Jerry Gulla

Stretch your site's usefulness with Elastic Search

5:00 PM MDT

Have you ever wanted (or needed!) to add search to your web site or application but thought it was too hard hard because you wanted things like scalability, fault tolerance and real-time search? Elastic Search may be just the ticket for you. It's Open Source, fast, scalable and easy to set up. Oh, and it's “cool, bonsai cool.”

Search is hard. It's not just about finding the “needle in the haystack” - it's about making search reliable, scalable and fast. Elastic Search aims to solve all these problems and more. It's got the features you need for a modern application, like multi-tennancy, painless setup and auto-sharding. Oh, and it's easy to integrate regardless of the technology stack you're developing with - simply use JSON over HTTP. No need to plan out a complex schema beforehand, either. It's schema free and document oriented.

Despite it's simplicity of use and ease of setup, Elastic Search is no lightweight. It's built on rock solid foundations such as Apache Lucene and comes from the creator of Compass project.

In this session, we'll go over the basics of Elastic Search and dive right in to see it in action. You'll see how it sets set up and running in no time across multiple nodes and how easily it integrates with applications. We will explore what happens when a node drops out, as well as how to deploy it with technologies like Chef.

RSpec for API Testing

1:30 PM MDT

We all know the benefits of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), but it’s not without it’s pitfalls. If you’re providing an API, wether for internal or external use, testing it is essential. Even if you only consume other APIs, testing them to make sure they didn’t change or break can be critical. RSpec is Behavior Driven Development (BDD) testing framework. Although RSpec was born out of the Ruby community, it’s not limited to testing Ruby APIs! It turns out it’s a great way to test ALL your APIs, regardless of language.

This session will cover what RSpec is, how to install it and how to start writing tests. What good are tests if you don’t run them? Not much. We’ll also cover how to integrate your RSpec tests with Jenkins, so you can run it as part of your builds.

Build Your Digital Playground

3:15 PM MDT

You've seen really cool and interesting technologies at conferences like NFJS, UberConf and The Rich Web Experience, but how do you “take it to the next level?” Setting up testbeds to play with things can be hard, involving multiple steps that need to be repeated often. Plus, you may not want to install 3 different NoSQL database and a myriad of frameworks on your system for fear of messing up what you need for your “day job.”

You've seen really cool and interesting technologies at conferences like NFJS, UberConf and The Rich Web Experience, but how do you “take it to the next level?” Setting up testbeds to play with things can be hard, involving multiple steps that need to be repeated often. Plus, you may not want to install 3 different NoSQL database and a myriad of frameworks on your system for fear of messing up what you need for your “day job.”

That's where VirtualBox, Vagrant and Puppet come to the rescue. In this session, you'll learn how to set up the VirtuaBox and Vagrant so you can run virtual machines as a platform to play. There's more to it, though. We'll also learn how to use tools like Puppet to create definitions for these VMs that will install and set up whatever you're interested in - from NoSQL databases to Spring to the latest frameworks. Something get messed up? No problem! Re-create your test environment from scratch using the Puppet scripts we'll create. Best of all, these can be shared with your co-workers saving them time and ensuring they have the same setup. See how these tools and techniques can control and manage your personal technology “digital playground!”