There is so much text in our lives, we are practically drowning in it. Fortunately, there are innovative tools and techniques for managing unstructured information that can throw the smart developer a much-needed lifeline. In this talk, based on the outline of the book Taming Text,  you will receive an introduction to a variety of Java-based open source tools that aide in the development of search and NLP applications. 

In this presentation, you will be introduced to useful techniques like full-text search, proper name recognition, clustering, tagging, information extraction, and summarization. We wll explore real use cases as you systematically absorb the foundations upon which they are built. Discussed in a clear and concise style, avoiding jargon, we will explain the subject in terms understandable without a background in statistics or natural language processing. Examples are in Java, but the concepts can be applied in any language.

Apache Hadoop has become the defacto platform for big data processing. It composes mainly of two platforms (1) Hadoop Distirbuted File System - a distributed file system running on a cluster of commodity machines and (2) MapReduce - a programming model to perform large scale processing of data residing on HDFS. In this talk, I'll introduce Hadoop and its main components, what is in Hadoop that is revolutionizing data processing. I'll quickly explain how users write applications on top of Hadoop. I'll round it up with introductions to various Hadoop eco-system projects like Pig, Hive, HBase, etc.

Secondly, Apache Hadoop MapReduce has undergone a revolution to emerge as Apache Hadoop YARN, a generic compute platform. This part of the talk will cover the details of Apache Hadoop YARN - architecture, applications and its real life usage. I'll conclude with how YARN is changing Hadoop to be a general purpose processing platform by enabling users to run batch, stream-processing, graph workloads, and more - all on same cluster resources.

Class loaders are at the core of the Java language. Java EE containers, OSGi, NetBeans modules, Tapestry 5, Grails and many others use class loaders heavily. Yet when something goes wrong, would you know how to solve it? In this session we will take a tour of the Java class loading mechanism, both from JVM and developer point of view. We will look at typical problems that you get with class loading and how to solve them. ClassNoDefError, IncompatibleClassChangeError, LinkageError and many others are symptoms of specific things going wrong that you can usually find and fix. For each problem we'll go through a hands on demo with a corresponding solution. Why is this important? Understanding the core of the JVM is critical to any Java developer so they understand how their java applications run and how that can differ in web application examples. This session will also help developers in the debugging of classpath issues and exceptions relating to classloader issues.

Have you ever wondered if the way you were conducting your jobs search was in line with what experts would consider to be “Best Practices”? Have you committed a major Faux Par? There are lots of opinions about things you absolutely should do while conducting a job search but we would like to share the top 10 Don’ts. Three experts from WinterWyman have been asked to talk about the major No-No’s when searching for a change in your career. Their sage advice will run the gamut from the fairly obvious to things you probably would not have thought about. Following the top 10 Don’ts we will have a lively discussion about other job search practices and answer any questions you may have about to go about an effective job search.

Most books, resources, and presentations tend to focus on a single technology or, at best, a single layer of web application development. In other words, most resources take a front-end (UI development) or back-end (server-side development) perspective. This is rightly so, since the entire spectrum of web application development is as wide and as deep as the Amazon river. It is, therefore, nearly impossible to maintain a key eye on all of the important technologies involved in the end-to-end delivery of a web application. It just so happens that I focus on just such a breadth-first perspective and would like to share a bit of what I have learned by taking a broad view of web application development. 

Contents

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• HTML5
  • When to use Element, ID, Class
• CSS3
  • Multi-column layouts and more
• JavaScript
  • Hard like algebra
• jQuery
  • Easy like Sunday morning
• Java
  • Are you still using JSPs?
• Spring MVC
  • Leverage JSON

This session will provide a high level basic overview of the Android Application Framework, its Intent messaging facility, and how simple TextToSpeech can be implemented by using an Intent to find and make use of app resource already installed on the phone. It is a condensed version of a portion of the speaker's Introduction to Android Application Framework and APIs continuing education class for IEEE Boston Section. Code snippets from a demo app will be shown. We will touch on the life cycle of an Activity, which is one of the four core application components of the Android Application Framework, and see how widgets can be laid out and instantiated for an Activity's UI screen. We will see how an Intent object is used to activate certain operations, and how to take advantage of the intent mechanism to implement TextToSpeech. The demo app is taken from "Learning Android" by Marko Gargenta and published by O'Reilly.

This session will explore the big data scene as it relates to business intelligence. We will explore who’s using Big Data for BI, what applications are being created, and what benefits are being realized. We’ll go hands on with the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project, which now offers native support to Hadoop through Hive queries. We’ll also cover how BIRT can access other Big Data sources such as Cassandra and MongoDB so developers can display their data in a stylized tabular or graphical nature which is extremely customizable using the BIRT designer. These reports can include dynamic drill through, interactivity, and can be exported to various formats, such as PDF, HTML, XLS, and ODT. This session will cover in detail how to retrieve and visualize data from Big Data sources using BIRT.

Spring Batch provides the ability to build scalable, mission critical applications for the bulk processing of data. The cloud provides processing power in bulk for use in almost any way needed. This talk will demonstrate how to bridge the two to provide cloud based scalability in batch processing.

"This presentation introduces the audience to the power of Gradle through many real-world examples that are demonstrated. By the end of the presentation, you'll understand how Gradle helps to elegantly solve the challenges that we face in our daily builds. We'll go through such powerful concepts as: advantages of declarative over imperative build systems, convention over configuration without rigidity, the Gradle plugins, deep multi–project support, performance optimizations through partial builds and incrementalness, harvesting existing functionality through Ant and Maven integration, as well as migration strategies for migrating from these build tools. We will demonstrate many of the innovative goodies that come with Gradle out–of–the–box, like the Gradle Daemon, the Gradle Wrapper, easy administration of your build environment, building Android apps and libraries, Eclipse integration, and other new plugins."

Do you feel like your project is under control?  Feel like you are trying to go against the current?  The problem with successful software projects is that they grow and gain complexity with time. This often means wasting time trying to figure out how to add features, getting others up to speed, and making sure that the code is not brittle. This can also result in delays shipping updates and bug fixes.  And worst of all, you might be the one asked to migrate or modularize such a project.


Working with large codebases can be a nightmare. In this talk we discuss some of time the small steps that can be taken to help eliminate productivity waste and bring your code base under control.  We will discuss tips for thinking about when modularizing a project, and tips for gradually improving the architecture of a codebase. We will demonstrate some tools that we have used successfully in the past and discuss results from both talking to team members and analyzing code of multiple projects.