Brian Sletten
Greater Wisconsin Software Symposium
Milwaukee · February 24 - 26, 2006
Forward Leaning Software Engineer @ Bosatsu Consulting
Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.
Presentations
Introducing the Semantic Web
Just as the world is feeling comfortable with the Web, Tim Berners-Lee et al inform us that what we have seen so far is just the beginning. His original plans at CERN were larger and grander. The Semantic Web is the new vision of machine-processable documents and metadata to improve search, knowledge discovery and data integration and management. While there are many naysayers chiding such grand visions, there are also pragmatic and useful technologies emerging that can be applied today.
JmDNS : Easy Service Discovery for the 21st Century
Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are all the rage. But how do you find all of these services once they are deployed? Configuration files are so 90's. Software of the 21st Century should be able to find related services and components without users having to specify particular configurations at start up. The IETF's ZeroConf multicast DNS protocol was designed to solve exactly this problem. JmDNS is Java-based open source implementation of this capability that allows local-link applications to find and use automagically discovered capabilities. Apple's Rendezvous technology is another open-source ZeroConf implementation behind many of the exciting applications it is building for OS X these days. Come learn how you can interact with these or your own service discovery-savvy applications without even having to learn how to spell UDDI. Bring your wireless notebooks to participate in a service-oriented environment (please have a working Java environment as we won't have time to debug installation issues).
Applied Design Patterns
Just about every modern software developer has a copy of the Gang of Four “Design Patterns” book sitting on a shelf; many of them have actually read it. The dark secret of the patterns community is that there is often a large gulf between whiteboard simplicity and real-world complexity. Language choice plays a part in the design (and even importance) of patterns. The situation is made even more confusing by the fact that many of the core patterns have now been “voted off the island” for one reason or another. This talk will give a pragmatic overview of the motivations behind design patterns and will focus on applying a handful of the GOF patterns to example scenarios in Java, Ruby and C#. A quick introduction to the role AOP plays in changing the patterns landscape will also be covered.