Brian Sletten

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.

Advanced NetKernel : Software for the 21st Century

If you have come to the NetKernel overview talk and came away compelled but unsure how to proceed, this talk will jump right in to building real resource-oriented systems with NetKernel. We will move away from the theoretical mind-melting right into the applied mind-melting. It is difficult to make the shift away from an object-oriented model, but this talk will demonstrate several examples of how and why you may want to. It will also include a preview of what is coming in NetKernel 4. This is kind of a REST + Polyglot Programming + SOA + Architecture talk all rolled up into one.

HTML 5 ... and the Kitchen Sink

HTML 5 is an adventurous and confusing prospect that will help change the Web as we know it. It is being finalized as a standard but won't be fully supported by most browsers for quite some time. Companies like Apple and Google have already committed to it as the future of Web application development, however. There are a huge number of new features, updates and gotchas coming at us (including the proverbial kitchen sink!) so it is time to get prepared. This talk will walk you through the new bits and try to put it all into perspective.

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.

RDFA : Weaving Richness and Meaning in the Web

The human web is reasonably well in hand by now. We are getting pretty good at building systems that people find valuable and entertaining. We have not spent as much time concerned about our software friends. There is a ton a rich content available on the web that is too difficult to extract in automated ways using just XHTML, the meta tag and microformats. This talk will introduce you to some emerging technologies from the Semantic Web camp to enrich your web pages with useful information for both automated extraction and improved browsing experiences.

SPARQL : Querying the Web of Data

The human-friendly Web is about nicely-formatted, accessible content for users to browse. There are emerging Data Webs (both public and private) that rely on technologies from the Semantic Web stack to link increasingly rich connections between various data sources. SPARQL and RDF are the main tools for expressing and using this connectivity. This talk will introduce you to one of these topics and the practical and accessible aspects of employing them on the Web and in the Enterprise.

Getting people to come to consensus on common models and schemas is usually the hardest part of any data integration strategies. These technologies help lower the bar on both the technical and social costs of stepping up your integration strategies.