Dave Landers

More good sessions today, but the best was from my friend Subbu, who talked on Pragmatic REST.

Subbu gave a really great overview of REST - what is it, and how do you do it. This is especially going to help me as I am just starting a project to build a RESTful API for WebLogic Portal, so I have this timely reminder to serve as a guide - thanks, Subbu!

If any of you are interested in REST, I suggest you check out his blog and his slides from this conference (they should end up on the conference web site eventually, or Subbu said he would post them to his blog soon).

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, REST, softwaresummit

I enjoyed day one of Software Summit, now we’re on to day two.

Yesterday, I attended several sessions. Highlights for me included Bryan Basham’s Becoming a JavaScript Wizard and Simon Roberts’ What OO Doesn’t Address

I don’t actually do much JavaScript - I spend most of my time doing server-side stuff. But last year I made a conscious decision to shed my decade-old prejudice against JavaScript, and found it to be a language with some interesting concepts and features. It happens to have most exposure in a browser, but the Java Scripting API (and the inclusion of Rhino in JavaSE) now makes it a compelling option on the server. Bryan spent some time talking about the language basics before diving into browser-based stuff (he mostly talked about prototype for this).

Simon’s talk surprised me - I almost skipped it. I was going by the title, which doesn’t do anything to represent Simon’s entertaining and energetic presentation style. The main take-away I got from this is that we “Software Architects” are (should be) mainly around to inject reality into the design. That is, a pure OO domain model won’t necessarily consider things like security, performance, scalability, networks, usability, etc. Satisfying these concerns requires insight, experience, and a high-level understanding of lots of conflicting issues. And it often means backing down from an ivory-tower design purism.

We had some interesting weather come through in the afternoon - lightning, thunder, and rain. Then it turned to a rain snow mix - some really huge flakes mixed in with the rain. Very wet. The temperature was I thin just a few degrees too warm or we’d had a great snow.

The sun is coming out this morning, and I’ve got some good looking talks on my schedule. Should be another good day.

Technorati Tags: colorado software summit, conference, softwaresummit