I was able to give Matt's comparison of Grails, Rails, GWT and Flex a miss, therefore, to see:
Microformats and the Semantic Web - Tim Berglund
I had the impression that microformats were an idea that never really happened. It seems I might have written them off prematurely. Google is pulling useful info out of microformats and RDFa, for example, and some big sites are using them (eg Best Buy, O'Reilly).
I've installed the Operator extension in Firefox now, as suggested by Tim, so I'll notice the use of this extra markup as I'm surfing.
Two more random points:
- Use Google Labs' Social Graph to explore your online connections (try your Twitter a/c)
- Best Buy is "sorbet for the mind", ie somewhere you can go after a hard day to cleanse the brain cells :-)
PHP and Symfony - Andy Gibson
I have a bunch of PHP hosting accounts for my various websites but I really don't exploit this resource. I do use PHP occasionally to crunch calendar data or manipulate a web page based on URL parameters but I've never considered using it to write a proper web app.
That's why I was attracted to Andy Gibson's talk. Perhaps a Java developer can develop in PHP and not feel dirty.
I can't claim to know a lot about Symfony since the introduction was necessarily brief but it looks like Struts (ie it's MVC) with added ORM. Which is fine.
The final generated web files did look like the usual mix of HTML and PHP though, so perhaps the templating part is not up to much. Still, it does put PHP back on the table for me, in the event I want to write a simple database-backed application.
iPad
At this point I won an iPad thanks to the wonderful folks at WIBU Systems. And while on a high from this I missed the next session :-) But I did pull it together for the final slots of the day...
Productive Application Development with Grails Plugins - Peter Ledbrook
It's old news that Grails development is accelerated by incorporating neatly pre-packaged units of functionality, ie plugins. But Peter Ledbrook's talk brought us news of exciting improvements to the plugin system.
When building a modular application based on plugins, a change to one of those plugins was not reflected in the running code until the plugin was repackaged and reinstalled. There is a solution now - in-place plugins. You specify the location of the plugin's development directory in BuildConfig.groovy and updates are then reflected immediately in the running code.
There are more details of plugin management here, including via a repository manager.
jQuery UI and Plugins - Marc Grabanski
I find myself looking for nice web page widgets more and more. I settled on Yahoo! YUI a couple of years ago. That's still a great framework but it's kind of falling between two stools at the moment. The cool JavaScript language features are in version 3 while many of the fancy widgets are in version 2. Looking at it I have option paralysis.
jQuery is renowned for making DOM manipulations ridiculously easy and I've used it (for example on my home page) when I just want some quick effect. I hadn't taken a proper look at jQuery UI, however, until this talk.
Obviously jQuery UI comes with a bunch of widgets - slider, date picker, etc. That's great but what impressed me was how skinnable they are. I'm a terrible designer so I like stuff that looks good out of the box. jQuery UI comes with a very nice set of skins.
Not only that, the CSS classes are designed to be easy to apply to the rest of your web page so you can make your web app visually consistent. That's worth a lot.
I also noticed that jQuery UI comes with a large set of icons, conveniently combined into a single sprite. It's a really thoughtful library.
For functionality not in the core UI library, jQuery has a plugin architecture and an enthusiastic community contributing new widgets. It's rather a lot to navigate and evaluate though, so Marc has curated his own selection of the very best widgets that play well with jQuery UI.
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