4 days / 20 talks
Awesome and great speakers
David McKoene
By day — ok, sometimes by night too — he works to make an affordable and useful box office CRM at Arts Management Systems Ltd (ArtsMan), building Theatre Manager and its companion products. He has a driving passion to push Omnis Studio to increasing greatness in the distributed, web-based, multi-language world that is increasingly dominating the software landscape.
ArtsMan’s and his dedication to open source has led to the creation of several prominent Studio externals provided by ArtsMan (https://github.com/artsman) and a few of his own (https://github.com/dmckeone). His past talks have focused on evidence-based optimization, test driven development, web technologies, and externals development.
Writing a Desktop Application in a World of Web and Cloud Apps
First it was the mobile phone, then it was the cloud, next it could be… almost anything. Recent technologies are shifting the ground on top of which we build our applications and we need to able to respond more quickly so that we can continue the long tradition of users that love our Omnis apps. To do so requires more than just adding a new interface or changing some features, it requires a shift in the way we approach software development and the way in which we think about our applications and our users. But don’t be alarmed! A small shift in perspective, combined with Studio 8 features and open source technologies, opens a whole new world of rapid development that can help you respond to users more quickly and more accurately.
This talk will focus on the life cycle of software development and ways to monitor, test, track and update applications, as well as revision management strategies for your source. It will also contain a (slightly opinionated) discussion about how to structure an application in a way that allows you to deploy with more flexibility, while also improving testability.
ArtsMen and the API
In the summer of 2012 ArtsMan embarked upon a journey. The journey was to to create a new kind of application, one that took advantage of emerging web technologies while also taking users out of the office and releasing them into the wild open internet. That journey centered around one critical piece: the REST API. An API let’s an application communicate with the outside world in a standard way that many other applications can understand. A REST API, commonly combined with JSON, is a loosely structured standard that has become a standard expectation for any modern web app. Of course our journey started with research into Roy Fielding’s originating REST thesis, but from there it traveled down a long and winding road. How do apps (and specifically Javascript apps) interact with the REST API? How should they? What does REST prescribe and how is that different from a SQL database? How do developers discover what to do with the API? How do you keep performance high? How do you prevent a nefarious (or ignorant) user from crushing your servers? How do you keep your data size down on the wire? How do you expose your business logic? How do you manage changes without breaking applications? How do you deal with security? How do applications know when data from your application has changed? Why should you care about this if you only write desktop apps?
This talk will walk you through that journey with us so that you too can discover the magic behind Artsman’s real-time dashboard (See Jon Harris’ talk for the sexy, visual part)
(WARNING: Also contains a spattering of some really cool API-specific PostgreSQL tricks.)
Working with WebSockets
TBA
