Pixelbox

At the end of last week I attended FOWA2008 with Tom from work. Having only really been to the excellent dconstruct previously (I’m not counting things like internet world) I wasn’t sure how it would match up. I wasn’t disappointed as it turned out to be a great event with some fantastic talks, and some great swag, such as the Carsonified Journal!.

The event was at Excel (which is huge and a bit lacking in character) and had two main tracks, which was something I wasn’t used to. Initially I was thinking about splitting between the developer and business, but once I found out they were filming the talks and putting them online I didn’t have to worry about missing a thing!

Blaine Cook & Joe Stump’s talk called: Languages Don’t Scale, was a great look at the language fanboys out there and how we shouldn’t bitch about X not scaling as all languages have their pros and cons, and at the end of the day, the differences are insignificant. They focused on the main area of concern for scaling, architecture.

Matt Biddulph’s talk entitles: Dopplr: It’s made of messages, was also really interesting. It would have been nice to have some code examples, but it was a little more tech focused that his talk at dconstruct, which was obviously more about the UX.

Later that day Blaine Cook, Ex Chief Engineer at Twitter presented another talk called: Colliding Worlds: Using Jabber to make awesome web sites. This was another really interesting talk, and something I would love to look into.

Building Desktop Caliber Web Applications with Objective-J and Cappuccino by Francisco Tolmasky, 280 North was really interesting. At first I was a huge sceptic of these sorts of frameworks, which focus on building an app, rather than how it translates onto the web. Francisco pointed out that the framework is aimed at building applications, not websites, which makes sense, as it’s modeled around Objective C methodology.

Recently I have been making the transition from programming web sites, to desktop applications, and the differences are huge. A client-side focused application is so different from a typical client server architecture, and as a web developer it’s extremely hard to build these apps using a typical website methodology.

Many frameworks like Cairngorm, PureMVC or in this case Cappuccino look at addressing this, by modeling your application as you would for a desktop application, and abstracting how it’s presented or rendered. Some of the features of Cappuccino are fantastic, such as key mapping, undo history and clever trickery with HTML canvases (check out 280Slides), however it’s biggest advantage is also it’s disadvantage. By using HTML, CSS and JavaScript it suffers form limited lockout, however by not requiring a plugin it also lacks from not having socket support, or better filesystem, webcam integration. Hopefully over the next few years (especially with chrome) the browsers will start evolving and adding some of these limitations.

Day two had some more great talks, such as Scaling the Synchronous Web by the meebo guys, and how they managed scaling on Meebo. Andrew Turner’s talk Beyond Google Maps opened my eyes to a world (no pun intended) of mapping tools available on the web. We also got a treat of seeing Mark Zuckerberg, although there wasn’t time (probably a good thing) to see him get grilled.

The day ended with the infamious DiggNation, which didn’t disappoint, especially with free Google beer!

Looking forward to next year already!