June 2014 Meeting - Mule Open Source ESB
Tampa-JUG Org
NOTE: the meeting will be Wed, June 25 2014, (not our usual Tuesday) at the ValPak headquarters in St Petersburg, FL.
An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is fundamentally an architecture. It is a set of rules and principles for integrating numerous applications together over a bus-like infrastructure. ESB products enable users to build this type of architecture, but vary in the way that they do it and the capabilities that they offer.
The core concept of the ESB architecture is that you integrate different applications by putting a communication bus between them and then enable each application to talk to the bus. This decouples systems from each other, allowing them to communicate without dependency on or knowledge of other systems on the bus.
The concept of ESB was born out of the need to move away from point-to-point integration, which becomes brittle and hard to manage over time. Point-to-point integration results in custom integration code being spread among applications with no central way to monitor or troubleshoot. This is often referred to as "spaghetti code" and does not scale because it creates tight dependencies between applications.
Join us for our June 2014 meeting to learn about some high level concepts and use-cases for where Mule and the ESB architecture could play a role in your organization.
Bob Damato, Director of Software Engineering – Valpak
Bob has been a self-described computer geek since he fell in love with his first Commodore 64 at eight years old. He developed his first business software systems (email, accounting, and order management) in the early 90’s while working as a graphic artist for his family’s commercial printing business.
Bob joined Valpak in 1995 as a Graphic Artist but discovered the IT department and set his sights on becoming part of that team. His “official” IT career started in 1996 as Tech Support Specialist repairing desktop Macs and PCs, but his true passion remained in software development. During his time in Tech Support he studied C, C++, and Visual Basic, as well as Windows, Unix and Database Administration. His IT career progressed as he spent a year each as NT Admin, Unix Admin and finally Database Admin.
Then in 2000, he became Lead Software Developer for the Valpak.com team and he was finally able to pursue his passion. Bob spent a year in that role before becoming Valpak’s Internet Technology Manager where, over the next nine years, he architected and led the development of over 50 web applications and six revisions of Valpak.com. He was promoted to Software Development Manager in 2010 and was given responsibility for all of Valpak’s software development.
In 2011, he was promoted to Director of Software Engineering and he currently leads the Software Engineering and QA teams that build and maintain the systems that support Valpak’s sales and order process, digital products, mobile apps, GIS mapping solutions, content management, and delivery logistics.
Date: Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Networking: 6:30 pm
Presentation: 07:00 - 8:30 pm
Meeting RSVP
Make sure to RSVP to ensure access to the building at http://tampajug-june2014.eventbrite.com