Neal Ford, Editor of "No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology"

Neal Ford is an senior application architect at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery.

He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, and author of the books Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques, JBuilder 3 Unleashed, and Art of Java Web Development.

He is also the editor and a contributor to No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology : The 2006 Edition and No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology Volume 2: The 2007 Edition. His primary consulting focus is the building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at numerous developers conferences worldwide. Check out his web site at www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Presentation: "10 Ways to Improve Your Code"

Track: Effective design and Clean code

Time: Wednesday 15:45 - 16:45

Location: Olympic

Abstract: It is too easy to get into a coding slump and not realize it. This talk revitalizes your relationship to code, forcing you to rethink some of the thing that you take for granted and showing new approaches to solving hard problems. It covers topics that range from improve the overall structure of your code to the way you write JavaBeans, with lots of examples. Everything in this talk may not be new to you, but I guarantee that you'll see some things that will make you reevaluate the way you think about your code.

Presentation: "Introduction: DSLs in Practise"

Track: DSLs in Practise

Time: Thursday 10:45 - 11:00

Location: City Room

Training: "Domain Specific Languages"

Track: Tutorial

Time: Tuesday 09:00 - 16:00

Location: City Room

Abstract:

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are an old technique in software development that's getting a recent resurgence in interest. Most developers run into them regularly - as XML configuration files, regular expressions, query languages or build scripts. However they haven't been given the attention they deserve and there is very little information out there to help developers build them effectively. We find that few people have done much to build their own DSLs and even fewer have a broad appreciation of the various techniques involved.

This tutorial is a step towards closing this gap. We'll begin by introducing the three main categories of DSLs: External, Internal, and Language Workbenches. We'll talk about the advantages of DSLs and the problems in using them, so that you'll appreciate what the different styles look like and when you might want to build them. In the second part we'll go into more details on techniques of working with each of the three styles, to get you started on your own work.

We are currently working to develop a coherent pedagogic framework (if you'll forgive a pretentious name) for DSLs, this tutorial is an opportunity to catch up with our work. However it does come with a caveat: we are still very much in the middle of the process of capturing and organizing this knowledge. As a result we won't be describing a finished body of knowledge, but rather one that is still evolving.