Brian Sletten

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.

Groovy + The Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is Tim Berners-Lee's full vision of what the Web can and will be. This HTML stuff we are all so enamored with is just the tip of the iceberg. “Web 2.0” is a kindergarten plaything (and a stupid name). Webs of linked data will allow us unprecedented flexibility in how we produce and consume information. While many people have been waiting on the sideline for the Semantic Web to get here, others have been making it happen.

Metaprogramming the Microkernel: Groovy + NetKernel

Most organizations have a pretty conservative attitude toward adopting technology. If you are allowed to use a language like Groovy, chances are it is still going to be deployed in a conventional container like Tomcat or some other J2EE infrastructure.

What would happen if you took the power of a language like Groovy and married it to a next-generation environment like NetKernel? Imagine combining the power of Groovy metaprogramming with a microkernel-based resource-oriented environment. Expressive, powerful, scalable. It's pretty much guaranteed to rip a hole in the space time continuum. Come watch it happen.

You will be amazed at how much can be accomplished with so little code (not to mention how well it will perform).