OTUG October 21, 2008 Meeting

Presentation - In this presentation, James Foster will give a brief demo of MagLev, then introduce Smalltalk, GemStone/S (a Smalltalk implementation that has built-in persistence and multi-user, multi-machine scalability), and the web framework Seaside. We will see how Seaside handles the "Back button problem" and provides a rich, component-based approach to OO web development.

The XRX Web Application Architecture - XRX is a new web application architecture that uses XForms on client, ReST web interfaces and XQuery on the server. XRX uses a declarative style of programming that allows complex rich-client applications to be created quickly with little or no procedural coding. XRX is frequently described as an elegant minimalist architecture since XML structures are used on both the client and in the persistence layers with no translation. This makes it an ideal system in which to integrate XML rules processing services. On the client side, XRX architecture leverages w3c standards, advanced MVC architectures in the web client, an efficient dependency graph and as-you-type data validation. On the server side XRX provides easy-to-create XML and XHTML web services to support all aspects of complex web processing.

This presentation will give an overview of the XRX architecture and the design patterns it encourages. We will also compare and contrast XRX with similar advanced web application architectures and then present two case studies of its use in the Twin Cities area including complex forms management and metadata management systems.

Bio - Dan McCreary is a local consultant who specializes in Enterprise Metadata Management and Business Semantics. He is the primary author of the now popular and "featured" XForms wikibook. He has participated in data architectures, data warehousing, business intelligence and rules management systems at several local Twin Cities organizations in the telecommunications, financial and government sectors. He has recently published articles on XML.com, DevX.com, IBM DeveloperWorks and presented at several conferences on XML and Semantic Web technologies. He has two daughters and lives with his wife in St. Louis Park. He can be reached at http://www.danmccreary.com.