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!

Slides from our recent talks at the Ajax Experience and the Rich Web Experience are now available. Newly added talks include:

• Standards Heresy: Dojo and the Rise of Open Web Pragmatism
• Dojo 0.9: Faster, Leaner, and Dijit?
• Comet: Low Latency Data Transit or Really Bad Pun?

Last week was the latest installment of the Ajax Experience in San Francisco. More low-key than last year’s conference, I left the main corridor only to give two talks, one on Dojo and one on Comet. I met a lot of people I had been wanting to meet for a while, and caught up with most of the usual suspects. Interest in Dojo 0.9 was strong, and there were a lot of good questions about Comet, as well as a great discussion at the end of the Comet talk with Greg Wilkins and Joe Walker in the crowd and participating.

If there was one point to take away from the conference, it was that everyone there has now bought into Ajax. Last year’s most frequently asked question, “What about accessibility?”, has now been answered in great detail by Dojo and Dijit. I believe this year’s theme was all about performance. Everyone has had another year to work with web apps, expectations are higher, and everyone wants to do more for less. This isn’t a great shock or surprise, but the comments from people attending the Dojo 0.9 talk tell me that the improvements we have made can’t come fast enough.

We’re speaking at and/or attending a number of upcoming events and conferences. We hope to see you there!

• May 20-23: Alex will be attending the IEEE Privacy and Security Symposium in Oakland, CA. Prior to our Dojo days, Alex spent most of his time thinking about security.
• May 23-25: I’ll be conducting a 3-day Dojo Training Course in London. The course will focus on Dojo 0.4, but will explain many of the changes happening in 0.9 as we work through the relevant topics.
• May 24: While in London for the training course, I’ll lead an evening discussion about Dojo 0.9.
• May 31: A few of us from the SitePen team will be attending the Google Developer Day in Mountain View to hang out and learn more about the latest Google Developer APIs.

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