Previously Alex was a Lead Engineer on the same team responsible for web application frameworks and developing common practices and additional functionality on top of Spring MVC & Webflow.
Alex is a graduate of Loyola University of Chicago, with a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Computer Science specializing in Software Architecture. He currently resides in Evanston, IL and when not coding, Alex enjoys playing tennis, hiking, skiing, and traveling.
The audience will be presented with a number of open source technologies that would enable building different layers of a multi-tier system.
We would look at various choices of foundational technologies like Spring and Google Guice, explore various options for the Web application containers and MVC frameworks, caching and distributed data store (NoSQL) solutions and cover some aspects of application monitoring and deployment.
The presentation will cover different types of application configuration, their lifecycle and management. The audience will learn about approaches on how to separate the configuration API from consumption and provisioning. The benefits that can be achieved from a well defined API providing ease of development, nice IDE support, type handling and true data objects, while maintaining the flexibility of being able to retrieve configuration from different sources and in different formats. They will learn about supporting different data stores, such as CouchDB, flat files, remote services and file repositories, as well as supporting different file formats like XML, JSON, Protobuf binary, etc.
The talk will cover some aspects of data modeling and design to best describe the configuration domain and support its ongoing evolution. A code demo will demonstrate an example of a system with a defined configuration data model represented via Protocol Buffers Model API, using multiple data providers consisting of data fetched from CouchDB, local files and remote RESTful services and being stored in multiple formats (JSON, XML, Protobuf binary).