Ted Neward is the CTO of iTrellis, a polyglot consultancy, and is an industry professional of twenty years’ experience. He speaks at conferences all over the world and writes regularly for a variety of publications across the Java, .NET, and other ecosystems. He currently resides in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two sons, dog, four cats, eight laptops, seven tablets, nine phones, and a rather large utility bill.
With the introduction of CouchDB to the world, the world suddenly seemed to be alive with a whole slew of “alternative” approaches to data persistence, collectively called “NoSQL” and offering a “slightly different” to “radically different” view of data storage and retrieval. It’s left a few developers scratching their heads, trying to figure out when to use a NoSQL database instead of a regular database, much less which NoSQL database to use. In this session, we’ll examine the NoSQL ecosystem, look at the major players, how the compare and contrast, and what sort of architectural implications they have for software systems in general.
The circle, as they say, is complete. JavaScript underwent a significant shift in thinking recently, from a “browser-only” language to a language that’s increasingly seen as a server-side execution system. In some cases, a JavaScript engine is embedded inside a larger server program, such as what we see with different NoSQL databases (MongoDB, CouchDB), but now, with the increasing popularity of NodeJS, as a server itself. In this presentation, we’re going to take a hard look at NodeJS, from installing it through using it write a variety of different server programs. No longer is JavaScript just a user-interface tool.
In the latter half of the 2000s, a new kind of programming language seemed poised to take the steam out of the dominance of object-oriented programming languages and their hold over “mainstream” development. But these new languages, collectively referred to as “functional” languages, were nothing new. In fact, they’ve been a part of the language landscape since the late 80s, and arguably even longer than that. What makes a functional language, and what makes a functional language interesting? Most importantly, why do we care now, thirty years after their introduction?
