Craig Walls

Developing Talking Applications with Alexa and Google Assistant

9:00 AM MDT

In this hands-on workshop, you'll learn to create voice-first applications for both Amazon's Alexa and Google's Assistant platforms. In addition, we'll also cover creating visual UIs to accompany the voice-first applications (for devices such as Echo Show).

No prior experience with voice applications is required and you do not even need to own a home assistant device to get started. Elementary experience with NodeJS is required. You'll also need developer accounts for both AWS and Google.

The way we communicate with our applications is an ever-evolving experience. Punch cards gave way to keyboards. Typing on keyboards was then supplemented by pointing and clicking with a mouse. And touch screens on our phones, tablets, and computers are now a common means of communicating with applications.

These all lack one thing, however: They aren’t natural.

As humans, we often communicate with each other through speech. If you were to walk up to another human and start tapping them, you’d likely be tapped (or punched) in response. But when we talk to our applications, we communicate on the machine’s terms, with keyboards, mice, and touch screens. Even though we may use these same devices to communicate with other humans, it’s really the machine we are communicating with—​and those machines relay what we type, click, and tap to another human using a similar device.

Voice user-interfaces (Voice UIs) enable us to communicate with our application in a human way. They give our applications the means to communicate to us on our terms, using voice. With a voice UI, we can converse with our applications in much the same way we might talk with our friends.

Voice UIs are truly the next logical step in the evolution of human-computer interaction. And this evolutionary step is long overdue. For as long as most of us can remember, science fiction has promised us the ability to talk to our computers. The robot from Lost in Space, the Enterprise computer on Star Trek, Iron Man’s Jarvis, and HAL 9000 (okay, maybe a bad example) are just a few well-recognized examples of science fiction promising a future where humans and computers would talk to each other.

Our computers are far more powerful today than the writers of science fiction would have imagined. And the tablet that Captain Picard used in his ready room on Star Trek: The Next Generation is now available with the iPad and other tablet devices. But only recently have voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant given us the talking computer promised to us by science-fiction.

Essential Spring Boot

8:30 AM MDT

In this example-driven presentation, you'll learn how to leverage Spring Boot to accelerate application development, enabling you to focus coding on logic that drives application requirements with little concern for code that satisfies Spring's needs.

For over a decade, Spring has sought to make enterprise Java development easier. It began by offering a lighter alternative to EJBs, but continued to to address things such as security, working with various sorts of databases, cloud-native applications, and reactive programming. And, along the way, Spring even took steps to make itself easier to use, offering Java-based and automatic component configuration. Even so, there's still a lot of near-boilerplate code required to develop Spring applications.

Enter Spring Boot. Spring Boot's primary purpose is to make Spring easier to work with. It achieves this in three ways:

• Automatic configuration : Considering what's on the runtime classpath as well as other factors, Spring Boot can automatically configure components in a Spring application context.
• Simplified dependency management : Taking advantage of transitive dependency resolution at build-time, Spring Boot offers several “starter” dependencies, focused on specific characteristics of an application, that transitively bring in libraries to enable development of those characteristics.
• Runtime insight : Spring Boot offers insight into the inner workings of a running application via REST endpoints and/or JMX MBeans to better understand what makes a running application tick.

All together, Spring Boot lets you focus on fulfilling your application's requirements without worrying about writing code that satisfies the needs of a framework.

Extreme Spring Boot

10:30 AM MDT

In this session, you'll learn how to take your Spring Boot skills to the next level, applying the latest features of Spring Boot. Topics may include Spring Boot DevTools, configuration properties and profiles, customizing the Actuator, and crafting your own starters and auto-configuration.

TBD

Spring Boot: Application management with Actuator

1:00 PM MDT

In this session, we'll explore the Spring Boot Actuator, a runtime component of Spring Boot that lets you peer inside a running application and, in some cases, even tweak configuration on the fly. We'll look at many of the Actuator's endpoints, learn how to customize and even create new endpoints, and see how to expose Actuator metrics to several popular instrumentation and monitoring systems.

Spring Boot makes developing applications with Spring easy work by offering auto-configuration for many common application scenarios. And with Spring Boot's starter dependencies, even an application's build file can be easily managed. But Spring Boot's powers don't end when the application is deployed. That's where the real fun begins.

Spring Data: Data at REST

2:45 PM MDT

In this example-driven presentation, we'll look at Spring Data REST, an extension to Spring Data that exposes your data repositories as a RESTful API, complete with hypermedia links. We'll start with essential Spring Data REST, but then go beyond the basics to see how to customize the resulting API to be more than just CRUD operations over HTTP.

Spring Data is a brilliant extension to the Spring Framework that makes simple work of exposing a database–any kind of database–via repositories. But as is often the case, your application's data doesn't usually stay within the application. It is consumed by external applications or from a Javascript client in the web browser. That means, we'll need to build a RESTful API around those repositories.

Securing Spring: REST and OAuth2

4:30 PM MDT

In this session, we'll explore Spring Security and OAuth2, including building an OAuth2 authorization server, fronting an API with a resource server, and verifying an OAuth2 access token's claims to ensure that the client is allowed to access the resource they are asking for.

Securing REST APIs presents some unique challenges as compared to securing a typical web application. The client of any REST endpoint may not even be a user in the traditional sense, but is more likely to be another application or a browser-based Javascript client. How can you ensure that the clients of your REST API are allowed to access the resources they are asking for?

OAuth2 offers a means by which a client application can request authorization to access a resource and be given an access token that must be presenting when making HTTP requests. This involves creating an authorization server that issues tokens and defining a resource server which acts as a wall around an API that verifies the presented access token's claims before allowing the request to proceed.

Spring Security has historically supported OAuth2 as part of a separate project called Spring Security for OAuth. But gradually, Spring's OAuth2 support is moving into the main Spring Security project.

The Talking App: An introduction to developing Alexa skills

8:30 PM MDT

The way we communicate with our applications is an ever-evolving experience. Punch cards gave way to keyboards. Typing on keyboards was then supplemented by pointing and clicking with a mouse. And touch screens on our phones, tablets, and computers are now a common means of communicating with applications.

These all lack one thing, however: They aren’t natural.

As humans, we often communicate with each other through speech. If you were to walk up to another human and start tapping them, you’d likely be tapped (or punched) in response. But when we talk to our applications, we communicate on the machine’s terms, with keyboards, mice, and touch screens. Even though we may use these same devices to communicate with other humans, it’s really the machine we are communicating with—​and those machines relay what we type, click, and tap to another human using a similar device.

Voice user-interfaces (Voice UIs) enable us to communicate with our application in a human way. They give our applications the means to communicate to us on our terms, using voice. With a voice UI, we can converse with our applications in much the same way we might talk with our friends.

Voice UIs are truly the next logical step in the evolution of human-computer interaction. And this evolutionary step is long overdue. For as long as most of us can remember, science fiction has promised us the ability to talk to our computers. The robot from Lost in Space, the Enterprise computer on Star Trek, Iron Man’s Jarvis, and HAL 9000 (okay, maybe a bad example) are just a few well-recognized examples of science fiction promising a future where humans and computers would talk to each other.

Our computers are far more powerful today than the writers of science fiction would have imagined. And the tablet that Captain Picard used in his ready room on Star Trek: The Next Generation is now available with the iPad and other tablet devices. But only recently have voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant given us the talking computer promised to us by science-fiction.

In this example-driven session, we'll explore the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and see how to develop skills for Amazon's Alexa. You'll learn how to use the ASK CLI to jumpstart skill development and how to create conversational applications in NodeJS.