2004 No Fluff Symposiums

The Apache Commons project is a utility project with more than 26 useful, reusable components. Short on flash and sizzle, but virtually everyone can use productivity components for: command-line processing, app configuration, app lifetime management, JDBC, and others. Shotgun through the Commons in a single, intense talk: 7.5 minutes lecture, 1.5 minutes Q&A on each of the top ten Commons components.

Java 1.5's generic types provide much needed type safety to the Java language, and enables Java classes with less ambiguous APIs. Several very basic parts of the core API are affected by Java generics: the collections API is completely "genericized"; the Reflection API has sprouted several new appendages to describe generic types at runtime. Attend this talk to master the new Java language constructs describing generic types, learn how generic types are achieved in the Java VM, and to be introduced to the core APIs for generics.

You've heard of O/R (Object-to-relational) and O/X (Object-to-XML) techniques. SQL/XML, a.k.a. the SQL-2003 standard, supports direct R/X (relational-to-XML) mapping. So you can query a database and get XML results conforming to any arbitrary XML Schema you want. Very powerful, especially for web services applications. Introduce yourself to the newest SQL standard's XML capabilities.

Some data demands to be stored in hierarchies. XML databases will store your XML documents and can retrieve arbitrary XML nodes using XQuery or XPath as the query language. The design principals of XML databases are compared and contrasted to those of relational databases in this talk. The XML data model supports different types of data structures than relational, which requires a new way of looking at things.