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Bio: Jason Hunter, principal technologist at Mark Logic, is the author of "Java Servlet Programming," published by O'Reilly. He's also an Apache Member and former Vice President and served several years as Apache's representative to the Java Community Process Executive Committee where he helped establish a landmark agreement allowing open source Java implementations. He's an original contributor to Apache Tomcat and a member of the expert groups responsible for Servlet, JSP, JAXP, and XQJ API development. He co-created the open source JDOM library to enable optimized Java and XML integration.
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Q: Your session this year is on web algorithms. What made you choose that topic?
A: Algorithms are like legalized cheat sheets for programmers. They hold some of the best and most insightful ideas of the past about how to solve both present and future tasks. Too often, as programmers, we try to brute force our way to a solution. In my algorithms talk, I skip the math proofs that bored me in school and focus on the innovative elegance. My favorite algorithms are those that solve problems I would have, on my own, thought unsolvable.
Q: What's an example algorithm you cover in the talk?
A: I cover a total of five algorithms. One of my favorites is public key cryptography. I find it fascinating that as a speaker at JavaOne I can establish a Q&A conversation with a stranger in the back of the room, in full view of the audience, in such a way that only the stranger and I could understand the conversation. We'd do it using public key cryptography, the basis for ssh and https. (Of course, in the talk I will accept plain text questions as well as encrypted.)
Q: Where in the process of programming do you have the most fun?
A: Starting from scratch is always a thrill. Without any raw resources except your mind and a laptop you can produce something new and interactive and, sometimes, of genuine value. In some ways it's like art -- the creating something from nothing, the subjective judgment you have to apply to success and failure -- but with the handy perk of a higher than normal average salary.
Q: What's the next big technology revolution?
A: An idea that's "revolutionary" is something that follows the phrase, "What if you could..." I'm working on an idea like that in my job as Principal Technologist at Mark Logic. Our "what if" phrase goes like this: "What if you could do for Word what Oracle did for Excel?" Or in longer form: "What if you could take information such as books, articles, and email (content that's textual, ordered, hierarchical, and irregular), and put it in a repository that could readily index, update, and interact with the content?" We're doing that at Mark Logic using XML as the native storage format and the XQuery language for querying and interaction. People are paying more attention to content these days, especially with Web 2.0. You'll know the revolution has come when textual content gets the first class treatment only data has received up until now.
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