Portal 2.0: Bringing Social, Web 2.0 and SOA together for the Enterprise
Brian Chan, Chief Software ArchitectThe first generation of portals from 2000-2005 have become the unloved children of enterprise software. Not quite infrastructure and yet without the immediate ROI of applications, portals garnered a bad reputation for being investment-heavy with little return. Meanwhile, in the last 2-3 years, all manner of new-fangled technologies with many portal-like characteristics have become the new darlings of the industry, including mashup servers, collaboration platforms, lightweight social software and widget frameworks.
Enter the second generation of portal servers, which have grown up. Despite the industry's misconceptions, portal technology is still often the most natural fit for enterprises that need web-based applications targeting a variety of audiences. Portals have naturally evolved to embrace new developments in social collaborative software for the enterprise and are once again strong contenders for delivering results and immediate usability. What's more, portals continue to enjoy their traditional advantages in enterprise integration, user management, presentation layer aggregation, and service oriented architecture, which are shortcomings of the newer lightweight technologies.
This presentation will discuss how the now conventional social, web 2.0, and collaborative paradigms can be brought into the enterprise most effectively. We will discuss how social collaborative paradigms can go deeper than surface-level interaction to become new revenue drivers and cost-cutters for enterprises if they don't neglect the back-end integration at which portal technology excels.
Java: Moving from a single language platform to a polyglot environment
Sebastian Meyen, S&S MediaAfter many years of a true language mono culture the Java platform is now turning into a multi language platform. Groovy, Ruby, Scala and many more languages are coming into the arena, making the platform more flexible and expressive. Furthermore, Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) help developers to solve specific problems more elegantly and efficiently. So, is this a new language jungle or is it possible to identify specific design patterns to make sure that you always find the right language for the given problem? Sebastian Meyen, program chair of the JAX India 2009 Conference, together with selected experts will try to find answers to these bulging issues.
Donīt Know Jack About Object-Relational Mapping?
Craig Russell, Architect at Sun MicrosystemsYou don’t know Jack about Object Relational Mapping. So why are you considering using it? Keeping up with the Joneses? There’s a great community or two out there, and who doesn’t need another community? You already know that modern applications are built using two very different technologies: Object-oriented programming for business logic, and relational databases for data storage. Object-oriented programming is a key technology for implementing complex systems, providing benefits of reusability, robustness, and maintainability. Relational databases provide data independence as repositories for persistent data. Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) is a bridge between the two that allows applications to access relational data in an object-oriented way.
But ORM has a learning curve, just like any technology that tries to make complex programming issues simple. And if it takes longer to master the technology than it would have taken to build your own solution, is your CV the only thing getting better? With the answers to five easy questions, you can determine whether ORM is right for you, with a 93.5pct chance of success. Guaranteed.