February 8th, 2008 – by Joe Walker
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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Posted in Conferences, DWR, News, Open Source | No Comments
January 17th, 2008 – by Kevin Dangoor
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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Posted in Conferences | 3 Comments
September 27th, 2007 – by Dylan Schiemann
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.
Posted in Cometd, Conferences, Dojo, News, ajax, mobile | 2 Comments
September 26th, 2007 – by Dylan Schiemann
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!
Posted in Conferences, Dojo, News, Training, ajax | No Comments
September 9th, 2007 – by Dylan Schiemann
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?
Posted in Cometd, Conferences, Dojo, JavaScript, News, ajax | No Comments
July 31st, 2007 – by Dylan Schiemann
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.
Posted in Conferences, JavaScript, News, ajax | 1 Comment
May 19th, 2007 – by Dylan Schiemann
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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Posted in Conferences, Dojo, News, Training, ajax | No Comments
March 27th, 2007 – by Dylan Schiemann
At SXSW and AjaxWorld, I had the opportunity to talk about dojo.gfx and native web vector graphics in general. The amazing thing about these talks was the large number of attendees familiar with and interested in SVG, Canvas, and other native vector graphics formats.
It’s still very early, but the interest in collaborative web applications that involve richer, interactive drawing capabilities is growing rapidly. I’m pleased to announce that I am making my slides available online for both of these talks. What is interesting about these slides, even more than the content within them, is that both were created using dojo.gfx. They are great examples of mixing HTML and SVG/VML techniques to create a nice user interface. While there is nothing explicitly preventing them from working cross-browser, I have only tested them on Firefox 2 given time constraints.
Posted in Conferences, Dojo, News, Vector Graphics, ajax | 3 Comments
February 25th, 2007 – by Alex
I got back late in the week from a trip to the ISOC-IL annual conference where I gave a full-day tutorial on Ajax and Dojo (with a little bit of Comet mixed in for fun). The conference organizers were tremendously kind and thoughtful and the whole trip was a lot of fun. What was best, though, were the great questions that folks had during the tutorial. It’s always a hit-and-miss on this kind of thing (big room, low lights, different country, potential language barrier, etc.) and it can go very badly indeed if people aren’t curious about the topic(s). The ISOC-IL conference drew great folks with wonderful and pointed questions that helped make everything go faster. It’s rare that conferences are that tightly run, well-attended, and have such good food and caffeine. Conference size can’t beat quality and the ISOC-IL conference proved it.
The day after the conference, I was lucky enough to get to visit some of the Zend hackers in Tel Aviv who were also tremendously kind and had lots of great feedback on how we can improve Dojo. Work aside, this was my first trip to Israel and I can say with some confidence that I’ll be back. My trip left me thinking that there’s a lot more to Israel than news accounts in US papers would imply.
Posted in Conferences, News | 3 Comments
October 20th, 2006 – by Dylan Schiemann
The Ajax Experience is this Monday October 23 through Wednesday October 25 in Boston. If it is anything like the one in San Francisco in May, it is going to be a great show.We are giving four talks at the conference. Alex Russell is giving two sessions on Tuesday morning: Intro to Dojo and Dojo in Depth. At the same time as Alex’s first session, Jesse Kuhnert of SitePen is teaming up with Howard Lewis Ship of Tapestry fame to give the talk “Tapestry and Dojo: The Peanut Butter and Jelly of the Ajax World”.
On Wednesday, Dustin Machi will be giving a talk called Dojo Cookbook, an advanced yet practical talk about tips and tricks with building complex web applications with Dojo.
Additionally, several of our friends from Dojo including Becky Gibson, Brad Neuberg, Greg Murray, David Boloker, Jon Ferraiolo, Abe Fettig, Greg Wilkins, Joe Walker, and Kevin Lawver are speaking, as well as a number of other interesting people including John Resig and Doug Crockford. It is shaping up to be an even better conference than the one in May. If you are attending, please take a chance to introduce yourself to Alex, Dustin, and/or Jesse.
Posted in Conferences, Dojo, News, ajax | No Comments
