Jerry Gulla

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!”

We all know that a career in software can be challenging. Keeping up with the latest trends, mapping out career choices and knowing how to stay marketable are critical skills. The speaker, using his own 20+ year career as an example, will talk about techniques he’s used to survive economic downturns, government contracts, technology shifts and even going from engineering to management and back - twice!

Strategies for succeeding in your current organization to positioning yourself for the next will be covered. Participation is encouraged! - We’ll save time for other to share their own experiences and ideas about how to thrive in any environment.

Cloud Foundry (www.coundfoundry.org) is an open “platform as a service” (PaaS). Introduced by VMWare, it's an open source project with the goal of providing agility, portability, scalibility to cloud applications. Cloud Foundry has many reasons to be on your technology radar, including the ability to deploy to both public and private clouds, choice of services and technology stacks (like Spring, Grails, Rails, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.) and even the ability to download a “micro cloud” that you can run right from your desktop.

We'll explore the basics of Could Foundry including setup, application deployment and local deployments. Examples of deploying Spring, Node.js, Rails, as services such as MogoDB, Redis and MySQL will be covered. See for yourself how easy it is to deploy and app and scale it with Cloud Foundry.

Bring the power of Ruby and Rails to your enterprise! Interested in harnessing the power of Ruby on Rails but not sure how to incorporate it into your existing Java/J2EE/Spring word? In this session, we’ll talk about real-world experiences, lessons learned and best practices for developing a new Ruby on Rails using JRuby.

You’ll learn about how to set up a Rails application using JRuby and deploy it using the industry standard JBoss application server. We’ll use many of the familiar tools and technologies Java developers are used to, such as MySQL and Maven. Also covered will be using JNDI for database connectivity, integrating with custom and 3rd party Java libraries and the use of servlet filters. We'll even dive in to how you can use Liquibase instead of ActiveRecord for database migrations.

Drawing on a real-world Rails/JRuby/JBoss deployment for a major SaaS company, we’ll discuss practical strategies for fitting your new application into existing operational procedures and talk about ways to overcome organizational challenges regarding adoption.

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.

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.

Has this ever happened to you? You hear about some problem on your production system, and have to troll though multiple logs on multiple machines to figure out what's going on? Well, no more. With Greylog2, you can “Manage your logs in the dark and have lasers going and make it look like you're from space.” Greylog2 is a powerful, open source solution that will help you avoid that painful search for events in your logs.

Logs. We don't think about them (much), unless there is a problem. But there is a lot of power locked up in those files. Imagine if you had a way to harness that power and use it for alerting, analytics, monitoring and searching. Wouldn't that be useful? Greylog2 aims to give you that ability by collecting and indexing your logs in order to give you a power platform to mine that data. Oh, and it has a cool web interface and to make it easy.

In this session, we'll learn about Greylog2, how to set up and some example uses. We'll also cover alternatives, both open source and commercial.

Vagrant is “virtualized development made easy.” If you’re looking to lower development setup time, minimize manual configuration and setup and eliminate the “it works on my machine” excuse, Vagrant is for you.

Vagrant leverages Oracle’s VirtualBox to create virtual machines that are configured via Puppet or Chef. You can use it to create reproducible and stable environments to deploy and test your application without hassle. Don’t hack up your development workstation to try and approximate your deployment config - use Vagrant to mimic the real thing.