Ian Robinson

Graph databases are an esoteric but powerful member of the NoSQL family. For highly connected data, graph databases can be thousands of times faster than relational databases, making Neo4j popular for managing complex data across many domains, from finance to social, telecoms to geospatial.

This tutorial covers the core functionality from the Neo4j graph database, providing a mixture of theory and accompanying practical sessions to demonstrate the capabilities of graph data and the Neo4j database. Specifically, you'll learn about:

• NoSQL and Graph Database overview
• Neo4j Fundamentals and Architecture
• The Neo4j Core API
• Neo4j Traverser API and declarative querying
• Graph algorithms
• Alternative Language Bindings [optional, depending on time]
• The Neo4j REST API and using the database from non-JVM platforms
• Solutions architecture: using Neo4j in large systems

Each session (apart from the fundamentals and architecture) will be a mixture of a small amount of theory combined with a set of practical exercises designed to reinforce how to achieve sophisticated goals with Neo4j. The practical parts of the tutorial consist of Koan-style lessons where a specific aspect of the Neo4j stack is presented as a set of failing unit tests which participants will work to fix, gradually becoming more challenging until the attendees are capable of implementing sophisticated graph operations against Neo4j.

Attendees won't need any previous experience with Neo4j or NoSQL databases, but will require some fluency in Java, a little familiarity with a modern IDE, and a basic understanding of JUnit to help complete the lab tasks.

Many organisations today are frustrated by success: their rapid, ad hoc growth has resulted in a “tube map” systems estate that is costly to operate, and which inhibits business agility.

In this talk, I show how an organisation can take its first steps to resolve this impasse by teasing apart strategy and execution. I discuss how our models of what the business does and what it's trying to achieve influence the progress of large software initiatives, and describe a number of practices and activities that together create a useful representation of a firm's operating model - one that can be used to identify, prioritise and plan strategic IT investments, and guide the evolution of the systems estate in an incremental, sustainable fashion.

This talk is all about what happens before the first line of code is written, about how we can create the foundations for success. It draws on recent experience with clients from a range of industries, including communications and media, entertainment, financial services, and oil and gas. It is of interest to business and technology leaders alike.

REST is ready for the enterprise. Imagine an information platform that is open and available to systems throughout the enterprise estate. A platform that eschews integration in favour of composition, connected data over siloed databases. A networked data structure with the power to implement valuable business behaviours: a distributed, hypermedia-driven application platform.

In this session you'll learn how to design and implement RESTful services to support complex business processes. With a detailed example, I show how to model business processes as domain application protocols; implement them in terms of resource lifecycles; and advertise and execute them using HTTP idioms, media types and link relation values.

Do you know what your enterprise apps get up to in their time off? Fighting fantasy, pick-your-path, hypermedia-driven, RESTful Web application adventures – of course.

With techniques drawn from the forthcoming O'Reilly book REST in Practice, this session challenges the notion that REST is suitable only for simple CRUD-based data services, suggesting instead that the Web’s architecture provides everything we need to model and implement sophisticated business processes in Web-based applications.

In this speculative dungeon delve I show how hypermedia-driven Web applications implement rich workflows. In the course of the session we'll tackle the many-headed Hydra of HATEOAS, the “Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State” monster; level up through the Web services maturity heuristic; and meet the dwarves with grudges. On the way, we'll learn how to model business processes as domain application protocols, implement them in terms of resource lifecycles, and advertise them using HTTP idioms, media types and link relation values.

The Web is fast becoming a serious competitor to traditional enterprise architecture approaches. This full day workshop will provide an introduction to RESTful Web Service techniques, both from a theoretical and practical perspectives.

This full day workshop is broken down as follows:

• Introduction and Motivation
• The Web Architecture
• Simple Web Integration including POX and URI tunnelling
• CRUD Services using URI templates and HTTP
• Semantics using Microformats and RDF
• Hypermedia and the REST architectural style
• Scalability and how a text-based client-server polling protocol outperforms everything else!
• ATOM and ATOMPub for event-driven and pub/sub applications
• Security
• Conclusions and further thoughts

Participants should be comfortable with distributed computing concepts, but won't need any particular integration or middleware experience

The Web doesn't care for your finely-honed application architecture principles - for your orthodox tell-don't-ask, information hiding dictums, separated concerns, and guaranteed and reliable delivery strategies. It's an irresponsible place, where exposing your data, polling for results and making your errors the client's problem are considered acceptable behaviour. If it wasn't so successful, it'd be dismissed as an architectural clown.

But despite its disregard for polite architectural society, the Web consistently beats your enterprise application efforts - and all at massive scale. It's time to find out why.