Today I’m attending the Twin Cities Code Camp, a free conference with sessions on .NET, testing, Ajax, and web services. Here are summaries of the morning sessions I attended.

Object/Relational Mapping with Hibernate

Bob McCune gave an introduction to Hibernate. He showed live code of Hibernate API calls and the SQL that was produced. Hibernate provides relational database independence and maps Java objects to the rows in relational databases.

Quick and Dirty Functional Testing with Selenium

Steve Peterson gave an excellent introduction to an open source tool called Selenium. He created and ran test scripts created with the Selenium IDE (a Firefox addon). The tool allowed him to capture input and view the results in a graphical way or in a source code view. The source code view can be toggled to output results in languages like Java, Ruby, or .NET. Output viewed as Java can be copied and pasted into a JUnit test.

Building Innovative Applications using Amazon Web Services

Jinesh Varia gave us an overview of all the Amazon web services, then focused on specific code examples utilizing Simple Storage Service (S3) and the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Twin Cities code camp had some great sessions. I enjoyed meeting people and hope to attend again in the future.