Great Lakes Software Symposium
April 18 - 20, 2008 - Chicago, IL
Brian Sletten
Forward Leaning Software Engineer
Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.
He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
Presentations
What's Going On? : Complex Event Processing w/ Esper
How well do you understand the dynamics of your applications? In our systems, we detect when simple things happen. Customers log in, people buy things, a stock is sold at a particular price, inventory shifts locations... all of these events mean little things, but what about the larger picture? Complex events are particular patterns of simpler events that suggest something deeper is happening. Do you know how you'd discover these bigger picture occurrences? Come hear how the Esper open source software represents a new class of complex event processing (CEP) frameworks that can be added to even high volume, high transaction systems.
Trying to write software to track event occurrence is difficult to do correctly and almost impossible to do efficiently. The problem is that the higher volume and performance our systems get, the harder it becomes and the more important it is to highlight interesting or unexpected activity that isn't represented simply by a log entry.
Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Event Stream Processing (ESP) systems are emerging as a new strategy for processing and detecting complex sequences of more rudimentary events that could have bigger implications to your production systems. While commercial software is starting to add this behavior, Esper represents one of the most accessible and widely-used frameworks for adding CEP/ESP capabilities to Java applications.
REST : Information-Driven Architectures for the 21st Century
There is a shift going on in the Enterprise. While still used and useful, the promises of the SOAP/WSDL/UDDI Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) stack have failed to live up to their promise. A new vision of linked information is enveloping online and Enterprise users. The REST architectural style is squarely behind this thinking as a way of achieving low-cost, flexible integration, increased data security, greater scalability and long-term migration strategies.
If you have dismissed REST as a toy or are unfamiliar with it, you owe it to yourself to see what is so interesting about this way of doing things.
There is tremendous interest in REpresentational State Transfer (REST) as an architectural style for building scalable, flexible, information-driven architectures in the Enterprise. The success of the Web has caught our attention in the face of increased complexity and many failures with more traditional Web Services technologies. The problem is that it is difficult to sell a way to do things. Managers do not want to feel like they are innovating in the middleware space. They want to understand why they should deviate from the blue prints laid down by the industry leaders. They want to understand when they should use REST, when they should use SOAP and when they might fallback to regular old Java-based messaging. They want to make business-based technology decisions that lay a path to forward progress rather than paying for technological flux.
This talk will introduce REST and walk through why it is so important and makes such a difference. We will talk about REST API design, security, long-lived systems, content-negotiation, contract enforcement, when REST might not make sense, etc.
REST and the Web Architecture are the basis for many exciting things happening on the Web and within our organizations. You owe it to yourself to make sure you really "get it".
This talk should be accessible to everyone but is probably intermediate level.
REST - Live!
You've read the articles, the books, the Ph.D. thesis and all of the meta-commentary about building RESTful APIs, but you're still not sure where to begin.
This is an interactive session and has almost no slides. You should come prepared to discuss ideas and maybe pair program with me and everyone else in the room. Bring your ideas for open source projects that we might want to expose through a resource-oriented model. Bring your concerns about your domains that you are convinced don't fit this model.
This is not an introduction to REST. If you do not know anything about REST, please come to the "Give it a REST" talk if that is offered as well. If not, we can have a quick review, but this session is more for people who want to talk about how the ideas apply.
RESTlet for the Weary
If you have started to take a look at REST as way of exposing web services or managing information spaces, you may be frustrated by the support offered by legacy containers. There is no direct support for REST concepts in the J2EE specs (yet). XML-based configurations are so 1990's. Come learn about Restlets, a little API that has caught the attention of many in the RESTafarian community.
The Restlet API was created by a guy who wanted object-level support for RESTful concepts, but didn't want to make the move to an advanced resource-oriented environment like NetKernel. He wanted his REST and conventional environments too. He also wanted a path to more modern containers that aren't tied to a blocking I/O model like the Servlet spec is.
This talk will include a brief review of REST and its primary concepts and will then provide an introduction to the Restlet API and how it supports these ideas. It will then focus on standing up a REST-oriented infrastructure using the Restlet API and a variety of other open source tools to support a publish/find/bind infrastructure without touching SOAP/WSDL/ or UDDI.
This talk will not try to convince you about using REST. If you aren't familiar with the concepts or want convincing, please come to the "REST" talk first.
Rich Clients, Rich Data Part I : Linking
You hear a lot of talk about rich clients, but the richness they purport to provide is predicated on having access to rich data as well as a rich user interaction style. Without the right levels of abstraction, it is hard to address and link all of the data we have to care about these days. Additionally, the web sites that do support the notion of linking require you to publish your data into TheirSpace. Forget that. You want to be able to link publicly available information to sensitive information in YourSpace.
Ever since we started doing relational joins, we've looked for ways to tie data together. The problem is, the relational model is a bit tired and doesn't move at the speed of the Net. We need schemes that integrate relational data, web pages, XML files, RSS feeds and various other sources of information.
The good news is that a slew of emerging technologies are starting to make this happen. Come explore integration strategies that allow real mashups to function on both the web and the Enterprise. We can use a variety of languages and tools to link legacy data and modern content sources. We will explore resource-oriented computing as a new way of building systems that manage information spaces, not code.
We will discuss the benefits and deficiencies of XML in this space as well as look at things like JSON, RSS and RDF. We will look at research projects like Simile from MIT, metadata storage systems like Mulgara and scalable orchestration environments like NetKernel. We'll see how to create your own Yahoo Pipes-like functionality without having to publish What happens when you mix the concepts of REST with Unix Pipes and Service-oriented architectures? What happens when you leverage the power of the web as a global data source in the context of your own day-to-day activities?
The first talk will be an overview of the various topics and technologies that enable the rich data. The second talk will focus on how we can create powerful, user and data-driven applications with the rich data we've linked.
A lot of this will be new and on the intermediate to advanced side, but an open mind is all that is really necessary to catch what is going on.
Rich Clients, Rich Data Part II : Consuming
You hear a lot of talk about rich clients, but the richness they purport to provide is predicated on having access to rich data as well as a rich user interaction style. Without the right levels of abstraction, it is hard to address and link all of the data we have to care about these days. Additionally, the web sites that do support the notion of linking require you to publish your data into TheirSpace. Forget that. You want to be able to link publicly available information to sensitive information in YourSpace.
Ever since we started doing relational joins, we've looked for ways to tie data together. The problem is, the relational model is a bit tired and doesn't move at the speed of the Net. We need schemes that integrate relational data, web pages, XML files, RSS feeds and various other sources of information.
The good news is that a slew of emerging technologies are starting to make this happen. Come explore integration strategies that allow real mashups to function on both the web and the Enterprise. We can use a variety of languages and tools to link legacy data and modern content sources. We will explore resource-oriented computing as a new way of building systems that manage information spaces, not code.
We will discuss the benefits and deficiencies of XML in this space as well as look at things like JSON, RSS and RDF. We will look at research projects like Simile from MIT, metadata storage systems like Mulgara and scalable orchestration environments like NetKernel. We'll see how to create your own Yahoo Pipes-like functionality without having to publish What happens when you mix the concepts of REST with Unix Pipes and Service-oriented architectures? What happens when you leverage the power of the web as a global data source in the context of your own day-to-day activities?
The first talk will be an overview of the various topics and technologies that enable the rich data. The second talk will focus on how we can create powerful, user and data-driven applications with the rich data we've linked.
A lot of this will be new and on the intermediate to advanced side, but an open mind is all that is really necessary to catch what is going on.


