Alex Antonov
Über Conf
Denver · June 14 - 17, 2010

Principal Engineer on the Technical Initiatives team at Orbitz Worldwide
Alex has joined Orbitz in 2004 and is responsible for providing technical leadership and guidance in the development of foundational technologies, core libraries and APIs for the enterprise-wide use, as well as establishing and maintaining common design principles and standards used within the company and integration of new software development practices within the development community.
Previously Alex was a Lead Engineer on the same team responsible for web application frameworks and developing common practices and additional functionality on top of Spring MVC & Webflow.
Alex is a graduate of Loyola University of Chicago, with a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Computer Science specializing in Software Architecture. He currently resides in Evanston, IL and when not coding, Alex enjoys playing tennis, hiking, skiing, and traveling.
Presentations
Resource Oriented Architecture using REST
A presentation explaining the building blocks necessary to build a distributed system using RESTful-style resource definition as well as benefits of using REST as they apply to testing, data caching, predictable resource discovery and transparent future system evolution
Building RESTful ROA Architecture at Orbitz
In the beginning Orbitz had a Jini based distributed system. The system design provided easy scalability and stability, but at the cost of tight coupling because of many shared modules and components, as well as Java serialization rules. In order to improve cohesion between individual services the decision has been made to migrate to a RESTful web services architecture. The new design is based on Google Protocol Buffers to define message formats and Spring/Spring MVC to handle client-server interaction. This resulted in a loosely coupled federation of services, each with its individual release and deployment schedule, which enabled more developer innovation and easier access to more data in a uniform fashion.
From Java to Ruby and Back
A presentation demoing clients and services written in different languages (Java & Ruby), demonstrating technologies that enable distributed systems to span languages and provide an automated way of returning alternative data representations (like XML, JSON, Protobuf, etc.) for different clients, while using the same backing data.