Venkat Subramaniam

Understanding the "NO" in NoSQL

Relational databases have ruled the world since the dawn of time (or so it appears). They power our enterprises and for many in the corporate world, it may be hard to imagine life without them. Each decade a novel idea would challenge the status quo and make a case to deviate for the tradition. A flock of enthusiastic programmers, like your humble speaker back in the early 90s, would throw their support around it, only to be crushed eventually by the large vendors and enterprise standards. But, the excitement around NoSQL has shown that enterprise data is not the only thing that's persistent.

Scala Koans - A new and fun way to learn a Scala programming language (Bring a Laptop)

Have you looked into Scala? Scala is a new object-functional JVM language. It is statically typed and type inferred. It is multi-paradigm and supports both object oriented and functional programming. And it happens to be my favorite programming language.

If you are interested in Scala, how you are planning to learn Scala? You probably are going to pick up a book or two and follow through some examples. And hopefully some point down the line you will learn the language, its syntax and if you get excited enough maybe build large applications using it. But what if I tell you that there is a better path to enlightenment in order to learn Scala?

Demystifying invokedynamic

Invoke dynamic is a Java 7 feature that had the most impact at the bytecode level and also in terms of performance. First perceived as a feature to help dynamically typed languages on the JVM, it turned into a powerful feature that has been exploited quite a bit in the implementation of features in the Java
language itself.

The Art of Simplicity

We've been told to keep things simple. It turns out, that's easily said than done. Creating something simple is, well, not really that simple. If simple was sitting next to us, would we even recognize it? Is my design simple, is yours simple? How can we tell?

Design Patterns in Groovy

When I got into Java I had a “Wow, look how easy it is to implement these patterns.” When I got into Groovy, I had the same reaction, but only better. The dynamic nature of Groovy makes it easier to implement some common patterns. What's better, there are some patterns that you can exploit in Groovy that are not so easy in Java. In this section, you will learn how to implement some traditional patters in Groovy, and also other patterns you are simply not used to in Java.

Applying Groovy Closures for fun and productivity

You can program higher order functions in Groovy quite easily using closures. But the benefits of closures go far beyond that. Groovy has a variety of capabilities hidden in closures.

Concurrency without Pain in Pure Java

Programming concurrency has turned into a herculean task. I call the traditional approach as the synchronized and suffer model. Fortunately, there are other approaches to concurrency and you can reach out to those directly from your Java code.

Java 8 Language Capabilities - What's in it for you?

There is a good amount of excitement about the new version of Java. The big
evolution of course is the lambda expressions. In this presentation we will dive into the language features in Java 8, take a look at some of their nuances, and look at ways to put them to good use.

A dozen cool things we can do with popular JVM Languages

Languages offer a lot more than syntax and compilers. They often have supporting libraries and special facilities that set them apart from other languages. Some languages offer special compiler support for a particular construct, like tail call optimization, for example. Others provide interesting library support or capabilities.