President and CTO Dion Hinchcliffe

Software architecture has become heavily influenced in recent years by the largest software system in the world: The Web. While the foundations of much of what we understand about software architecture haven't changed, the living laboratory of the Web has created a steady and impressive stream of innovations and ideas that are just now being fully appreciated. Questions such as how to design our systems, which methods are best to make them composable and extensible, how much of an architecture should be pliable and who should be able to influence it are all subjects for which the modern era of the Web has offered up compelling and often startling new approaches.

This session will take a comprehensive look at how the "Web as Platform", one of the foundational concepts of the Web 2.0 era, is changing the discipline and practice of software architecture in important and significant ways that architects and technical leads must know today. Not just an exercise in examination of current trends, attendees will take away useful and immediately applicable methods for improving and extending the discipline of software architecture with Web approaches that can put to work in the enterprise or anywhere else.

Description: WOA Bootcamp is an intensive hands-on exploration of next-generation approaches for rapidly building lightweight applications and services over the network using Web-Oriented Architecture, also know as WOA.  Topics covered include the complete WOA "stack" which encompasses RESTful architecture, AJAX, lightweight integration patterns, mashup techniques and approaches, open APIs, cloud computing, network identity, open industry-specific standards, security, and related topics.

Prerequisites: Although WOA Bootcamp is deeply technical course that includes code samples and encourages hands-on participation, software professionals from any field will be able to participate actively and understand the material.

Background: WOA describes a core set of new strategies and techniques using Web technologies including HTTP, XML, browser-technologies, as well as lightweight application development and integration approaches such as mashups.  WOA is emerging as a dynamic, highly scalable, and widely interoperable new Web architecture approach for Internet applications as well as client/server.  WOA also complements enterprise architecture disciplines such as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). WOA is based on simple, pragmatic approaches that are working successfully on a global scale today for thousands of organizations and has recently become a growing grassroots phenomenon.  For the last year, industry observers and practitioners alike have been exploring the options offered by WOA and comparing them to previous methods as more and more WOA success stories have become public. WOA is often claimed to be lighter, more flexible and composable, and ultimately more effective than traditional approaches for architects & practitioners who need to quickly and cost-effectively build distributed applications over the network using the latest best practices. With WOA becoming one of the leading new models for distributed application architecture, software architectures and designers will need solid literacy in the many new concepts in the WOA toolkit.

Attendees of this course will gain:

    * A solid understanding of technical Web fundamentals -- the HTTP application protocol, the URI naming standard, the XML markup language, and RESTful Web services

    * The fundamentals of Web-Oriented-Architecture, a pragmatic set of rules for designing RESTful Web services, open APIs, mashups, networked applications, and cloud computing services

    * An introduction to consumption-optimized design with the 9 classic SOA principles and new Web-oriented techniques

    * The ability to compare and contrast how WOA stacks up against SOA, RPC, and other distributed computing alternatives

    * How to directly apply RESTful designs for simpler, more flexible, and reusable services and applications

    * Best practice-based techniques for interacting with actual RESTful Web services, with examples from Amazon's Simple Storage Service and the Atom Publishing Protocol

    * Knowledge of the available WOA-friendly Web service clients for popular programming languages

    * How to implement WOA services in three popular languages/frameworks -- Ruby on Rails, Java, and Python

    * The practical issues: Security, identity, data portability, testing, versioning, coupling, and tool support for WOA

    * Strategies for how best to apply WOA in enterprise computing environments

    * Effective approaches for making WOA adoption successful in your project, product, or organization

Attendees will come away with:

    * A complete working knowledge of all the moving parts of Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA)

    * A coherent set of techniques to make first-time WOA practioners successful

    * Working samples of WOA clients that actually work in the real-world

    * A cogent understanding of the tools, environments, and languages that support WOA and their pros/cons

    * A clear set of ideas on how to start implementing WOA in the attendee's local software development environment

This course is designed for the following attendees:

    * Software architects

    * CTOs and enterprise architects

    * System engineers

    * Software developers

    * Web developers

    * Integration specialists

    * Technical IT staff

    * Industry vendors