My employers, POKE, were kind enough to send me to FOWA 2007, a conference boldly titled "The Future of Web Apps".
The quality of the speakers and talks was nothing short of amazing. My head is full of ideas and inspiration after listening to the thoughts and musings of some of the leading minds in web development.
I'll do a full blog and summary of the conference as soon as I have some time (I'm going to Alton Towers tomorrow and need sleep), but here's a teaser:
Steve Souders, Chief Performance !Yahoo
High Performance Websites
- Optimising the front-end is cheaper, faster and more effective at creating a more responsive application to the user as opposed to optimising the backend.
- Golden Rule, plus 14 "best practises". Most very quick and easy to implement, some can lead to drastic speed improvements for users
Dion Almears, Google/Ajaxian.com
Offline Web Applications
This talk was awesome. Dion really knows his shit, and I was gripped with the plans for Gears and libraries built on top of it, and intruiged by the "sync" problem.
Matt Mullenweg
Scaling
This was the most surprising talk. I've been a user of wordpress and a reader of photomatt for years, but I had no idea Matt was such a hardcore developer/architect. Loads of wisdom on "do" and "don't" to do with web architectures and a lovely outline of the "Mini-matt Cluser" - internet clouds and all.
Loved the notion of "being stateless" which allows much more instant expansion of the hardware architecture; for example instead of using sessions (which prevents distribution load/data) you could encrypt the username and password in a cookie and authenticate the user for every request. With the correct database architecture, the read on the username/password will be a primary key lookup (hint: FAST) so performance shouldn't be affected too much.
Very cool views on advertising too, and targeting only the users who will genuinely use (i.e., click) the advertising.
John Resig, Mozilla/jQuery
Future of Firefox, Future of Javascript
An awesome talk. Some really exciting new features in Firefox including SVG and Canvas 3D which lead to the craziest thing I saw all day: writing real C code in HTML. Yes, you heard me. Canvas 3D exposes the OpenGL C API which you can call/use directly from a web page. All proof on concept, and after being grilled about security in the Q&A session, notably tounge-in-cheek, but exciting none the less.
The new Javascript engine, Tamarin, looks exciting too with its support for Javacript 2.0. Real classes (yay, no more prototype chain hacking) and packages amongst the best.
Like I said, I'll do a full blog along with a proper brain dump of the ideas and opinions when I'm back tomorrow night.
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