Day 3
I didn't post about the third day of the 2006 EuroDevCon / EKON 10 conference, because there wasn't much to say. I spent most of the day preparing for my own workshop on Friday, and that (as usual) took me more time than I was expecting... so I had to miss a couple of interesting sessions, although I did follow one on AJAX by Hadi Hariri and one on the same topic by Bob Swart (or was that the day before?). The conference closing session was the classic thank you + let's give away prizes. In the evening threre was a speakers' dinner, at a nice small restaurant with nice food (thanks Masoud, always a very friendly conference host).
Workshop, Friday
On Friday, I gave my full day tutorial on "Web 2.0 in Delphi", briefly covering the evolution of the web as a platform, and then delving into the technologies behind it: HTML + CSS, XML, XSLT, Web Services (REST in particular), JavaScript... and the technology that sums all these together, AJAX. Having a Delphi perspective meant I used WebBroker and WebSnap (actually only Internet Express) as backend for all the demos. One of my points is that with user interfaces moving to the browser, Delphi stands a better chance than in the past as a technology to build a strong backend. I enjoyed giving the seminar and hope attendees liked it.
Given all of the foundation material I decided to cover in some detail, I discussed only a handful of AJAX examples, from those on my ajax.marcocantu.com site to a few new ones, including a Delphi-driven gadget you can show in your personalized Google home page. I'm thinking of collecting all of my AJAX-oriented material and write a short book covering the technology. It might be a good way to test a print-on-demand system.
Conference Summary
There have now been a few blog posts about the conference, including those of Nick, Dr. Bob, and Daniel (with plenty of pictures). As I didn't attend to Nick's opening tutorial, I was told only later he had covered some of the new language features of Highlander, like generics and partial classes. Anyway, I had a chance to chat with him and many people of the Delphi community, some working for Borland and some independent. As in the past I really liked the conference and the good company. I even met an old-time friend of mine, Christian Gross, who was teaching at a parallel conference on AJAX (which, in the envy of EKON participants and speaker, had a younger audience and way more women).
As a final note, some of the participants (and also some of the Borland and independent experts) were worried about the company spin-off of the Developer Tools Group, which is taking more time than expected. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope this will be a done deal within a few weeks: the sooner, the better!