Emerging Technologies
for the Enterprise 2014

Tim Fox - creator, Vert.x

Vert.x is a lightweight, high performance, reactive application platform for the JVM that’s designed for modern mobile, web, and enterprise applications. In this talk you will learn about the design principles and motivation behind Vert.x and why we are heading for a reactive future.
You will also hear an overview including demonstrations of some of the key features of Vert.x including the distributed event bus which extends right into the browser, high availability, and the module system. Demonstrations will involve examples in Java, JavaScript, Scala, Groovy and Python.
You’ll also learn about how improved build tool and IDE integration simplify the process of developing applications with Vert.x – including short demonstrations of module auto-redeploy from the IDE and executable “fat jars”

David Turanski - lead, Spring Data GemFire

2013 was a “pivotal” year for Spring! We saw the Spring family join Pivotal where – along with Cloud Foundry and our data driven technologies (the Pivotal HD Hadoop distribution, the GemFire data grid, and the RabbitMQ message broker). Today’s Spring embraces Java 8, Scala, Groovy, provides a best-in-class REST stack, supports the open web, mobile applications, big-data applications and batch workloads. Today’s Spring is easy to get started with, easy to learn, and embraces convention over configuration. Join Spring developer David Turanski as he takes you on a tour of today’s Spring, including the Spring.IO platform, Spring Boot, Websocket support, Spring HATEOAS, and more! This is a Spring you may not have seen yet.

Have You Seen Spring Lately

James Roper - lead developer, Play Framework

Java 8 heralds a new era of reactive programming, with lambdas and promises taking the limelight as the bright new features of the language. To best take advantage of these features, Play Framework offers a ground up asynchronous full stack web framework, with a high velocity development environment, making it the most natural web framework to use with Java 8. This presentation will showcase the best that Java 8 has to offer in the world of reactive web development.

Robin Ward - co-founder, Discourse

Browser Applications are all the rage these days. When we started Discourse, our next-generation open source forum software, we wanted a rich application that would last more than just a couple of years. To achieve this goal, we embraced the Ember.js framework and built a very heavy and powerful Javascript application. Along the way we learned quite a bit about the advantages of client side programming and enterprise design patterns. This talk is a walkthrough of the principles we learned and the challenges we faced along the way to client side nirvana.

Ellen Friedman - co-author, Mahout in Action

As machine learning emerges from research to find its place in practical applications, it’s useful to know some tips for how to build a simple but powerful recommendation engine. This talk explores how to choose effective data, how to use Apache Mahout to discover the “right kind” of co-occurrence and an innovative use of search technology for implementation. With Apache Solr to deploy the recommender, you save development time and have a dependable way to deliver rapid response recommendations in a production setting. We will also take a look at the current state of Apache Mahout, which has recently released a 0.9 version and discuss some of the best ways to get involved with this open source project.

Jon Moore - Technical Fellow, Comcast Corporation

Many interesting “reference datasets” now fit in a single commodity server’s RAM, with more on the way as main memory sizes continue to grow. The open source Sirius library allows developers access to this data in native datastructures while managing the distributed systems heavy lifting of replication and persistence.

In this talk, I’ll describe what “reference data” means so that you can recognize this common use case in your own applications, highlighting problems that Sirius is a good fit for (and those that it isn’t). I’ll describe the overall architecture of a Sirius-based application—-the high-level concept of how it works. Finally, I’ll use a case study from Comcast as an example where Sirius is powering applications serving tens of millions of customers.

Aaron Mulder - CTO, Chariot Solutions

In the olden days, 3D in the browser meant something antiquated like VRML, Java3D, or other unpleasant formats and plugins. But many of today’s browsers can handle it natively via the HTML5 Canvas and
WebGL, based on the popular OpenGL standard. But wait, you say, the only way to program anything in the browser is via JavaScript! Sure, there are libraries like three.js to help, but JavaScript is so…
slow. Enter asm.js, a subset of the language specifically constructed for high performance. In this talk, we’ll look at the browser support, APIs, and JavaScript libraries for WebGL, and check out the changes needed to bump up performance with asm.js.

Look, Ma, No Plugins! Presentation

Roland Kuhn - Project Lead, Akka

Building on the success of Reactive Extensions—first in Rx.NET and now in RxJava—we are taking Observers and Observables to the next level: by adding the capability of handling back-pressure between asynchronous execution stages we enable the distribution of stream processing across a cluster of potentially thousands of nodes. The project defines the common interfaces for interoperable stream implementations on the JVM and is the result of a collaboration between Twitter, Netflix, Pivotal, RedHat and Typesafe. In this presentation I introduce the guiding principles behind its design and show examples using the actor-based implementation in Akka.

Ben Alman - creator, Grunt

As web applications have become more complex, we’ve addressed performance, usability and scaling concerns by promoting JavaScript from second-class citizen (image rollovers, form validation) to first-class citizen (business logic, app routing, Ajax, templating). However, in doing so, most of us haven’t optimized our process to treat JavaScript and its front-end siblings, CSS and HTML, like the first-class parts of our application that they have become. In this talk, we’re going to learn how to incorporate Grunt: The JavaScript Task Runner into our build process to help automate often-marginalized tasks that center on the “Front Half” of your app (you know, the half of your app you take for granted).

Dean Wampler - co author, Programming Scala

Spark is an open-source computation platform for Big Data. Leaders in the Hadoop community, such as Cloudera, have embraced Spark as a replacement for MapReduce, the venerable standard for writing Hadoop jobs.

This talk explores why this change is needed. Spark provides two important benefits compared to MapReduce. First, its performance is significantly better than MapReduce. We’ll discuss why. Second, because Spark is implemented in Scala and rooted in the world of functional programming, it provides better, more composable primitives that make it easier for developers to create a wide variety of high-performance applications. We’ll discuss these primitives and look at some example applications.

Jan Machacek - CTO of Cake Solutions and Scala/FP enthusiast

Jan will show how the principles of reactive design apply to APIs. In particular, Jan will show how to serve & consume REST APIs using Scala and Spray. The talk will explain the components in Spray, how they build on each other to offer convenient abstractions, and how you can easily combine the different abstraction levels in your code. Jan will show how Spray makes the implementation of even complex APIs easy and understandable.

You do not need thorough understanding of Scala or the actor model (though knowledge of the Scala’s syntax will help). After the talk, you will understand the principles in Spray and how to apply them in your applications.

James Wanga - Morgan Stanley

AngularJS directives are a powerful tool that can bring elegance to complex technologies like WebGL. Last year, with an amazing team, I won a NASA hackathon by building a drone using a quad-coptor and a
custom built sonar that was later featured on the discovery channel. During my talk I’ll walk through how that project has evolved into an example of how we can use AngularJS directives and services to interact with the physical world in beautiful ways, unbinding this excellent framework from the browser.

Angular Reality: Rendering the World in Real Time with AngularJS Directives and WebGL