Spicing up user experience w/ Silverlight – Tech Session, Day 2

This session was probably the biggest disappointment of the conference so far… not that I really have a lot of high hopes for Microsoft’s RIA framework, but this was just ridiculous.  The speaker was not an employee of MS, so I’ll cut her some slack… but if her attitude towards the framework is any indication of the real motives behind Microsoft creating Silverlight then they simply don’t get it.  Several times the speaker repeated the line “isn’t this cool!?” to the room full of dead quiet developers.  Some guy spoke up, “Doesn’t Flash already do this?”.  Yea, it’s basically exactly like Flash, except maybe more like Flash 4.  She was all excited about the drag-and-drop controls, most of which do already exist in flash (graphing, sliders, etc).  A lot of people, including myself, jumped out of there a few minutes early…

IDE + Framework Roundup 1

A few of the sessions that I’ve decided not to go into detail about were basically sales pitches (I’m using the term loosely – Most of these are open source and free to use) for a development IDE or framework… here’s a few of note:

• Aptana Studio & “Jaxer” Ajax Server – This IDE has support for HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, and Ruby On Rails. It’s interesting because it supports most of the popular javascript libraries (prototype, dojo, etc) and offers some pretty slick code completion. It also seems like a pretty swell IDE for the iPhone SDK (The speaker built a small web app for the iPhone in a matter of minutes). The Ajax server allows for server-side javascript.
• jMaki -A mashup framework, in beta, created by Sun Microsystems. This seems to have a lot of potential. Basically they created wrappers for several popular js toolkits which allows developers to use PHP, JSP, or whatever to embed the javascript code. It abstracts the event model of whatever particular js library you use into your language of choice. It is supported (with the help of plugins) in Netbeans, Eclipse, and ANT-based tools.
• Webtop – Also created by Sun, Webtop is based on jMaki and is essentially an open source, extensible iGoogle clone.
• ICEfaces – Java EE Framework for building asynchronous, real-time social web applications.

Day 2 Keynote: “Good Morning… btw, the WWW sucks.”

Ok, he didn’t really say that in so many words but that was pretty much what was thrown at us during the opening keynote at 7:30am this morning. The main message: The WWW has problems. Serious problems. It’s not secure, and it just wasn’t built for the kinds of Web 2.0 applications that are becoming increasingly popular. But, on the other hand… it works, and for a lot of people that’s ok. However, keynote speaker Douglas Crockford from Yahoo seems to believe that the end of the world wide web may be at hand and other technologies such as AIR, Silverlight, or JavaFX may be there ready to compete for dominance if new standards that fix these issues aren’t put in place within the next decade. Ultimately he said that the DOM and Javascript need to be replaced all together… which is definitely no small task.

Also of note, he mentioned jsLint, a javascript verifier, as well as Google’s Caja and Cajita to help safely allow javascript-enabled third-party widgets in mashups, but this isn’t a viable solution for securing RIAs.

just for the record…

I’m soooo sick of powerpoint slides.  I’ll be having nightmares about them for the rest of the month.

buzzword alert!

Web Ecosystem - a fancy term for mashups.

The Performance Paradigm of a Mashup World – Tech Session, Day 1

Peter Kirwan of WebMetrics was the presenter of this session. There was a lot of propaganda to sort through (his company offers monitoring services for web applications, among other things), but he talked a lot about one of the few recurring themes in the conference – The lack of security and performance standards in the mashup world. With sites such as iGoogle, PageFlakes, or any other mashups (ad services are also mashups) , your site performance relies on the performance of the applications that you mash together… in other words, if you use a widget from some third party that runs slowly it can bring down your site as well. The same concern holds for security risks when using third party widgets. Often you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes (third parties may be using other third parties, and so on), and that can open up your application to a lot of potential security threats.

buzzword alert!

The Fit Client - Hybrid Fat/Thin Client. RIA Desktop applications, browser-less rendering of applications.

Embracing New Platforms

The speaker was Bert Halstead, chief architect for CURL. This presentation was roughly based on a study commissioned by CURL to compare Flex, CURL, AJAX, and .NET on several different aspects such as learning curve, average development time, loading speed, etc by finding teams of developers to duplicate a certain web application for each language. As you could expect, CURL came out on top a few times… with Flex consistently coming out in the middle. I wasn’t very impressed with the survey – it seemed the results were a bit off, especially for development time aspect since apparently they tested teams that had prior knowledge of some of the languages. Basically the point was that there are trade-offs with each method. He also believed that we’re moving towards building more web-enabled applications for the desktop.

buzzword alert!

Mashup – Not a new term, but I’ve heard it a lot just in the first day. “Mashups of mashups of mashups” was also mentioned. Means “aggregate application”. Refer to pageflakes.com…

2 more sessions in day 1 to come…

ASP.NET Ajax Design Patterns : Tech Session, Day 1

One good thing I learned from this – Microsoft has a free version of Visual Studio called Visual Web Developer 2008 that even their own developers use on a regular basis… obviously they’re not making it a high priority to promote it.

This was a basic demo of how to create an ajax driven page using the AJAX.NET controls (partial page update panels). The speaker mentioned several different popular methods of retrieving data using ajax.net – such as paging/caching records and using what he called “predictive fetching” which is basically just saying we should program applications in a way that stores relevant data (cached using javascript) to be shown later based on the actions the user takes in the beginning of their session. He also mentioned pageflakes.com, since it was built using ajax.net.