Pratik Patel
Great Lakes Software Symposium
Chicago · November 9 - 11, 2012

Developer Advocate @ Azul Systems
Pratik Patel is a Java Champion and developer advocate at Azul Systems and has written 3 books on programming (Java, Cloud and OSS). An all around software and hardware nerd with experience in the healthcare, telecom, financial services, and startup sectors. He's also a co-organizer of the Atlanta Java User Group and North Atlanta JavaScript meetup, frequent speaker at tech events, and master builder of nachos.
Presentations
Mobile Development Options 2014
There's a bevy of options for developing mobile apps. If you're looking at cross-platform solutions, there's a multitude of options to choose from. In this session we'll explore the three basic categories for developing mobile apps: native, cross-platform-to-native, and mobile web. We'll discuss the sweet spot for each of these three approaches and the benefits and drawbacks of each. Technologies discussed include Android, iOS, HTML5/CSS3, Phonegap, Titanium, and jQuery Mobile.
Mobile Performance Tips n' Tricks
Creating a web site, web app, or native app for mobile use presents a special set of challenges. Specifically, developers and designers should be zoned into the techniques for usability - and usability can be enhanced greatly by taking performance elements into consideration up-front.
In this session, we explore the many performance tips and tricks you can employ to make your website or web app or native app shine on mobile devices. This is an advanced course that discusses issues such as image loading, JavaScript performance, and wireless latency.
Developer guide to the cloud
There's a ton of options for deploying to the cloud right now. Heroku and Engineyard are among the well known Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers. What if you don't want to use these PaaS services? What if you don't know which one is better? Are they cost effective? What about private deployments into internal infrastructure? This session answers these questions with a discussion of PaaS services and setting up your own PaaS using CloudFoundry.
Advanced JavaScript for Java Devs
So you think you've picked up enough JavaScript to be dangerous, but feel like the whole prototypical language thing is still a mystery. In this session, we'll go from basic JavaScript to advanced JavaScript. We'll discuss and code modular JavaScript with CommonJS. We'll look into the details of a prototype language and discuss things like parasitic inheritance. We'll also look at JavaScript libraries that will help you get the most out of JavaScript - not jQuery, but a library like UnderscoreJS and SugarJS.
Put some Backbone.js or Ember.js into your app
We've come a long way down the JavaScript road. Gone are the days of 'just hack it' for the web - architecting even a small project in JavaScript can be a challenge. Thankfully, there are several frameworks to help you; the most popular currently is Backbone.js. In this session, we'll assume you know nothing of Backbone.js, and we'll build a small application using Backbone.js as the foundation. We'll also build the same app using Ember.js, another popular JavaScript framework.