Application Configuration using REST & Protocol Buffers
ÜberConf
Denver · July 12 - 15, 2011
About this Presentation
The presentation will cover different types of application configuration, their lifecycle and management. The audience will learn about approaches on how to separate the configuration API from consumption and provisioning. The benefits that can be achieved from a well defined API providing ease of development, nice IDE support, type handling and true data objects, while maintaining the flexibility of being able to retrieve configuration from different sources and in different formats. They will learn about supporting different data stores, such as CouchDB, flat files, remote services and file repositories, as well as supporting different file formats like XML, JSON, Protobuf binary, etc.
The talk will cover some aspects of data modeling and design to best describe the configuration domain and support its ongoing evolution. A code demo will demonstrate an example of a system with a defined configuration data model represented via Protocol Buffers Model API, using multiple data providers consisting of data fetched from CouchDB, local files and remote RESTful services and being stored in multiple formats (JSON, XML, Protobuf binary).
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.