the GroovyObjectCustomizer object from Spring to implement a DSL. This also seemed relatively simple, but it was surprising how much more complex it was to implement in straight Java versus Groovy. I still prefer Ruby though.

The final talk before 500 pasty, flabby geeks descended upon the Hollywood, FL beach was Spring Web Services by Arjen Poutsma. I didn't gather a ton of info out of this session but a couple of nuggets were useful. The speaker advocated the opposite approach of XFire. Basically that you should start with the contract and work back towards mapping to your domain which I think makes sense in all but some of the more trivial cases. Additionally it seems that once you get the gist of Spring and the annotations provided in 2.5, moving from Spring MVC and WebFlow to something like Spring WebServices is rather trivial.

Time to hammock up!