InfoQ Homepage QCon London 2008 Content on InfoQ
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Presentation: Under The Hood
David Chelimsky takes a look at the Ruby Gems system - and a few very useful Gems: hpricot, builder, mocha, hoe, bones, and more.
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Presentation: Beyond Agile - Cultural Patterns
Willem van den Ende and Marc Evers introduce different cultural patterns you can find in software organizations, based on Gerald M. Weinberg's work, and tell how to recognize them, what behavior to expect, and how you can handle unexpected events and change. They show how different agile processes like Scrum, XP, and Lean fit in, while explaining some common agile failure modes.
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Presentation: Building a Large Scale SaaS Application
Dan Hanley, of Magus, discusses design principles, architectures and infrastructure of the SaaS frameworks used by Magus to rapidly develop and deploy large-scale, web-based, applications for clients. Along the way he discusses the components of their technology stack and the evolution of their methodology.
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Presentation: Meeting the Challenge of Simplicity
This session addresses the abstract notion of simplicity, looks at why it is critical in modern UI design and answers questions: Why does simplicity matter? Is there a meaningful definition of simplicity? Why do design processes and good intentions undermine simplicity? What processes and techniques can software developers use to achieve simplicity?
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Presentation: Born to Cycle
Agile development is not about doing a set of practices, it's about a way of "being," it's about learning. How is this learning accomplished? By taking brief pauses after small experiments, even large problems can be solved. In a recent Harvard Business Review interview of Toyota's president, he observed, "...when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution."
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Presentation: JQuery - a Javascript DOM Library
Announcing a presentation on JQuery: a JavaScript library that provides cross-browser compatibility, Ajax and DOM services, rapid construction of interactive prototypes, and the addition of dynamic behavior to existing Web applications. The presentation introduces Jquery, demos it use, and discusses particular features that differentiate it from similar library products
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Presentation: The Market Risk System
In this presentation recorded at QCon London 2008, David Harper and Dominique Delarue present the Market Risk System used by BNP to retrieve, store and analyze risk data for all trading activities of their bank.
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Presentation: Agile Mashups
It is rare to come across a team that are following an agile software method such as Scrum or XP by the book. Most teams create their own "mashup" of agile practices to suit their unique situation. This talk highlights what's on offer in the different agile methods, where different agile practices add value and how to go about blending them into your current approach.
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Presentation: Financial Transaction Exchange at BetFair.com
Betfair is the world's largest betting exchange with a transaction volume the equivalent of over half the combined equity trading volume of every major stock exchange in the world. In response to an increase in transaction volume coupled with a decrease in value per transaction, Betfair launched a number of initiatives to dramatically increase transaction processing capacity and reduce cost.
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Presentation: A Tale of 2 Systems
In this video recorded during QCon London 2008, Pete Goodliffe presents two Linux-based audio products with a complete different outcome, software design making the difference.
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Presentation: Google Data API (GData)
Frank Mantek discusses the Google Data API (GData) including decisions to use REST rather than SOAP technology, how the API is used, numerous examples of how GData has been used by clients, and future plans for evolving the API. A discussion of how GData facilitates Cloud Computing concludes the presentation.
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Transparency: A Great Leap Forward or Exposed Artery?
Agile propagandists make great claims about the advantages of being transparent about the state of their projects. They claim that this how mature relationships work and that "Honesty is the best policy". But is this true? Many of us work in dysfunctional organizations where honesty is the best way to get cheated. Surely Transparency is just not pragmatic?
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Presentation: Making Roles Explicit
In this presentation recorded during QCon London 2008, Udi Dahan, The Software Simplist as he calls himself, explains why sometimes it is not enough to apply good OOP and patterns lessons. He introduces a new principle: make roles explicit.
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Presentation: Interactive Websites with Comet and DWR
In this session filmed during QCon London 2008, Joe Walker presents Comet, a long polling AJAX method used for updating the browser’s page, and DWR, a Java library for writing web sites using AJAX.
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Presentation: Steve Vinoski on REST, Reuse and Serendipity
Planning reusability is hard, designing for unforeseen reuse might be even harder. In this QCon London 2008 talk, Steve Vinoski presents some of the barriers to reuse found in typical distributed systems development approaches, and discusses how REST not only helps overcome some of these barriers, but also leads to potentially significantly increased chances for achieving serendipitous reuse.