Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference

Speaker: Debasish Ghosh

Talk: DSLs: Does Expressiveness for Domain Experts Have to Compromise the Underlying Implementation?   

Eleventh in our ETE 2011 screencast series

The biggest benefit of DSL driven development is the ability to collaborate with your domain experts as well as your fellow programmers as you flesh out your APIs. A DSL needs to speak the language of the domain. But when you design a DSL, it’s not only the linguistic aspect that you need to consider – the underlying semantic model also has to be malleable enough. It’s how this model interacts with your language syntax that shapes your DSL implementation. The expressiveness of the language and the succinctness of implementation both depend a lot on the ability to design abstractions at the proper level.

When you want to design a DSL that models the ubiquitous language of the domain, there’s always a tension between the degree of expressiveness that you offer to your users and the ease and elegance of the underlying implementation. A successful DSL is one that finds the right compromise between the two forces. In this talk I will discuss how to design abstractions at the proper granularity so that they compose beautifully when you weave them during your language evolution.

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference

Speaker: Mike Brocious

Talk: How MongoDB Helps Visibiz Tackle Social CRM       

Tenth in our ETE 2011 screencast series

So you’ve heard about MongoDB and it sounds really sweet (BTW, it is!). Now you’re thinking about using it in your application. We can’t tell you if it’s right for your application, but we can tell you how we’re using it at Visibiz and that might help you with your implementation.

This presentation provides a use case of MongoDB at Visibiz. It first discusses why we chose to use MongoDB as our application’s primary datastore (what were the relevant application requirements and perceived benefits). It then covers how we’re using MongoDB in the application, touching on schema design of the primary collection and listing several secondary uses for it in the architecture. We also touch on lessons learned, as well as pros and cons.

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference

Speaker: Bruce Tate

Talk: Mary Poppins Meets the Matrix: Seven Programming Languages at the Cinema       

Ninth in our ETE 2011 screencast series

Every foreign language you learn makes you a little smarter, and even shapes the way you think. In the Pragmatic Programmer, Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt say that a developer should learn a new programming language every year. In the book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, Bruce takes this challenging advice to the extreme. The book helps a developer solve a nontrivial problem in each of seven different programming languages, spanning four different programming paradigms. In this talk, Bruce will take a light-hearted look through the evolution of programming languages, paying special attention to the seven languages in his book, Ruby, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, Clojure, and Haskell.

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference

Speaker: David A. Black

Talk: Command Performance: The Why and Whether of Small-Scale Optimizations       

Eighth in our ETE 2011 screencast series

We’ve all heard it: “Don’t worry about that just yet” followed by the famous Hoare and/or Knuth dictum, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

So why does the dictum always feel neither exactly right, nor completely wrong?

Like soap operas, many software projects are engineered to go on forever. Releases more than a few months old seem already covered in cobwebs. Given such a paradigm for the project life-cycle, when does “premature” give way to “mature”? At what level of granularity in the project and/or the code does maturity emerge—and how do you know? Do rules rooted in the concept of “maturity” even have a place?

This talk will use some of these observations and questions as a point of entry for consideration of small-scale code optimizations. We’ll look at the ways in which most of us already optimize, sometimes unconsciously, and try to fit the pieces of the maturity/optimization puzzle together in a satisfying manner.

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference

Speaker: Daniel Spiewak

Talk: Uncovering the Unknown: Principles of Type Inference     

Seventh in our ETE 2011 screencast series

The theory and practicum of type inference has been around for literally decades, but it remains a tricky and needlessly dry topic, even in academic circles. This talk will delve into the glorious details and subtle implications of type inference in industrial languages like C# and Scala, as well as highly mathematical languages like Haskell. We will uncover the sordid reasons beyond some of the many unnerving quirks of modern type inference schemes, as well as the the amazing power they proffer.

Love of math is not a prerequisite, though utter dread of such may result in minor hallucinations during the talk. Deep-seated hatred of static typing is welcomed! The primary focus of this talk will be on Scala, Haskell and SML, but prior knowledge of these languages is neither expected nor required.

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference

Speaker: Jonas Bonér and Garrick Evans 

Talk: Above the Clouds: Introducing Akka  

Fifth in our ETE 2011 screencast series

We believe that one should never have to choose between productivity and scalability, which has been the case with traditional approaches to concurrency and distribution. The cause of that has been the wrong tools and the wrong layer of abstraction – and Akka is here to change that. Akka is using the Actors together with Software Transactional Memory (STM) to create a unified runtime and programming model for scaling both UP (utilizing multi-core processors) and OUT (utilizing the grid/cloud). Akka provides location and network transparency by abstracting away both these tangents of scalability by turning them into an operations and configuration task. This gives the Akka runtime freedom to do adaptive automatic load-balancing, cluster rebalancing, replication and partitioning. In this talk you will learn what Akka is and how it can be used to solve hard scalability problems. We will also walk you through a real-world case-study using Akka to implement a highly scalable and fault-tolerant compute grid. Akka is available at http://akka.io (under Apache 2 license).

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference

Speaker: Josh Clark

Talk: Buttons Are a Hack: The New Rules of Designing for Touch   

Third in our ETE 2011 screencast series

Fingers and thumbs turn design conventions on their head. Touchscreen interfaces create ergonomic, contextual, and even emotional demands that are unfamiliar to desktop designers. Find out why our beloved desktop windows, buttons, and widgets are weak replacements for manipulating content directly, and learn practical principles for designing mobile interfaces that are both more fun and more intuitive. Along the way, discover why buttons are a hack, how to develop your gesture vocabulary, and why toys and toddlers provide eye-opening lessons in this new style of design.

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference

Keynote Speaker: Stormy Peters

Talk: Would You Give It Away (Again)?  

Second in our ETE 2011 screencast series

One of the things about the open source community and web developers that continues to baffle those non-open source people is, why do you do it? People and companies work on open source software and open web applications for a number of reasons from scratching an itch to gaining a reputation to building a resume to contributing to a good cause. The interesting problem comes when money enters into the equation. Research shows that when someone works on something for free for internal rewards, those internal rewards are replaced if you start paying them. Then if you stop paying them, they will stop working on it. So when people get paid to work on open source software, does that change things? If their free web application starts making money, does that change things? How can companies work with these open processes and technologies in a productive way? Why are open technologies important to business?