Lessons learned from a large scale OSGi web app

Track:

OSGi Track #2

Time:

Wednesday, 4:15pm - 5:05pm

Abstract:

Building a large scale, cloud hosted, multi device product that changes the way students are taught in high schools, turns out to be not entirely trivial. We have been building PulseOn for the last two years. We faced many technical challenges, and have tried many different technologies. Some ideas turned out to be extremely helpful, some other ideas that looked promising turned out to be bad practices.

In this talk we will discuss what we have learned about building modular, scalable web applications. We will go into different areas of the technology stack, from storage and (nosql) databases to a modular RESTful backend and a multi device HTML5 based frontend. We will also go into the cloud, and discuss topics such as auto scaling and failover. We will discuss what works and what doesn’t, and hopefully help other to make the right decisions.

Some topics that we will touch upon:

Modular architecture with OSGi
Failing at linked data and semantic databases
Using MongoDB from OSGi
Release process and semantic versioning
Continuous deployment
JavaScript frameworks

Paul Bakker

Paul is a software architect for Luminis Technologies and the author of “Building Modular Cloud Apps With OSGi”. He believes that modularity and the cloud are the two main challenges we have to deal with to bring technology to the next level, and is working on making this possible for mainstream software development. Today he is working on educational software focussed on personalised learning for high school students in the Netherlands. Paul is an active contributor on open source projects such as Amdatu, Apache ACE and BndTools. He has a background as a trainer on Java related technology and is a regular speaker on conferences such as JavaOne, Devoxx and JFokus. @pbakker

Jago de Vreede

Jago is a software engineer at Luminis Technologies, as a software engineer he has seen a broad-spectrum of projects and he has been working on a large OSGi project for the last year. His work is not exclusive to java development but also does front-end development, and the integration between these. Performance tuning and optimizations are also part of his work.