Presentations on Toronto BARCAMP / DEMOCAMP, April 25, 2006, agenda

• BBS for Bell Kids' Help Phone, (Java) - Yang Lu, Jonathan Lung, Yimei Miao, and Andrew Reynolds, U of T with the introduction from Greg Wilson. This was a project by students and it involved adding custom functionality to JForum. While quite simple in its technical nature, it exposed very interesting general issue. The students took a standard JForum branch and made some changes to it - to achieve the goals of their project. It is likely that both the JForum team and the student’s team will continue to develop their products. If so, the issue will arise: how to propagate the changes between the branches? The standard options are:
  • JForum to take students work and include it in the product core
  • students to merge their changes into the new releases of JForum
  • both teams to ignore each other
  The project was easy, but the consequences are not.
   
• Chris Nolan.ca, (Ruby On Rails) - Showed the power of RJS templates. This was RubyOnRails exploration and thoughts session.
   
• BlogMatrix Platform - (?) David Janes and Tim Desjardins will demonstrated the BlogMatrix Platform used for structured blogging and microformats. This was an example of self-modifiable web site where each visual thing has the metadata associated with it. The metadata is then used to slice and dice objects in various ways and create new views out of them. This demo made me think that semantic web might really work...
   
• Unspace, (Ruby On Rails) - Live Data Grid and Live Search. These guys showed complex AJAX-dynamic web pages with the superior usability and ease of use. They also mentioned that doing it with AJAX was difficult, especially respecting the back button. What I liked the most is superior attention to details, the absence of hipe, and the acknowledgement that AJAX is hard and requires thought. They did not mention that server-side folks most likely hate them a lot since their pages make huge number of requests back to the server. They also did not mention that AJAX can be slow.
   
• DabbleDB, (Smalltalk) - Avi Bryant & Andrew Catton, creators of DabbleDB and the Seaside Framework. The DabbleDB is a web based meta-modeling engine that lets users to manipulate their data (aka Excel worksheets) and metadata (aka cell types and their relations). The metadata is then used to provide single click access to the variety of analytical features that apply to the certain data types and relations. For example: the strings can be sorted or grouped. The numbers can be added up, averaged, etc. The collaborative access to the workspace was mentioned, but the extend of it is somewhat unclear to me. I wrote very similar meta-modeling system in Java (pardon me mentioning this language) and I had to provide full transactionality, undo-redo and multi-user support. I will testify that it is quite a lot of non-trivial work. The DabbleDB product came out great; I think users will feel very natural in it and will almost feel that a computer reads their mind when they use it! Well written meta-modeling environments do this kind of thing to a user...
   
• Select Access, (?) - Enterprise Authentication and Authorization was presented by Adam Goucher, Senior Test - HP Identity Management. This is the enterprise level access-control system that plugs into a web server of your choice. It felt boring to most and many people in the audience did not appreciate the magnitude of the problem and the complexity of implementation and testing. As we hear more and more Ruby presentations, people will forget how expensive is to solve the hard problems. Where are all of those people that can write and test this kind of system? They are probably unemployed, or are on the fast learning track to learn HTML/CSS and Ruby.
   

Final word
The innovation is definitely on in Toronto. It is a good thing and many people are very excited. Some of us even use term DOT COM Boom 2.0. But the innovation and new stuff must not make us forget what we learned in the past. The talent, skills, hard work, and sound business model will still be required.

The skills I am concerned about... Do you know that it is virtually impossible to find a good C++ developer these days - for any kind of money! But everyone "knows" Rails... Before I hire anyone who has a RubyOnRails mentioned on their resume they will have to answer the following questions:

• what is a closure?
• what is a lambda function?
• what is a side-effect?
• what is prototype in the JavaScript?
• what is reentrant function and how to write one?

Presentations on Toronto BARCAMP / DEMOCAMP, March 28, 2006, agenda

• Semacode , (Java ME) - Any cell phone with digital camera and Java ME can be turned into Semacode (special kind of barcode) reader. Simon Woodside presented Semacode and gave a demo. Quite amazing progress given many general Java ME issues, like: slow processor speed, limited memory, truncated Java API and vendor quirks in Java ME implementations.
   
• Disposable Digital Cameras, (?) - Randy Glenn gave a demo showing how to hack into digital disposable cameras sold at the variety stores across North America. Hacking allows the reuse of camera, USB access, and who knows what else. I am not sure why we did not have in-depth discussion and the hands-on hacking session after the meeting! I can't even count how many things I could hack into if I learned how to do it from Java...
   
• Visual Search, (?) - Leila Boujnane and Paul Bloore gave a demo of a Visual Search. The audience was shocked and surprised when they showed how their product finds 1/2 inch crop of a larger picture smuggled into the newspaper front page. Given what I know about difficulties of the DNA sequence analysis and the text similarity searches from my days at ACD/Labs this product development team rocks! Beowulf cluster does the job, but I am sure they will be hit by the raising electricity costs as the power consumption of the cluster goes up and up with every new customer...
   
• Social Q/A Website, (?) – A very simple concept behind this: all people have question, other have free time and might answer them.
   
• Outmailer, (Ruby On Rails) – If I am not mistaken, this was Ruby On Rails learning exercise.
   
• tag-Engine, (PHP 5) – Josh Davey gave a demo of a this exciting new library. This is all about letting the Power Users to directly customize the content of their web pages. The Power User hates forms as considers them way too simple, but makes too many errors while using true programming language. The Power User needs simplified programming environment. This is what Excel is on Windows... The implementation of tag-Engine-like thing is quite difficult, especially in PHP. No doubt a lot of work went into the grammar, abstract-syntax tree, evaluator, error reporting to the user, runtime performance, and coordination of presentation view with meta-model. Very difficult job indeed! These kinds of skills are very rare, and there is no surprise that John Lam and Josh Davey are rumored to be working together now.
   

Final word
This was the first DemoCamp / BarCamp I attend and was greatly impressed. Over 100 people in the room, all quietly listening about Java-tag libraries done in PHP... Unbeliavable! I live in the city since 1997 and have never seen one of these! The high gas prices have probably caused this, I guess.