Keynotes:
The Zen of Free
Simon Phipps, Sun
“Opening” the Possibilities: APIs and Open Source
Gary Lang, AutoDesk, Inc.
Ugh — As good as the first day’s keynotes were — these were not. I was nearly ready to bag the keynotes when…
5 a day
Robert “rOml” Lefkowitz, Root Markets
This was a fantastic keynote. He started with a tomato and eventually wound his way around a discussion of the quantification of open source. It was hillarious and interested…fantastic.
Building Rails to Legacy Applications
Robert Treat, Open Source Developer
Since we are in the process of porting a set of code from PHP to Ruby, I thought I’d go to this session to see what was up. There was a number of interesting tricks and techniques discussed that I definitely am looking forward to trying.
AJAX + .NET = Atlas
Christian Wenz, Hauser & Wenz
Since frameworks are big right now, I wanted to see what Microsoft’s frameworks offerings are. What I found was that I actually find this pretty interesting. The .NET Atlas framework provides a comperable framework to Rails, but specifically generated for ASP.Net. Looking at some sample code — it looks very simple and I’m pretty sure — looking at the implementation, should run on a ‘nix machine using MONO. Also, the javascript/ajax code generated is browser neutral. This I found somewhat suprising, but very cool. The code generated works equally well in the current major browsers. I’ve actually downloaded the framework and am looking at it right now trying to see how I might be able to incorporate it in some of the ASP.net coding that I’ve been doing lately.
Scripting .NET with IronPython
I’ll admit, I went to this session primarily because I’ve been putting together some documentation on running MarcEdit with IronPython for dchud (btw dan, I’ll send you these slides/code as soon as they post them). I really wasn’t sure what to expect with this session, partly because IronPython was first released 2 or 3 years ago at OSCON and at the time, only would run a single test case. In 3 years, the development team has been officially picked up by Microsoft and has implemented ~80 percent of the current Python 2.4 feature set. At the session, they showed some very cool demos, like some 3d work, an mp3 player, etc. Very cool. They will actually be posting the source code to all these projects later so when I see them, I’ll let folks know. Oh, and they announced that the software has hit release canidate 1 status.
Building Internet Applications with Mozilla Xulrunner
Benjamin Smedberg, Mozilla
Aside from showing demos of code written using XULRunner, the speaker spent a bit of time discussing how Mozilla is looking to implement this platform for developers.
–TR