SitePen recently returned from Beantown, the host city to this year’s Dojo Developer Day (DDD) and The Ajax Experience, the largest annual conference dedicated to Ajax development. SitePenners in attendance included Joe Walker, Kris Zyp, Tom Trenka, Peter Higgins, and Alex Russell, all of whom must be applauded for their great presentations at both events. Kudos to all!

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Just back from @media Ajax with a few ideas buzzing around. One based on this comic:

It's patently absurd. And yet it's what we do with accessibility all the time, and in some ways the differences between someone with a visual impairment and someone with dexterity difficulties could be greater than the differences between a Spanish and Italian speaker.

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I gave a talk on Dojo Wednesday at ZendCon, and when I walked into the room for the talk, there was some disorder as the conference center staff were taking out the tables to fit more chairs in. Even with the extra space, the room was totally packed, thanks in large part to the amazing Dojo integration work that the Zend team has done.

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The PyCon 2008 talk videos are making their way up to YouTube. My talk is not yet there, and the footage they’re putting up right now is the “raw” footage from the camera at the back of the room. I have posted a screencast version of my talk, “Rich UI Webapps with TurboGears 2 and Dojo”:

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This past weekend was the time for PyCon 2008, which was in Chicago for the first time. The US PyCon conference is a volunteer-run conference, which means that it’s filled with Python enthusiasts. Even the vendors there are enthusiastic about Python.

This year, there was a lot to be cheery about. The Dallas venue of the past two years would never have held the 1,000+ person crowd. For me, the primary appeal of a conference like PyCon is that it’s a chance to meet many people who are doing interesting things. I’m a big fan of the “hallway track” and open spaces. I think it was at the first CodeMash that I heard Bruce Eckel talk about how you can watch an “eyes-forward” presentation anywhere on video, but the face-to-face discussion can only happen when people are brought together.

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SitePen was in the news recently:

Simplexity Rising: Web usability reveals itself to be a game of hide-and-seek covers our session, “Your Mom, 2.0″, for the upcoming SXSW 2008, and offers some choice quotes about building web apps that are feature rich yet easy to use. At this session, we’ll be discussing the things that make an app that’s easy for Mom to use but still delivers the features everyone wants to use. The format is somewhat of a round-table discussion, and we’ve invited a few local Austin Moms to attend. We’ll also present the results of a survey of Moms, and see where this open discussion takes us.

Developers Seek Web, Dynamic Languages is a summary of a recent developer survey, noting the rise in interest of Ajax among other things. Our Research & Development Director Alex Russell explains why dynamic languages are becoming so popular: increasing CPU power puts greater emphasis on developer efficiency. Dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, and PHP are “just riding the complexity versus CPU power curves.” It’s not just a matter of letting people bang out apps in 30 minutes—when you worry less about the infrastructure, you get to spend more time on features and design.

The article mentions a number of advantages to web apps—easy deployment, painless updates, huge reach—plus one of our favorites: openness. As proponents of the Open Web, our investments in research and development of open source web tools and technologies make it easier for you to deliver great user experiences, even for Your Mom.

I’ve just had a whirlwind trip to Stockholm for JFokus 2008. It was a focused conference with some really interesting presentations. I came back wishing that I wasn’t on such a tight schedule so that I could have attended more talks.

Kirk Pepperdine was there, and despite not hearing his talk we had quite a bit of debate about it (we met due to a wrong turn on the way back to the hotel by the conference center). Maybe his talk turned out differently, but it sounded as though he was going to be ringing the warning bell for big databases. The argument essentially went: transactions don’t scale over multiple CPUs (something Amazon etc. have already discovered) and since we’re all going multi-core, we need to look to ways of doing things that are not transactional. Kirk’s answer was object databases.

I did a tutorial on DWR, and updated the ‘Case for the Open Web’ talk that I did with Alex at TAE. I managed to add 50% more material and finished early to boot. I guess with 2 people talking there’s a lot more banter.

One of my contentions was that monopolies are bad for the web, no matter who holds them.

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CodeMash 2008 was my first conference since coming to work for SitePen, and my first opportunity to talk about Dojo. I had two talks: an introduction to Dojo (i.e. “how much Dojo can I cram into an hour”) and a talk about Dojo Offline and Google Gears. I love talking about cool technology, and CodeMash is great fun, so this was a treat.

I’d like to highlight a couple of topics that came up at CodeMash. Over on my blog I have posted more general comments about CodeMash 2008 with a bit less detail on these topics.

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I recently had the opportunity to speak about Dojo on the iPhone at AjaxWorld West. The session was a straightforward, if not colorful, review of the current state of app development for the iPhone.

In preparing for the presentation, I needed to install several native applications in order to create high quality screenshots for my slides. As a result, I presented the audience with an overview of this information because there are a variety of useful development tools that require installation.

Because Christopher Allen gave a talk just prior to mine with an iPhone and iPod Touch Ajax overview, I dove right into specifics about the current issues and problems with iPhone development for Dojo developers. I wrapped things up by walking through a few working examples of Dojo-based applications, some optimized for the iPhone and others not. At the end of the talk, I promised a forthcoming, iPhone-optimized Dojo build that removes features and code for items not supported on the iPhone. We hope to have that ready in time for the 1.0 release of Dojo on October 31.

The press seems to have enjoyed the session, with Network World running a fairly lengthy article titled Unauthorized iPhone Apps Market Flourishes. I should make it clear that my talk focused mainly on pitfalls and frustrations that developers face, but the iPhone is by far the best mobile, open web, development solution on the market today.

With the recent launch of Dojo 0.9 and the planned launch of 1.0 in late October, the SitePen Dojo training courses have been revamped and now focus exclusively on the new code base.

SitePen’s partnership with UK-based Skills Matter is allowing us to offer our 3-day Dojo training workshop overseas, several times, in the upcoming months.

• London, Oct. 15-17, 2007
• London, Nov 14-16, 2007
• London, July 9-11, 2007
• Denmark, July 15-17, 2008

On another note, and speaking of Skills Matter, the Grails eXchange is taking place October 17-19 in London, and I will be giving a brief talk on Dojo there as well. Skills Matter puts on a number of great training sessions and evening seminars, and we have high expectations for their first major conference. The itinerary includes a number of excellent sessions on Ajax and Comet techniques to be presented by Joe Walker, Jonas Jacobi, Scott Davis, Dave Crane, and Sven Haiges. As an event sponsor, SitePen is pleased to offer a £100 discount to all of our friends and clients. Please contact us for the promotion code and then visit Grails eXchange to register!