Trends and Transients

Over­view

Each year there are more new tech­no­lo­gies to keep track of, more ways to organ­ise your life and your company’s inform­a­tion, more ways to com­mu­nic­ate. This ses­sion will intro­duce you to new tech­no­lo­gies, dis­cuss older, under-appreciated tech­no­lo­gies, and enter­tain you at the same time. Our expert speak­ers will debate cur­rent issues and tech­no­lo­gies, giv­ing you the bene­fit of their wide exper­i­ence and dif­fer­ing points of view, so you can decide for your­self which tech­no­lo­gies will meet your needs and which are a waste of your time.

Classes for 2010

Choose your lan­guage: XML val­id­a­tion done four ways

Taught by Dr. Henry Thompson

In the early days of XML, there was one way to val­id­ate your XML, and that was with a DTD. Now there are four major ways to impose some sort of val­id­a­tion cri­teria on your XML: DTDs, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, and Schemat­ron. Which language(s) you choose will depend on whether you have doc­u­ments or data­bases, use web ser­vices, and on the tools and expert­ise you have avail­able. This class will help you decide which schema lan­guage to use when — but since it’s a con­tro­ver­sial topic, expect lots of dis­cus­sion with our experts!

JSON for XML heads

Taught by Robin Ber­jon.

Over the past dec­ade, XML tech­no­lo­gies have had a hard time mak­ing their way into the com­mon tool­box of the aver­age Web developer, while sim­ul­tan­eously JSON has become ubi­quit­ous. In this talk we will look at what JSON is, what makes it so suc­cess­ful, how the XML com­munity can learn from JSON, when to pick XML over JSON and vice-versa, and how to use them both together.

Lunch break

 

Social Soft­ware for <Robots/>

Taught by Blaine Cook.

The web, once a col­lec­tion of pages con­nec­ted by links, is today an act­ive rep­res­ent­a­tion of our lives. Social inter­ac­tions, daily struggles and cel­eb­ra­tions, and the fruits of our labours are all shared online. The catch is that whilst exper­i­ment­ing with these tech­no­lo­gies, we’ve lost some of the most import­ant prop­er­ties of the web along the way. Cent­ral­isa­tion of atten­tion on the web means that exper­i­ments with new forms on the inter­net are harder than ever before.

In this class, we will explore the emer­ging web of mes­sages. Start­ing from how social com­mu­nic­a­tion works on the web today, we’ll dive into sev­eral emer­ging stand­ards that enable rich exchanges of con­tent (and emo­tion) to occur without ever rely­ing on any one company’s Min­istry of Cent­ral Plan­ning. We’ll also dis­cuss secur­ity and pri­vacy in the con­text of this social fron­tier, and how the approaches applied here can be exten­ded to other con­texts cross the web.

Poly­glot Per­sist­ence (NoSQL, SQL, tools, and uses)

Taught by Matt Pat­ter­son

The new wave of non-relational data stores, often lumped together under the NoSQL label, are a dis­par­ate bunch. They often com­bine reviv­als of pre-relational approaches to data stores with new tech­niques for per­form­ance, resi­li­ence and scalab­il­ity, but their approaches to the kinds of data they work with, how they store it, and why they work that way var­ies wildly.

In this ses­sion Matt Pat­ter­son will intro­duce the major fam­il­ies of stores, what they do and why you might want to use one. You’ll be intro­duced to major open-source imple­ment­a­tions from each fam­ily, and see how they’re being used in the wild.

He’ll also look at the wider areas of poly­glot per­sist­ence, rela­tional versus non-relational, and using rela­tional and non-relational tech­no­lo­gies together.