Archive for the ‘Training & Certification’ category
Get Smart…Paddy Power technology Series
February 9th, 2012Mike Cohn’s Certified ScrumMaster Training
March 14th, 2011Last week, I attended Mike Cohn’s Certified ScrumMaster course and I must say it was a great opportunity to learn from someone with such a vast amount of experience with Scrum and Agile.
In addition to authoring 3 books on Scrum, Mike publishes many of his presentations on his website, Mountain Goat Software. Having read his books and much of his published material I was quite familiar with what was being presented but still gained so much from listening to Mike’s views on the issues people were raising and his experiences of consulting for a range of companies adopting Agile.
Mike’s presentation style was relaxed and he welcomed questions from the floor throughout. He answered questions with great ease and a confidence that can only come from having experienced many of the issues raised before. His enthusiasm is infectious and for anyone floundering in their Agile adoption, this in and of itself is a great asset.
The two day course includes a number of group activities that reinforce the material and encourage attendees to consider their own experiences with Scrum and Agile. It was very encouraging to hear about how others were adopting Scrum, what issues they experienced and how they addressed them. With everyone coming from different backgrounds and adopting Agile in different ways, I gained a lot from these activities.
I would highly recommend that anyone who is considering adopting Scrum or is acting as Scrum Master consider attending this course. In my opinion, the main differentiator for such courses is the experience of the trainer. In this regard, Mike’s course has to be the benchmark.
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Building Twitter with Grails
December 8th, 2009I have been hearing good things about Groovy and Grails for quite a while now without really knowing much about either. The aquisition of the company that developed Grails (G2One) by Spring Source in late 2008 has naturally added some weight to the Grails movement. Having grown tired of standing, eyes glazed over, as others discuss the advantages delivered by Grails I decided I would learn more.
One of the more popular demonstrations of Grails is that delivered by Graeme Rocher in which he demonstrates building an application similar to Twitter using Grails. A webinar of this demonstration is available for download from the Spring Source website.
The webinar runs for just over an hour and begins by giving an introduction to Grails, what it is, what it hopes to deliver and how it delivers it. This includes how Grails leverages existing technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, Sitemesh and Groovy. Graeme then gives a brief history of Grails explaining its inception in 2005 through to acquisition by Spring in 2008 before using download metrics to give an indication of the current adoption of Grails (70,000 downloads per month at the end of 2008).
The core of the webinar is focused on the demonstration of building Twitter with Grails. Graeme starts by introducing the Grails command line interface and uses it to build the initial project directory and file structure. He gives an tour of the directory structure explaining what goes where before proceeding to install the Spring Security (acegi) plugin for Grails. The functionality provided by this plugin includes the generation of the authentication domain model, authentication manager and login\registration process (user interface and controllers).
Graeme then demonstrates the creation of additional domain model objects to which he adds associations and constraints. In order to manipulate the additional domain objects, Graeme creates a controller and associated view (.gsp file). This controller and view facilitates posting a tweet and displaying a history of tweets.
Graeme then proceeds to install and demonstrate the use of the Searchable plugin which facilitates searching for domain objects using criteria queries. This also requires overriding the default view of the searchable plugin. The Searchable plugin and associated view modifications allow the user to add people who they are interested in hearing tweets from.
If someone who the current user is interested in adds a tweet, a JMS message is sent to notify them (update their tweet history) that a new tweet has been added. The JMS functionality is delivered via an activemq plugin which is installed through the Grails command line interface.
Graeme then demonstrates exposing the same tweets via RSS and XML using the same controller that handles web requests.
The key features of Grails are specified as:
- Plugins to let you rapidly compose an application
- Plugins that use convention over configuration
- Not only a web framework but an entire platform (JMS support etc.)
- Plugins to enable testing (Selenium, Fitness, Code Coverage etc.)
- Rich Grails (Flex, GWT, Grails UI\Yahoo UI etc.)
- Secure Grails (Spring Security, JSecurity OpenID)
- Integrate Grails (Search, Jasper Reports, JMS)
This was a good introduction to Grails, the command line interface, project conventions and the plugin system. It has piqued my interest sufficiently that I will spend a bit more time (when I have it!) progressing through some of the many Grails tutorials.
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Introduction to Data Protection Legislation
November 27th, 2009As a member of the Irish Computer Society I regularly receive invitations to their ‘Breakfast Briefing’ and ‘Lunch and Learn’ events. I have been meaning to attend the regular ‘Introduction to Data Protection Legislation’ event for some time now and finally got the opportunity to attend one today.
This event was held in the ICS building in Dublin 2 (convenient city centre location), starting with a light lunch at 12:30 with the presentation running from 1pm to 2pm. The presenter was Hugh Jones and I found him very knowledgeable and highly informative. We only had an hour so the aim was to touch on all the facets of the legislation without going into detail.
The presentation started by discussing privacy and the many definition’s it has been afforded over time. A couple of high profile privacy cases are then outlined to demonstrate different legal views on the protection of privacy.
The presentation then proceeds to discuss the particulars of the Irish data protection legislation giving a summary description of the acts. Before explaining the acts further, the terms ‘Data’, ‘Automated Data’, ‘Manual Data’, ‘Personal Data’, ‘Sensitive Personal Data’, ‘Relevant Filing System’ and ‘Processing’ are defined, as well as the characters ‘Data Subject’, ‘Data Controller’ and ‘Data Processor’.
The data processing rules are then explained, along with the individuals rights afforded by the legislation. Finally, enforcement provisions, registration, specific offences, overseas transfers of data and exemptions are discussed.
Coming from a development background and working primarily in this domain I have never required in depth knowledge in this area but it is certainly advisable to have an awareness. This event refreshed my long lost memories of when data protection was covered in my undergraduate degree and I found it interesting. Anyone working with personal data should be aware of their responsibilities and if you are completely ignorant in this area, I would highly recommend this event. It is free to ICS members and a small fee is applicable to non-ICS members.
If you have more responsibility relating to data protection and require more than just an awareness of the legislation, the ICS also provide a 1-day course and 3-day certification in the area. For me, the introduction was as far as I feel would be relevant but i found it very informative and interesting.
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Spring Source ‘OSGi and Modular Applications’
November 24th, 2009OSGi is a dynamic module system for Java which has been gaining quite a lot of publicity in recent times. One of the most well known OSGi implementations (Equinox) is used within the Eclipse project to provide its plugin architecture. Spring Source are full members of the OSGi Alliance and have shown their commitment to OSGi with the development of the Spring Source dm Server and Spring Dynamic Modules.
Spring Source have recently added the OSGi and Modular Applications training video to their free online training offering. I was eager to learn more about OSGi and what Spring Source were doing to simplify OSGi in the same way it has with much of enterprise Java.
The training video lasts for just over an hour and provides an overview of OSGi, Spring Dynamic Modules and Spring Source dm Server. It starts with a history of OSGi and the OSGi Alliance and provides some information related to OSGi bundle visibility, the OSGI bundle lifecycle, the OSGi service registry and the OSGi container.
The video then proceeds to a demo entitled ‘Using plain OSGi bundles to share types and services’. The demo uses Spring Source Tool Suite to develop an OSGi bundle which exports a service and then deployes the bundle to the dm Server. It then demonstrates the development and deployment of another OSGi bundle which imports the service provided by the previous OSGi bundle.
Next, there is an introduction to OSGi and Spring which focus on Spring Dynamic Modules and how it simplifies OSGi development in the same way that the Spring Framework simplifies enterprise Java development. A demo entitled ‘Using Spring Dynamic Modules to share types and services’ highlights how Spring Dynamic Modules provides dynamic proxies to services that have been exported to the OSGi service registry. It also demonstrates the use of the OSGi namespace to configure the OSGi services within the exporting and importing bundle.
We are then introduced to some of the issues surrounding enterprise OSGi including incompatible classloading models, lack of web support, appropriate deployment models and lack of enterprise library bundles. This is very useful as it highlights some of the obstacles to be overcome before introducing OSGi to the enterprise. OSGi architectures and partitioning strategies are also discussed highlighting the characteristics of vertical and horizontal partitioning as well as partitioning granularity.
The final demo is ‘Developing a multi-bundle web application with Spring Source dm Server’ which demonstrates a web application consuming OSGi services.
Overall, the training video provides a useful introduction to OSGi and OSGi development using the Spring technology stack. As with the previous free training video the quality of the material was very good and it was presented in a clear and concise manner.
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