Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Consultant

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a mentor and a trainer. His experience has spanned defense, finance and commercial domains with security consulting, network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and a Semantic Web-based system. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and currently lives in Fairfax, VA where he and his wife run Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. Brian is also a partner in Zepheira, LLC, a new services company focused on using semantic-oriented technologies to solve data integration problems not handled by conventional tools and techniques.

• Give it a REST
• NetKernal: XML Processing for the 21st Century
• Introducing the Semantic Web
• Applied AOP

Give it a REST
As developers, we sometimes get to make choices about the technologies we use, sometimes not. We base these decisions on personal experiences, recommendations from others and a general sense of where the industry is going.

Web Services have been all the rage for several years now. We have been told time and again that we should be building systems around them; as an industry, we've never been more confused. Perhaps it is time to Give it a REST.

Part of the problem with the conventional Web Services technology stack is that it is more complex than it needs to be for small to medium-sized systems. All of the examples show how simple it all is, but how often do we really need to check the temperature or get a stock quotation? Real systems that are built out of these technologies are rapidly spiraling toward incomprehensibility, unmaintainability and (shocker) insecurity!

SOAP has a place, but so does REST, a simpler architectural style for invoking services in a language- and platform- independent way. This talk will motivate REST, explain how it fits in to other Enterprise and Web technologies and help give you some ammo for suggesting that your organization give it a REST too.

We will look at getting started with the Restlet API, using conventional containers and advanced environments like NetKernel to build scalable REST-oriented systems.

This talk should be accessible to everyone but is probably intermediate level.

NetKernal: XML Processing for the 21st Century
A wise man once said, "XML is like lye. It is very useful, but humans shouldn't touch it." If you've had to incorporate XML into your project by hand, you have probably been burned by getting too close. NetKernel turns this wisdom on its head and encourages you to use XML like the liquid data stream you want it to be. Imagine the simplicity of REST married to the power of Unix pipes. Come see how this open source / commercial product built on a compelling modern architecture can be used to create, manipulate and transform XML.

The audience will be introduced to NetKernel's main features including:

- its modern architecture that combines the best parts of REST and Unix Pipes
- creating XML pipelines using both declarative and procedural scripting
- integrating external tools into the pipeline
- exposing services as active URIs
- its plug-in modules and other extendable features
- caching and throttling

Introducing the Semantic Web
Just as the world is feeling comfortable with the Web, Tim Berners-Lee et al inform us that what we have seen so far is just the beginning. His original plans at CERN were larger and grander. The Semantic Web is the new vision of machine-processable documents and metadata to improve search, knowledge discovery and data integration and management. While there are many naysayers chiding such grand visions, there are also pragmatic and useful technologies emerging that can be applied today.

Attendees will learn:

The history and motivations behind the Semantic Web The technology stack that will make it happen (including RDF and OWL)

An overview of tools and technologies that are beginning to satisfy the vision

This talk stands on its own, but feeds into the "Experiencing the Semantic Web" talk which is more hands on.

Rating: Intermediate
Prerequisites: This is all so new, most engineers will find something to excite them.

Applied AOP
Most people new to Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) are fed up with separation of concerns zealots explaining how great their techniques are at dealing with... logging. Ok, you get it. Logging is a cross-cutting concern that can be appropriately modularized. What else does AOP have to offer? A lot, it turns out. This talk will give an introduction to the motivations of AOP as well as a series of concrete examples drawn from enterprise and client side Java. Come learn how AspectJ-flavored AOP can begin to benefit you immediately either in development or production environments. Learn how to enforce architectural policies, find Swing threading issues, reduce the invasiveness of the Observer design pattern or even improve the reusability of your domain models. Now that Spring 2.0 provides support for AspectJ, the time has never been better to learn about these new (but backwards compatible) ways of thinking about building software.

Attendees will learn about
The history and reasons behind AOP
Development-oriented aspects that can be useful, but compiled out of production code
Production-oriented aspects that can simplify development and ease the burden of future changes
Basic AspectJ usage and jargon
How to use AspectJ with Spring

Rating: Intermediate
Category: Architecture/Languages, Client Side Java, Server Side Java
Prerequisites: Basic Java. Some level of AOP understanding is helpful, but not required. The pace of the introduction will depend on the average level of exposure the audience has previously had to AOP.