Brian Sletten
Great Lakes Software Symposium
Chicago · November 21 - 23, 2008
Forward Leaning Software Engineer @ Bosatsu Consulting
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, AI/ML, 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
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.
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.
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.
The Semantic Web : The Future, Now
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 a vision of machine-processable documents and metadata to improve search, knowledge discovery and data integration and management. The only problem is that there is no such thing. There is no Semantic Web, just the Web we have that is increasingly semantics-enabled.
Forget the hype. Come learn how the technologies of this vision are being used today on the Web and in the Enterprise by more people than you might think.