2018 New England Software Symposium - Sept 28-30th in Framingham, MA

This talk will examine features of Kotlin at a greater depth than most tutorials. Higher order functions will be covered, as well as reduction operations like reduce and fold, and lambdas with receivers. Those topics progress toward building DSLs and builders in Kotlin. Terms like “apply”, “let”, “use”, “also”, and “with” will be covered along with their typical use cases. Finally, an introduction to Kotlin coroutines will be included.

Details of the type system, including the Any, Unit, and Nothing classes, will be covered. Examples will be provided on how to define extension functions, infix operators, and inlining functions for efficiency.

Java is a language in evolution. There are a handful of language changes in Java 9 and 10 plus several JDK changes in 9, 10, 11, and 12. Some of these changes are significant in that they allow us to do things more effectively than before. The difference can be anywhere from reducing code to avoiding errors that come from verbosity. In this presentation we will explore the language changes first. Then we will visit the additions to the JDK. Along the way we will also look at a few things that have been removed from Java as well.

You’ve probably heard of MicroProfile, but how do you go from buzz to production? In this code-heavy, interactive presentation, we’ll describe how to use OpenTracing (http://opentracing.io/) with Jaeger (https://www.jaegertracing.io/)  and annotations in MicroProfile and other Microservice architectures to reliably improve and deploy updated versions your applications to OpenShift and Kubernetes in the cloud.  Topics include best practices for performance analysis, maintaining delivery pipelines using the Linux command line, plus tips on the best free OpenTracing tools and SDKs available on GitHub.

NOTE: This meeting is NOT on our normal "second-Thursday" schedule.

The popularity of Amazon's Alexa and Google Home has been inspiring both developers and businesses to think about Voice computing. From a banking assistant on your phone to grocery shopping on your TV - it is truly exciting to see how Voice Interfaces could be used. The challenge, however, is that most Voice Apps are fairly limited in what they can do.

In this talk, Vineet shares experiences from prototyping and building over a dozen Voice Apps. He shows how practical decisions can make implementing great apps easy, reviews existing tools that have been built and talks about Violet (http://helloviolet.ai/) an Open-Source Voice App Framework designed to help developers create Voice Apps. Violet uses an approach inspired by Angular and React to simplify the complexity needed when manually building using other lower-level frameworks, while providing for more flexibility than the drag-and-drop non-technical tools on the market.