Intro

This is a brief write up of Day 1 of the 2008 XTech conference held in Dublin, Ireland from 6-9 May 2008. Days 2 and 3 to follow. The proceedings and presentations from the conference are available for further reading.

The theme for this year’s conference was “The Web on the Move”. Not being able to put the intro any better, this is the intro from the parent website and the conference programme:

“For years we have been developing and promoting open data standards, enabling data portability. Recent developments have led to web-wide programming APIs and virtualization. It’s no longer just our data on the move, it’s our applications and even our servers too.

What impact will this era of unprecedented portability have on us? How should we change the way we build for the web? XTech 2008 will examine the technology, war stories and practical concerns of developing for today’s web.”

Day 1

The conference opening keynote was already started when I arrived (being slightly late, hot and flustered after taking the long way round to get to the venue due to a Google map print-out of restricted detail!) so I missed the introduction, but it turned out to be a presentation on the role of “open” in the process of innovation to commoditisation. I must admit to missing the point slightly, but this talk seemed to summarise (in many, many, slides) that the ‘open meme’ will be a major driving force in behind the changes in the market in terms of getting from innovation to commoditisation, by changing the market and the services that will need to be provided. This talk was followed by David Recordon of Six-Apart, who presented a very interesting journey through the technologies behind Open Platforms (concentrating on social applications), and their common requirements, ie: ways to share abstract information, ways to communicate, ways to know who someone is, ways to know who someone knows, ways to know what someone is doing. This involved discussions of OAuth, XMPP, OpenID, XFN Microformats (XHTML Friends Network), FOAF, Twitter, and others. Sadly, many of these I was oblivious to, but no more - I have, as a result now got accounts on Twitter and Fire Eagle, and am experimenting further with Google Talk and its XMPP client.

After a welcome coffee break, next I sat through an enlightening talk from Douglas Crockford, currently of Yahoo! on “Javascript: The Good Parts” where he attempted to show that Javascript is “a beautiful, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders”. He also demonstrated JSLint a Javascript verifier, which should (will?) save you from all the pitfalls and nightmares of badly coded Javascript. Coincidentally, Douglas has a book being published by O’Reilly on this very subject coming out shortly.

Then it was on to a talk by Michael Smith of the W3C who gave a rapid look at some of the important changes in the browser landscape since XTech 2007, and at what those changes mean for developers. There was a lot of information on how Webkit is becoming more prevalent, and how there has been much development in the mobile browser arena, with Opera still a major player in the absence of any significant challenge from Mozilla (so far - they are now working on a Gecko based mobile browser). Otherwise, it was some CSS3, better SVG and much surprise that the IE8 beta seems to be better than people were expecting.

I then went to a couple of presentations on AJAX, the first by Bob Buffone of Nexaweb Technologies who talked about ways to optimise AJAX applications. Areas covered were: Mozilla’s Rhino JavaScript engine as a complete performance monitoring tool for Ajax code bases; Injecting monitoring code into every function of JavaScript within an application to create a complete performance picture; Locating performance issues through drilldowns of function call counts, total time spent, average time per call, and call stacks; and start time optimization using Dojo, Gzip, and Compression. Most of this was fairly obvious, but a useful summary, and was also introduced to YSlow, a Firefox plugin for measuring page download/rendering times, which I’d not come across before. The second talk was by Clinton Smullen of the University of Tennessee who presented a paper on how they tried to increase the performance of part of their University website by using AJAX. He described the tests they used to determine the best way of delivering the AJAX content (ie partial HTML, XML, JSON, and CSV). Interesting stuff, but I felt fairly limited to that particular application, but definitely worth bearing in mind that there may be better ways to serve your content than the obvious, and that you should look at other methods where possible.

After coffee, I went to listen to Arve Bervendsen of Opera give a talk on giving Web Applications and Widgets access to device and user data. Not knowing really what widgets were in this sense, I thought this would be an interesting learning session for me, but I have to say I’m still none the wiser, and so this probably wasn’t a great talk to go to as it did presuppose some knowledge on the subject. Still, it appears you can do what he said you could, and had some demos. Mostly I just caught up on email.

Finally today, I went to listen to Fabrice Desre of Orange Labs talk about Open Mashups. The Open Mashups editor is a Firefox extension, which aims to allow the creation of mashups which provide: clean separation of functional (what the application is doing) and non-functionnal (e.g look and feel) aspect; independence from devices and execution platforms: no vendor, device or platform locking; and user friendliness : no need to be a coder to use it. This looked very cool, and I do intend to have a play when time allows. Currently reliant on FF3 though.

Talks I wished I’d been able to go to:

Blaine Cook - Building the Real-Time Web
Simon Willison - Unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery