From Java to Ruby and Back

A presentation demoing clients and services written in different languages (Java & Ruby), demonstrating technologies that enable distributed systems to span languages and provide an automated way of returning alternative data representations (like XML, JSON, Protobuf, etc.) for different clients, while using the same backing data.

The audience will be shown in detail how to design and build a 3-tiered system consisting of a data store, a mid-tier and a webapp, all using different languages for the implementation, a Google Protocol Buffers as a data format and a RESTful based means of communication between the systems.

The data store will be represented by a CouchDB storing JSON documents which would be consumed by a Java mid-tier processing application over HTTP using Protocol Buffers, as a data definition, sending the results to a Rails webapp, all without special handling and manual format transformation, relying purely on the Protocol Buffers ability to handle different format representations as well as variant structure on different ends.

About Alex Antonov

Alex has joined Orbitz in 2004 and is responsible for providing technical leadership and guidance in the development of foundational technologies, core libraries and APIs for the enterprise-wide use, as well as establishing and maintaining common design principles and standards used within the company and integration of new software development practices within the development community.

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.

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