Designed by IT professionals to help their peers deliver on the promise of the agile enterprise.

Session descriptions

Tuesday, February 8

General Session: Key Issues in Software Architecture
Steven P. Davis, Walt Disney Studios
10:30 a.m.
Hear the role of software architect defined and learn how it fits into the overall IT puzzle. Find out just how important software architects have become in IT organizations and learn about the skill sets that will be needed to be effective in this position.

.NET/J2EE Interoperability: Harmonizing Platforms, Code, and Development Teams
Yaacov Cohen, Mainsoft with Marius Roets, Woolworths, S.A.
11:45 a.m.
According to Gartner, .NET/J2EE interoperability is a growing concern, with as many as 95 percent of medium- and large-scale enterprises supporting both platforms by 2008. Take an in-depth look at how you can harmonize code and developer skills by enabling .NET and Java teams to co-develop J2EE Web applications and Web services. You will also learn to simplify a mixed server environment by deploying ASP.NET applications directly on J2EE servers. Woolworths, S.A., a Mainsoft customer, will address the obstacles and benefits of this cross-platform development strategy.

Application Architecture
Billy Hollis, DotNetMasters, and Keith Pleas, Guided Design
11:45 a.m.
Discover how to use an integrated model for building service-based applications using multiple tiers. You'll learn about refactoring existing assets for use in loosely-coupled distributed systems and how to establish control and communications between the layers.

Is SOA Just N-Tier in Other Clothing?
Rocky Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
2 p.m.
Service-oriented architecture is the current fad in our industry, but can it live up to the hype? Services can be viewed as procedures that are called across the network, so is SOA just remote procedure calls (RPC) repackaged with XML? Services can also be viewed as a message-based technology, so is SOA just MQ Series or MSMQ brought forward into the Internet world? Or is SOA something that will have a bigger, more sweeping impact on our industry over a period of years or decades? Listen in as we explore these and other questions about the future of service orientation.

Data Layer Architecture
Billy Hollis, DotNetMasters, and Keith Pleas, Guided Design
2 p.m.
Find out how to design and build a data access layer. We'll explore how to design data containers (datasets versus business objects) and where to actually put code (into the database itself versus traditional coding techniques).

Patterns for Service-Oriented Architecture
Ron Jacobs, Microsoft
3:15 p.m.
Patterns are well known solutions for common problems. We’ll cover several patterns that provide solutions to the problems that developers will face when building systems using the principles service-oriented architecture. We will begin by examining the architectural context as well as the details of the solutions based on the patterns and consider how you can apply these well known solutions to your applications.

Middle-Tier Architecture
Billy Hollis, DotNetMasters, and Keith Pleas, Guided Design
3:15 p.m.
We'll examine design concepts, strategies, and technologies for the middle (business logic) tier, including how to configure, communicate, cache, handle errors, and implement successful security models.

Global Integration Patterns
Gregor Hohpe, ThoughtWorks, Inc.
4:30 p.m.
Integration is never an easy undertaking. The inherently large scale, heterogeneous environments, lack of control, and evolving standards add to the challenge. This talk presents a pattern language that can help you structure your thinking around integration, services, and asynchronous messaging. We will use the patters to describe design options and trade-offs in global integration scenarios.

Smart-Client Architecture
Billy Hollis, DotNetMasters, and Keith Pleas, Guided Design
4:30 p.m.
Find out how to design the layers within the client. Learn how to control how clients get, use, validate, and send back data. We'll also cover designing for offline operations, componentizing functionality, and how to take advantage of the stateful nature of smart clients..

Web Services and SOAs: A Critical Look
Alexander Krapf, CodeMesh
5:45 p.m.
Distributed programming models have been in use for several decades now: RPC, DCOM, CORBA, SOAP, and now Web Services. What exactly is it that makes Web Services a cure-all for our architectural itches? Can it really live up to the hype? What's so new about Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs); didn't we have that already with CORBA?Listen in as we take a critical look at the hype that surrounds Web Services, and show you where Web Services might be appropriate and where they're definitely not. In addition, we’ll show you what other technologies you should take seriously if you're interested in SOAs.

Deployment and Operations
Billy Hollis, DotNetMasters, and Keith Pleas, Guided Design
5:45 p.m.
Discover how to design for multi-tiered instrastructure, including where to “draw the lines," securely deploy the solutions pieces, and then monitor and control it all.

Wednesday, February 9

Top 10 ESB Myths
Gordon Van Huizen, Sonic Software
10:30 a.m.
As the enterprise service bus (ESB) has crept into the corporate IT lexicon, with have come a number of misconceptions and myths about what the technology is and isn't, and how it relates to service-oriented architecture (SOA), Web services, application servers and enterprise application integration (EAI) technology in general. We'll look at the top 10 myths, misconceptions, and questions related to the enterprise service bus (ESB) and provide clear guidance for enterprise architects considering the technology. Questions answered include: Is ESB a pattern or product? Do ESB compete with application servers? Do I need an ESB if I'm using Web services? How is an ESB different from traditional EAI?

Best Practices for Faster Application Development
Peter Varhol, Progress Software
10:30 a.m.
Learn about several possible architectural and design solutions for building apps in a timely manner. These solutions take several forms — process (agile development), design (models and patterns), and architecture (service orientation). We'll present both concepts for building custom applications more quickly, as well as illustrating specific examples of those concepts.

Data Caching In Service-Oriented Architectures: Best Practices
Chris Keene, ObjectStore
11:45 a.m.
Service-oriented architectures are increasingly popular, but there are still relatively few case studies that define data caching requirements and best practices for building large-scale service-oriented systems. We’ll discuss best practices for building SOA applications based on real-world examples from the financial services and transportation industries that are currently supporting tens of thousands of users and processing thousands of transactions per second.

Object-Oriented Concepts in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Rocky Lhotka, Magenic Technologies
11:45 a.m.
Is there a future for object-oriented design and programming in a world dominated by service-oriented thinking? Does OO have any place in SOA, and if so where? Service-orientation is all about passing data, not objects, between services. Yet there is still room for object thinking, and many lessons learned in the OO space apply equally to service-oriented environments. In this session you will learn how and where OO concepts apply, and things to watch for when architecting for SOA.

Reuse Best Practices in Service-Oriented Architectures
Brent Carlson, LogicLibrary
3:15 p.m.
Reuse is one of the most critical success factors of SOA. Listen to best practices for identifying, tracking, and managing assets within an SOA — from design to deployment — all while ensuring that deployed assets meet an organization’s business and technical architectural standards.  Topics include: the Web Service production/distribution/consumption lifecycle; p ragmatic Web Service interface modeling and design; Web service versioning and managing produced Web services as “products;” and more.

Web Services and the Enterprise Security Threat
Madhavan Vasudevan, Senior Director, DataPower
3:15 p.m.
Connectivity to information, fueled by XML Web Services and dictated by business partners, has exposed back-end enterprise resources in a whole new way. IT architects need to learn from mistakes made in past when internal portal projects provided companywide access to information that was once only available to a select few. The ability of XML Web Services to connect directly to information is both a blessing and a curse. It enables the sharing of specific information for a specific purpose, but in doing so, it also opens an express lane to the heart of an organization by unknowingly bypassing traditional security measures. We’ll discuss the steps that early adopters of Web Services technology have employed to protect their enterprise resources.

Building Applications for Interchangeable User Interfaces
Peter Varhol, Progress Software
4:30 p.m.
What are the architecture considerations surrounding the development of similar applications with different user interface layers? A service-oriented architecture is an obvious answer, but other alternatives may make sense as well. These include Web front ends, mixed-platform code using RPC or other tightly coupled communications, or proprietary means of communication. Learn how such a system might be architected, and why it is useful in real-life business situations.