Our first podcast from Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise is our Javascript frameworks panel. Led by Robert Hansen, author of GWT in Action and host of our prior Web Framework shootout in 2011, it includes developers who contribute to Meteor, Backbone, Ember and AngularJS, four Javascript frameworks that cover the gamut between all-in one platforms to comprehensive client-tier frameworks to strongly focused and less-comprehensive and more configurable ones.

Robert Hansen - moderator
Avital Oliver - Meteor Development group, core developer
Tim Branyan - Matchbox - Backbone contributor
Yehuda Katz - creator of Ember, Rails Ruby and other standards projects contributor
Brian Ford - AngularJS Core Team / Google / co-author AngularJS in Action
Lukas Ruebbelke - Senior Engineer WebFilings - co-author of AngularJS in Action

Sponsored by the Chariot Education Services Team.

Joel Confino is a long-time consultant at Chariot Solutions. He has spent the last four years working with a large enterprise, here named ABC Corporation, rolling out a new development platform and build process. Joel was one of two speakers at our event, which also included Sonatype's Jason Van Zyl. Joel's focus was building in competitive advantage by choosing to implement continuous integration tools such as Maven, Nexus, Jenkins, and Sonar. 

Philly Emerging Technologies Podcast 2011 - #3

How MongoDB Helps Visibiz Tackle Social CRM

Speaker - Mike Brocious - Lead Architect, Visibiz

From the ETE Session Abstract

So you’ve heard about MongoDB and it sounds really sweet (BTW, it is!). Now you’re thinking about using it in your application. We can’t tell you if it’s right for your application, but we can tell you how we’re using it at Visibiz and that might help you with your implementation.

This presentation provides a use case of MongoDB at Visibiz. It first discusses why we chose to use MongoDB as our application’s primary datastore (what were the relevant application requirements and perceived benefits). It then covers how we’re using MongoDB in the application, touching on schema design of the primary collection and listing several secondary uses for it in the architecture. We also touch on lessons learned, as well as pros and cons.

Philly Emerging Technologies Podcast 2011 - #2

Doing the Mundane a Million Times a Minute

Speaker - Mark Chadwick, Invite Media/Google

From the ETE Session Abstract

When dealing with high-volume distributed systems, even the most mundane tasks can be daunting challenges. This talk describes some of the steps, as well as missteps, made while building such a system. It will work through the discovery of such pain points, as well as describe their resolutions with specific technologies or patterns.

Over the course of three years, Invite Media built a high-volume system for serving online advertisements from the ground up. Some of the more interesting challenges revolved around operating routine services at scale, such as distributing requests, logging diagnostics, and keeping track of simple transactions.

This talk will dive into some of these problems, showing the evolution of simple systems at scale, with a strong bias towards cloud-hosted applications. It will include details about the discovery and resolution of bottlenecks we experienced, as well as specific technologies and pattens discovered in the process.

It may serve as a springboard for ideas when building distributed cloud-based systems, as well as hone a sense of when components may be reaching their tipping point.

Philly Emerging Technologies Podcast 2011 - #1

Polyglot Persistence for Java Developers

Speaker - Chris Richardson, VMware

From the ETE Session Abstract

Relational databases have long been considered the one true way to persist enterprise data. But today, NoSQL databases are emerging as a viable alternative for many applications. They can simplify the persistence of complex data models and offer significantly better scalability, and performance. But using NoSQL databases is very different than the ACID/SQL/JDBC/JPA world that we have become accustomed to. They have different and unfamiliar APIs and a very different and usually limited transaction model. In this presentation, we describe some popular NoSQL databases – Redis, SimpleDB, MongoDB, and Cassandra. You will learn about each database’s data model and Java API. We describe the benefits and drawbacks with using NoSQL databases. Finally, you will learn how the Spring Data project simplifies the development of Java applications that use NoSQL databases.

Download the Slides

Today's conference session is a talk from this week's Mobile Application Developer seminar series, held by Chariot Solutions, in Philadelphia. 

The talk, "State of the Art for Mobile Application Development", was given by Chariot's Don Coleman, who develops both enterprise and mobile applications in a variety of platforms and languages.  In this talk, he surveys the current landscape of APIs and platforms, and gives his perspective on where things are today, and where they may be moving to in the future.

Links

• Presentation Slides
• Javascript frameworks
  • jqTouch - http://jqtouch.com
  • Sencha Touch - http://sencha.com
  • SproutCore - http://sproutcore.com
  • IUI - http://code.google.com/p/iui
  • XUI - http://xuijs.com
  • Zepto - http://zeptojs.com
  • Phone Gap - http://phonegap.com
  • Rho Mobile - http://rhomobile.com
  • Titanium Appcelerator - http://appcelerator.com
  • Corona - http://www.anscamobile.com
  • Adobe Air 2.5 - http://adobe.com

We are pleased to release this recording of Linda Rising's talk on Deception and Estimation.  This is a one-hour talk, and is a good talk about how we deceive ourselves in a number of ways in life in general, and of course in the estimation process.

From the abstract:

"Cognitive scientists tell us that we are hardwired for deception. It seems we are overly optimistic, and, in fact, we wouldn’t have survived without this trait. With this built-in bias as a starting point, it’s almost impossible for us to estimate accurately.

That doesn’t mean all is lost. We must simply accept that our estimates are best guesses and continually re-evaluate as we go, which is, of course, the agile approach to managing change. Linda Rising has been part of many plan-driven development projects where sincere, honest people with integrity wanted to make the best estimates possible and used many “scientific” approaches to make it happen – all for naught. Re-estimation was regarded as an admission of failure to do the best up-front estimate and resulted in a lot of overhead and meetings to try to “get it right.” Offering examples from ordinary life – especially from the way people eat and drink – Linda demonstrates how hard it is for us to see our poor estimating skills and helps work with the self-deception that is hardwired in all of us."

Thanks to Linda Rising for speaking at ETE 2010 and letting us publish her talk.  

slides

Bonnie Aumann is an agile project manager and customer advocate for Algorithmics. Her ETE 2010 talk is entitled "Are your developers BS'ing you?" In this talk, she tries to cut through the potential blame game and IT culture issues by practicing rapid feedback and response, and Agile techniques.

Her abstract

"A question I’m often asked is how a non-technical manager like me can tell when their software team is pulling one over on them. This seems to be especially true of enterprise managers and points to structural problems with command and control development methodologies. The principlesof whole team interaction and the practices of rapid feedback and response in Agile seem to create an alternative culture in which things "just work."

Explicit tag warning

You'll hear the word "B.S." in long form several times in this talk, so anyone offended by this term should not tune in. However, it's done in context, and is very tasteful.

Resources

• Bonnie's presentation page: http://ow.ly/24myk
• The Tree Cartoon: http://ow.ly/24mzq
• Slides from the discussion : http://ow.ly/24mAl
• The Cocktail Party Effect: http://ow.ly/24mBp
• Servant Leadership: http://ow.ly/24mCe
• Bonnie Aumann on Twitter: twitter.com/bonniea

Our ETE 2010 Session today is "Influencing your way to Agile" by Audrey Troutt. Audrey Troutt is a Software Engineer at the Drexel Math Forum.  She can be reached on twitter at @auditty.

In this talk, Audrey describes ways to approach your team members, bosses, bosses bosses, and other types in a more productive, influential way.  She discusses common pitfalls and traps, and the talk is very informative as well as entertaining. At the end of the session she takes audience questions.

Her slides are available online.

ETE Session #6 is "Write Once, Run on Any Phone"

A session with Chariot's Aaron Mulder and Kevin Griffin.

They discuss three popular mobile frameworks that allow developers to write the software one time and deploy it to each phone platform supported by the framework.

Rhodes, Titanium and PhoneGap are featured.

Slides for the presentation can be found here.

Today's ETE 2010 Session is another panel discussion:

Social Media - why should I care? (session details).

Panelists:

• Skip Shuda - CEO, Team and a Dream
• Chip Rodgers - VP and COO, SAP
• Adam Coomes - President, Infegy
• Erik Harbison - Senior Director of Interactive Marketing, TrueAction
• Ken Rimple - Director of Education, Chariot Solutions

Disclosure: Chariot Solutions collaborates on social media efforts with Team and a Dream

Today's ETE 2010 session is a panel discussion I chaired on mobile application development.  Panelists were:

• Adum Blum - @AdamBlum - RhoMobile, a re-targetable mobile application development platform
• Joe Conway - Big Nerd Ranch (Apple mobile developer, trainer, mentor, co-author of iPhone Programming)
• Andrew Oswald - Chariot Solutions, developer of the ETE Android application representing Android development
• Kevin Griffin - Chariot Solutions, mobile developer, with interests in open source mobile application development tools, experience with Blackberry, iPhone development

Enjoy.

Ken

We held an open podcast on the evening of April 8th at the happy hour reception of the 2010 Philly Emerging Tech show.  I had invited James Ward and Michael Cote to sit with me, and see what developed.  Well, beyond the happy hour food and beer, which flowed freely, so did the conversation.  Adam Coombs from Infegy sat down with us, and later Ed Burns from Oracle joined the table.

We had a great time with a wide ranging conversation.  I hope you enjoy it.

Standard disclaimer for a live broadcast:  Of course, the opinions expressed are our own, influenced by food and beer, and not those of our employers...

Links

• All about Philly Cheesteaks (mmm, yummy!)  
• The banning of cross-compilers by Apple in the new iPhone SDK
• Reminisce about your first computer and check out THIS cool site  
• The Turbo button 
• We podcasted from the Sheraton Society Hill who set up a nice podcasting table, complete with electric and a steady stream of beverages,  in South Philly  - thanks for the hospitality! 

Guests

• Adam Coombs of Infegy http://www.infegy.com/ 
• Ed Burns of Oracle 
• James Ward of Adobe 
• Michael Cote of Redmonk

Thanks everyone!

Chariot TechCast ETE Podcast #2 - the Web Framework Shootout of 2010

Warning: NSFW

Our last web framework shootout at ETE was in 2008, and we felt it was high time for another meetup. Since then, Rails and Merb have merged, JSF 2.0 was released, Grails has become more mature, Spring has moved into annotation-driven configuration in a big way, and there are still a ton of choices for an architect to make when choosing a web framework.

This year the shootout is led by Robert Hanson, author of Manning's GWT In Action, who was a speaker on last year's podcast. This is a Not Safe For Work download, as it involves some cursing and stronger statements, but overall it's no worse than you'll hear when meeting up with a few of these guys at a bar.

Slides have been published by Robert on his website.  We will have them soon as well as a large number of slide decks at chariotsolutions.com/downloads/presentations.

Speakers in this shootout include, in no particular order:

• Chris Richardson of Cloud Foundry/SpringSource/VMware
• Dan Allen and Lincoln Baxter III of JBoss, a division of RedHat
• Alex Payne of Twitter
• David Black of Cyrus
• Scott Davis of Thirsty Head
• Yehuda Katz of Engine Yard
• Jeremey Grelle of SpringSource/VMware
• Ed Burns of Oracle

All told, we have representatives arguing for Rails, Grails, Seam, CDI, Spring, Spring MVC and JSF, but also discuss JavaScript "we are solving problems from 10 years ago," component abstraction -vs- scripting on the page, the eternal Java versus Ruby debate, and many more.

Music for the podcast was performed by Chariot's Andrew Oswald.

Chariot Solutions TechCast - ETE 2010 Conference Session #1 - Keynote Session from Michael Coté, analyst from RedMonk

I first ran into Michael Coté's work back in 2008 when we put together the Chariot Cloud Con East conference. Among the many grandstanding blogs about cloud computing at the time, RedMonk was a place we could go to read about emerging trends, such as Platform as a Service and Software as a Service.

Useful links:

• Conference Abstract (including slides link)
• Michael Coté's RedMonk page
• Follow @cote on twitter…

This podcast episode is a recording of Michael Tiemann's keynote presentation from the 2009 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference.  Michael is RedHat’s VP of Open Source Affairs, and has a  long history in working on open source projects.  He is the president of the “Open Source Initiative,” and has served as the CTO of RedHat, and founded the first open source software company, Cygnus.

Michael’s talk focuses on "Exonovation", or innovation from an open community, and how it can make a product even better than a closed, controlled, proprietary effort.  It is a very interesting talk, and for those who want to follow along with the slides, you can go to http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2009-ExonovationTieman.pdf

Books discussed during the talk:

1. The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization:  John Hagel III, John Seely Brown - This book questions the zero sum gain theory espoused by Harvard Business School.
2. Democracy in America: Alexis de Tocqueville (the link is a free transcript download) 
3. Unlocking the Sky: Glenn Hammond Curtiss and the Race to Invent the Airplane by Seth Shulman.  Referred to when discussing the Wright Brothers' assumption that instability was a key feature of flight.
4. As We May Think : Vannevar Bush, the Atlantic Monthly, 1945 - Vannevar imagined the Internet (or something eerily like it) in this paper.
5. Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcolm Gladwell

Web Links:

1. Michael Tiemann’s blog - http://opensource.org/blog/8
2. Truth Happens - http://truthhappens.redhat.com/
3. The Open Source Initiative - http://www.opensource.org

Show Sponsors:

1. SquareSpace.com - A hosted content management and blogging platform that makes publishing your web content easy.  Sign up using the promotional code 'techcast' for a 10% discount on your monthly service.

On today's show, we feature the Manning author's Q&A  forum.  Marjan Bace is the co-founder of Manning Publications, which publishes books on a wide variety of technical topics. 

Last year at ETE, Marjan assembled the web framework shootout (if interested...  part 1, part 2).  This year Chariot asked him to assemble an author’s forum, where he takes questions from the audience on writing books for publication.

The panelists are Dan Allen, author of Seam in Action, David Black, author of Ruby for Rails and the upcoming title, The Well-Grounded Rubyist, and John Resig, author of the upcoming Secrets of the Javascript Ninja.

This is a very interesting look at what it takes to write a book, what it demands of you, and what you end up learning in return.  Marjan, Dan, David and John did a great job.

Today’s show is a recording of the Philly Emerging Tech session by Jason Van Zyl, of Sonatype.  Jason is the creator of Maven, a java build tool that works using a set of conventions and plugins. 

This talk focuses on the current challenges in building OSGi based modular applications using Maven, and how the Tycho project enables easier integration between headless builds from tools such as Hudson, the Maven POM, and the Eclipse IDE.  You may download the presentation at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2009-MavenAndTheFutureofOSGi.pdf

Links:

1. Sonatype's blog page on all things tycho.
2. Sonatype's m2eclipse plugin

One of the highlights of the 2009 Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference was our afternoon keynote from Jascha Franklin Hodge, from Blue State Digital. 

Mr. Franklin Hodge cut his social media teeth working on the Howard Dean campaign.  Blue State Digital built and managed the Barack Obama campaign website, which provided news, email correspondence, coordination with official and unofficial leaders on events, YouTube and video/audio media, and more.

This keynote highlights the successes of properly using the internet and social media to run a successful campaign including contrasts with the McCain effort as well as discussion of lessons learned.

A copy of the presentation slides is being processed, and will be made available soon.  For now, you can view the slides from an earlier presentation at MIXX Canada, on Slideshare. 

Andy Hunt is co-founder (along with Dave Thomas) of the Pragmatic Programmers.  Their seminal book, The Pragmatic Programmer, gave every developer a nudge, and started their publishing company, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Andy's latest book (his seventh) is Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Refactoring your Wetware.  His keynote at 2009 Philly Emerging Tech covered topics from the book, and was a fantastic walk down memory lane (sorry, couldn't resist).  Seriously, folks, his talk was all about maximizing your ability to learn and retain knowledge.  Here are some great books he mentioned:

1. Andy Hunt:  Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
2. Mihaly Csikszent: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (P.S.) 
3. Dan Pink: Whole New Mind
4. Betty Edwards: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

You can find Andy's writing on the Pragmatic Bookshelf or on his blog, toolshed.com. For a mind map of his key topics, click here.

The second part of the podcast includes audio from the Destruction Zone.  Pictures were posted at our ETE Flickr Group.  The company, Wondergy, allowed us to tear apart old fax machines, printers, computers and cell phones, and worked with Chariot to line up green recyclers to haul it all away.  You'll hear a little audio, although distorted, of the bashing of a copier, as well as an interview with Wondergy's Ken Fink, on how the project came together.

Today's podcast is a redux of last Friday's "Fall Forecast, Computing Among the Clouds" panel discussion. Moderated by Ken Rimple (me), our guests were

• Kortina, a Google App / EC2 Developer
• Chris Richardson, author of Manning's POJOs in Action and developer of CloudTools, an EC2 deployment framework
• Chris Cera, CTO of Vuzit, an Amazon EC2 / S3-based product for managing various document formats online
• Toby DiPasquale - a long-time user of Amazon EC2 and S3

The panel discussed various aspects of cloud computing, including administration, scalability, security, tools and various strategies. It's a good listen, with lots of interesting debate and dialog.

Enjoy the show. Please email your comments to techcast-feedback@chariotsolutions.com. Show notes will be available within a few days.

Thanks,

Ken

Commerce 360 CEO Lucinda Holt discusses technology waves and how organizations use them to their advantage. She compares four competing movements in adoption a new or disruptive technology: Custom development, Tooling, Applications and Platforms. She gives many examples from her own past and offers thoughts on how to "ride the waves" that may be appropriate for your organization. The presentation, once loaded, can be accessed at our presentations page It is a shockwave file, which should open in your browser. Click on the blank screen to start the slides. If you cannot run the presentation, you should install the latest Macromedia Flash player.

Today we feature the second of a two part session from the 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference.  The session, entitled "Web Framework Shootout," was assembled and moderated by by Manning co-founder Marjan Bace and was one of the highlights of the conference.  Speakers included Yehuda Katz,  Chad Davis, Max Carlson, Robert Hansen, Bear Bibeault, Chris Richardson, Dan Allen, Emanuel Bernard, Peter Armstrong and Obie Fernandez.  Quite a group!  

I have lightly edited the quiet patches, and edited out one or two questions where people were speaking off mic and nobody responded.  If you hear dropouts, it's because of those reasons, no major content was left out.

This half does contain a few curse words and some heated debates.  There is a very interesting exchange between the Java and Ruby camps.

Today we feature the first of a two part session from the 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference.  The session, entitled "Web Framework Shootout," was assembled and moderated by by Manning co-founder Marjan Bace and was one of the highlights of the conference.  Speakers included Yehuda Katz,  Chad Davis, Max Carlson, Robert Hansen, Bear Bibeault, Chris Richardson, Dan Allen, Emanuel Bernard, Peter Armstrong and Obie Fernandez.  Quite a group! 

The show was broken into two parts due to the fact that it ran rather long (over an hour).  I have lightly edited the quiet patches, and edited out one or two questions where people were speaking off mic and nobody responded.  If you hear dropouts, it's because of those reasons, no major content was left out.

The second half promises to be even more entertaining than the first.  I'll publish that segment next week, as we need to beep out a few choice words as the conversation got quite heated.  Enjoy the podcast!

This presentation, by Rossen Stoyanchev from SpringSource, was delivered at the 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference.  Rossen discusses changes in the Spring Framework version 2.5, concerning Java and J2EE, AspectJ, OSGi, Annotation-driven configuration, Spring MVC, and new testing support with the TestContext framework.

You can find the presentation slides on our web site at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2008-RossenStoyanchev-spring-2.5.pdf.

Don't forget to visit the show notes page at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/podcasts/techcast/shownotes.

Today's show features Aaron Mulder and his Introduction to Rails talk.  It was recorded at Chariot's 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference.  You can find many of the presentations in the Downloads section of Chariot's web site, www.chariotsolutions.com.

Aaron's presentation is entitled Rails 101.  Click here for the PDF file and follow along.  iTunes users:  the URL is http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2008-rails-101.pdf

The ETE conference was held at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA.  Learn more about Drexel's iSchool at www.ischool.drexel.edu.