Trip Report

Web 2.0 Expo, 15-18 April 2007, Moscone Center

This was a great conference, even with just the free "Expo Only" pass. I wasn't intending on doing all 3 days, but after the first day I couldn't stay away! This especially helped me with my big task for the quarter, which is making up a new 4-week long authentic project for my Ajax class.

RICH INTERNET APPLICATIONS FOR USERS

Most require a browser only
e.g. free online office suites: Google has docs, spreadsheet, presentation, mail now.
ThinkFree opens and stores MS Word document format.

Some require a runtime environment
They work when you are offline, then upload when you are online again.
More features and better performance because they leverage the client's processor too
Adobe Apollo is an example of this

APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT TOOLS FOR DEVELOPERS:

IBM's qed
framework for creating mashups, still in alpha

Yahoo pipes
visual editor for mixing rss feeds - http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/docs?doc=overview

Google's GWT
allows you to program in Java, then it compiles to javascript to execute in browser

Ruby on Rails
implements MVC, writes SQL for you

Adobe's Apollo
"for Flex developers", still in alpha, but already has an O'Reilly book on it!?

Loads of JavaScript toolkits

TRENDS:

People from all over the world attended, mostly engineers.

Many, many Macintoshes present. This was true for presenters and attendees.
It appears that now that we are developing for the web instead of developing for Windows,people are free to choose their dev machine and they are choosing Macs.

Everyone doing agile development process (aka extreme, iterative.)

Tools that allow users to collaborate are seen as the big benefit to web apps.

Eric Schmidt of Google was asked "what is the next big thing?" His answers:
1) users need to carry the web around on their persons
(he is also on the board of Apple, which will be selling the iphone in June)
2) getting web info specific to your locale will give new value to users
3) Schmidt also pointed out that Google is building and using the biggest supercomputer ever.
He means of course the thousands upon thousands of servers,
forming a massively parallel processor that we all use to search the web

NETWORKING:

Web 2 Open (for open source) was a subconference "in the hallways" that was free to attend.
In fact, they got O'Reilly to give a free "Expo-only" badge for cheapskates like me!

SocialText is a startup that makes wikis in downtown Palo Alto. Their CEO is a Foothill alum.

I saw a former student, Christopher Balz, who now works for E*trade.

Newton Chan was there, of course.

The project for my Ajax students finally congealed: they will be creating a web page that is a mashup including weather, maps, a wiki, photos, etc to be used by a club.

TO LOOK INTO:

Microformats
ThinkFree - wp engine for inclusion in your web page
Badges
TextMe