Northern Virginia Software Symposium
November 3 - 5, 2006 - 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
Applied REST
REST sounds like such a simple thing. But, what is it really? How do you convince your boss to let you try it when she has been sold on the equation SOAP = SOA + P(rofit)? How do you go about building, deploying, publishing and orchestrating web services without the (Un)Holy Trinity of SOAP, WSDL and UDDI?
This talk will thoroughly examine this REST phenomenon in terms of its history, its goals, its consequences and where it fits into the Big Picture of SOA. We will also look at exposing existing tools/APIs through RESTful APIs.
If you find yourself interested in talking about REST without people dismissing it as trivial (yeah, but what is it?!?!), unsaleable (yeah, but I am trying to solve problems, not buy tools!) or not SOA (<insert your own joke here -- that one leaves me speechless>), come on by.
Introduction to NetKernel : Software for the 21st Century
Imagine the simplicity of REST married to the power of Unix pipes with the benefits of a loosely-coupled, logically-layered architecture. If that is hard to imagine, it may because the architectures available to you today are convoluted accretions of mismatched technologies, languages, abstractions and data models.
NetKernel is a disruptive technology that changes the game. It has been quietly gaining mind share in the past several years; people who are exposed to it don't want to go back to the tired and blue conventions of J2EE and .NET. Not only does it make building the kinds of systems you are building today easier, it does it more efficiently, with less code and a far more scalable runway to allow you to take advantage of the emerging multi-core, multi-CPU hardware that is coming our way.
Come see how this open source / commercial product can change the way you think about building software.
NetKernel makes the things you are doing now easier, but also makes new types of systems possible.
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.
But, XML is only part of the story. Resource-oriented computing is a generalized and revolutionary approach to modern, flexible systems. There is less code to write, but it is more fun to do. Orchestration of existing services and data sources is faster, easier and more encompassing than with more conventional technologies.
This talk will help explain what NetKernel is (app server? pipeline tool? embedded SOA?) and, through a comprehensive set of examples, give you a glimpse at a deeper software reality than you might have thought possible.
Disclaimer: There will be no blue pills given to you to make you forget what you have seen. Come with an open mind.
