Northern Virginia Software Symposium
October 28 - 30, 2005 - Reston, VA
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
JmDNS : Easy Service Discovery for the 21st Century
Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are all the rage. But how do you find all of these services once they are deployed? Configuration files are so 90's. Software of the 21st Century should be able to find related services and components without users having to specify particular configurations at start up. The IETF's ZeroConf multicast DNS protocol was designed to solve exactly this problem. JmDNS is Java-based open source implementation of this capability that allows local-link applications to find and use automagically discovered capabilities. Apple's Rendezvous technology is another open-source ZeroConf implementation behind many of the exciting applications it is building for OS X these days. Come learn how you can interact with these or your own service discovery-savvy applications without even having to learn how to spell UDDI. Bring your wireless notebooks to participate in a service-oriented environment (please have a working Java environment as we won't have time to debug installation issues).
Attendees will learn
- Why you don't need UDDI to find services
- The basics of multicast DNS and the ZeroConf protocol
- How to take advantage of Bonjour-enabled devices and software
- How to build their own applications that can be found without a central repository
Rating: Advanced
Category: Client or Server-side Java
Prerequisites: Basic to Intermediate Java skills, basic networking knowledge
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.
