Presentation: Tweet"What is a Reactive Application Part I"

Track: Leading & Bleading Edge - Day 2 / Time: Friday 14:40 - 15:30 / Location: Frederik

Reactive is becoming the new cool kid on the block when it comes to developing mission critical applications. What is the big deal? The old hands that were involved in the likes of Erlang and Tandem will say this is nothing new. Indeed that is very true. However many seem to have lost their way with enterprise applications and descended into the tar pit of big frameworks such as JEE, or built Rails apps that fall apart when they grow up into successful applications. Yet some large scale web companies, telco providers, financial trading firms, and multi-player online games are delivering services that are always available by being resilient to failures, always responsive so that users are not left waiting, and reactive to load by elastic use of resources. How do they offer this level of service? Well that is what we want to discuss.

In this deep dive we will explore what are considered the desirable characteristics of reactive applications via a series of lightening talks. Then we will discuss the design approaches that can be taken to achieve these desirable characteristics. The discussion will be open to the audience so everyone can explore this topic and learn.

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Kresten Krab Thorup, TweetHacker, CTO of Trifork, Member of Program Advisory Board

Biography: Kresten Krab Thorup

Kresten Krab Thorup is CTO of Trifork, a public Danish company providing software solutions to government and financial services providers. Trifork is also creator of the long-running GOTO conference (formerly known as JAOO), and co-creator of QCon. As Trifork CTO Kresten in responsible for technical strategy, and spends most of the time acting as internal consultant, researching future technologies, as well as being editor for GOTO and QCon conferences. Kresten has also been a principal contributor to Trifork's own Java EE certified application server "Trifork T4", where he authored many core elements.

Kresten has been a contributor to several open source projects, including GCC, GNU Objective-C, GNU Compiled Java, Emacs, and Apache Geronimo/Yoko. Before joining Trifork, Kresten worked at NeXT Software (now acquired by Apple), where he was responsible for the development of the Objective-C tool chain, the debugger, and the runtime system. Kresten was on the committee for JSR-14 (adding generics to Java) which was closely related to the subject of his Ph.D. thesis.

More recently, Kresten has been hacking Erlang projects, and founded the Erjang open source project (notice the J there), a virtual machine for Erlang running on the Java Virtual Machine, as well as several smaller open source packages for Erlang.

Kresten is member of GOTO Aarhus Program Advisory Board; he has a Ph.D. in computer science from University of Aarhus.

Martin Thompson, TweetHigh-Performance Computing Specialist

Biography: Martin Thompson

Martin is a high-performance and low-latency specialist, with over two decades working with large scale transactional and big-data systems, in the automotive, gaming, financial, mobile, and content management domains. He believes in Mechanical Sympathy, which is applying an understanding of the hardware to the creation of software, being fundamental to delivering elegant high-performance solutions. Martin was the co-founder and CTO of LMAX, until he left to specialise in helping other people achieve great performance with their software. The Disruptor concurrent programming framework is just one example of what his mechanical sympathy has created.

Twitter: @mjpt777
Blog: Mechanical Sympathy
Video presentations: YOW! 2011: Martin Thompson - On Concurrent Programming and Concurrency Folklore

Todd Montgomery, TweetChief Architect at Kaazing

Biography: Todd Montgomery

Todd Montgomery is a networking hacker who has researched, designed, and built numerous protocols, messaging-oriented middleware systems, and real-time data systems, done research for NASA, contributed to the IETF and IEEE, and co-founded two startups. He currently works for Kaazing as Chief Architect.

Twitter: @toddlmontgomery

Viktor Klang, TweetChief Architect at Typesafe

Biography: Viktor Klang

Viktor Klang (@viktorklang) is Chief Architect at Typesafe, former Tech Lead for the Akka project and co-author of scala.concurrent in the Scala Standard Library. Viktor has a long background on the JVM and a passion for concurrent, asynchronous, distributed and resilient systems and the making thereof.

Hailing from southern Sweden, Viktor is a passionate Scala hacker since 2007, a Java enterprise systems architect since 2003 and a programmer since 1998.

He's a big fan of agile development, scalable software and elegant code. He's spent the past 7 years building a EIS, ERP, CRM and PDM system for a large international enterprise.

After being involved in the Lift web framework for 2 years, he joined the Akka team in the middle of 2009 as one of the earliest committers.