Brian Gilstrap

By Brian Gilstrap

Until recently, REST as an architectural style has suffered from a lack of understanding and serious lack of frameworks. Now that APIs and frameworks like JAX-RS and Jersey are here, why should you take the time to learn how to build RESTful services?

Applying REST to your web services asks you to give up some very familiar and comfortable tools (session data, distributed transactions across services, etc.) and it may not be clear what you gain. This talk will explain why you can do more (composable services, flexible interactions, simplified caching, easier testing) with less (stateless interaction with the client, no distributed transactions, no servlets, optionally no container, etc.). Jersey, the JAX-RS reference implementation) is a great tool for building RESTful services and we'll use that to drive the discussion.

Not only will we discuss REST design, we'll explore a working example with a sample RESTful service built using Jersey. We'll look at the nuts and bolts of building JAX-RS based services and even delve into topics like resource-independent caching. And we'll look at the limitations of REST and JAX-RS to understand when it does and does not make sense to use it.

By Brian Gilstrap

Performance tuning/troubleshooting is the poor stepchild of software development. There are many reasons for this, and often it boils down to justifying the purchase of tools and the time to learn them. As a result, when problems occur we often end up struggling to find ways to get results in short timeframes and with much more attention on our activities than is good for finding and fixing problems. What if you could skip the PO process and still performance tune?

Open source performance tuning tools can help bridge this gap. They allow us the opportunity to gain the knowledge needed to investigate and solve performance problems without having to justify a purchase first. Sometimes they will be all that we need, and sometimes they will be a stepping stone to a more tailored tool. Both ways, they are invaluable.

In this talk, we'll explore many of the open source performance tuning tools available for Java. We'll look at usage patterns, kick the tires on some of the tools, and explore which tools make sense in which situations. This is the sort of information which, combined with some use of these tools while doing your development, will leave you in a much stronger position to tackle your next tuning dilemma.