Salt Lake Software Symposium
June 29 - 30, 2012 - Salt Lake City, UT
View the event details here ».
Brian Sletten
Forward Leaning Software Engineer
Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.
Presentations
Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST I
The first in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
The REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architectural style has emerged as a winning strategy for building scalable, flexible, resilient systems that lead with an information focus. Far from being the simple "Web Services through URLs" idea many people have about them, REST-based systems require a new perspective, a fair amount of consideration and the discipline to look beyond simple point-to-point interactions.
The benefits are exciting and provide a gateway to a whole new world of information technology. This first talk will be an introductory session covering the basics of the REST architectural style.
Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST II
The second in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
People already familiar with REST (or who have attended the first session) will be walked through the deeper topics of building Level 3 Hypermedia-based RESTful systems, security, content negotiation, etc.
Resource-Oriented Architectures : REST III
The third in a series of talks that are part of an arc covering next-generation information-oriented, flexible, scalable architectures. The ideas presented apply to both external and internal-facing systems.
The move to a good REST API yields an explosive combination of options due to content-negotiation and arbitrary workflows. At the same time, the uniform interface you project (representations, how you respond to verbs, response codes, etc.) becomes your contract with your clients. The API itself becomes a completely transportable, reusable bit of organizational knowledge when done well. Testing it sufficiently will give you a safety net but may drive you crazy unless you do it right. We will walk through the use of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to test these kinds of APIs.
We will highlight the problems of sufficiently testing REST APIs while providing a rich and relatively straight-forward solution to the problem. We will use a Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) tool like Cucumber to establish reusable steps and comprehensive, but lightweight testing strategies for testing REST APIs.
This talk will not be an introduction to REST. If you have come to the REST I or REST II talk, or have a good understanding, it should be very accessible.
Semantic Web Workshop
The Web is changing faster than you can imagine and it is going to continue to do so. Webs of Documents are giving way to machine-processable Webs of Information. We no longer care about data containers, we only care about data and how it connects to what we already know.
Perhaps the concepts of the Semantic Web initiative are new to you. Or perhaps you have been hearing for years how great technologies like RDF, SPARQL, SKOS and OWL are and have yet to see anything real come out of it.
Whether you are jazzed or jaded, this workshop will provide you with the understanding of a technological tidal wave that is heading in your direction.
In this workshop, we will:
Explain the Web and Web architecture at a deeper level Apply Web and Semantic Web technologies in the Enterprise and make them work together Integrate structured and unstructured information Create good, long-lived logical names (URIs) for information and services Use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to integrate documents, services and databases Use popular RDF vocabularies such as Dublin Core, FOAF, DOAP Query RDF and non-RDF datastores with the SPARQL query language Model and Do Inference with the Web Ontology Language (OWL)
Bring your laptops. This is a hands-on workshop.
Semantic Web Workshop
The Web is changing faster than you can imagine and it is going to continue to do so. Webs of Documents are giving way to machine-processable Webs of Information. We no longer care about data containers, we only care about data and how it connects to what we already know.
Perhaps the concepts of the Semantic Web initiative are new to you. Or perhaps you have been hearing for years how great technologies like RDF, SPARQL, SKOS and OWL are and have yet to see anything real come out of it.
Whether you are jazzed or jaded, this workshop will provide you with the understanding of a technological tidal wave that is heading in your direction.
In this workshop, we will:
Explain the Web and Web architecture at a deeper level Apply Web and Semantic Web technologies in the Enterprise and make them work together Integrate structured and unstructured information Create good, long-lived logical names (URIs) for information and services Use the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to integrate documents, services and databases Use popular RDF vocabularies such as Dublin Core, FOAF, DOAP Query RDF and non-RDF datastores with the SPARQL query language Model and Do Inference with the Web Ontology Language (OWL)
Bring your laptops. This is a hands-on workshop.

