wiki.webvm.net/ papers/ xtech2008

Proposal for Xtech2008

“The Web on the Move” is the theme and the deadline is January 25th, 2008.

Topic title suggestions

  1. Exposing device APIs with WebVM
  2. Mobile device API access
  3. Exposing location to the mobile browser
  4. Solving the device API problem
  5. Mobile ajax is not just about interactivity

Description (brief overview for marketing purposes, max. length 400 characters—about 65 words)

Millions of Java deployments on mobile devices implement device APIs. Device APIs that implement standard interfaces (via JSRs) to files (offline), camera, location, the addressbook, bluetooth amongst others.

The WebVM plugin efficiently exposes these Java implementations via a familiar javascript interface to the browser. Setting the foundation for some very interesting Web applications on the move.

Abstract

The Aplix corporation, a member of the “Open Handheld alliance”:http://openhandsetalliance.com/ is committed to providing an excellent Web user experience on mobile devices. Codename “WebVM”:http://wiki.webvm.net is a new approach by Aplix to improve the mobile Web by leveraging our widely deployed Java VM, the Jblend platform.

“Compared to Liveconnect”:http://wiki.webvm.net/webvm/liveconnectcomparison/ WebVM encourages Web developers to use the Web API, not Java. WebVM should also be much faster and better deployed on mobile devices.

Any interested party can define their own device “APIs”:http://wiki.webvm.net/api to suit their own purposes, so long as the underlying functionality needed is provided by a Java profile. APIs can be created and deployed by publishers, carriers or manufacturers as needed, and superseded by standard APIs once they become available.

Report of Xtech 2008

The cost is quite high:

£1419GBP (consisting of £719 conf registration, £600 accommodation 4 nights, £100 travel).

The schedule had a split personality. Those that were XML centric (include RDF) and those that were more focused on the pragmatic issues of Web HTML5. Though the conference was themed “The Web on the Move”, there was very little to do with Mobiles.

The IDEAlliance organisation left a lot to be desired. For example the Web registration of the Xtech conference did not work. I had to fax through registration details. Similarly I had to call to book the hotel. Quite embarrassing for an event that showcases the bleeding edge in Web applications. The conference bags were from 2007 and had very uninspiring contents.

I (Kai Hendry, all opinions etc. are my own) attended the HTML track. I didn’t attend the tutorials on Tuesday as I didn’t find them interesting and more importantly was not prepared to pay for them.

I did check into the Raddisson SAS Royal Hotel and I thankfully found the hotel very new. The hotel had it’s grand opening just last month and the facilities are excellent. Though, no sauna. :)

Wednesday 7th of May

Tbh I found Simon Wardley’s commodisation keynote a little boring. David Recordon produced a good session though I’d wish he would address some of the bugs in the Perl OpenID 2 library.

I saw Douglas give the same speech at @media AJAX a few months before at @media AJAX 2007. Now he also selling a O’reilly book to go with it. :)

Very well subscribed and enjoyable talk. I didn’t know the Aplix Corporation were members of Vision Mobile’s elite 100 million club. I also was reminded that George Staikos now works for torchmobile.

Lunch had a terrifyingly long queue and the food wasn’t very good. Breakfast before however was excellent.

Nothing too interesting. Some results showing CSV as being fast to parse. This is quite a contentious area to measure, though I do support CSV (line based protocols) over XML. HOWEVER there are many several slight variations of CSV. Best to stick to the rfc4180 and normalise to it.

Doing full circle: Giving Web Applications and Widgets access to device and user data Arve Bersvendsen (Opera Software ASA)

Finally, a talk by someone that matters. A representative from a browser vendor! Excellent talk and importantly File IO announced.

Validator.nu — Validation 2.0 Henri Sivonen (Henri Sivonen)

Validator talk was good. I just wrote a vim script to use Validator’s API. Henri works for Mozilla, but doesn’t really represent them. Sadly the closest we came to Mozilla attending the conference.

Thursday 8th of May

OpenSocial, a standard programming model for the Social Web Chewy Trewhella (Google)

Initially I though Open Social was about sharing contacts. It isn’t. It seems like a very restrictive widget interface. Quite disspapointing.

Creating portable social networks with microformats

I actually know enough about Microformats that this seemed to be like a dejavu from a few years ago when I was more involved. After having hCard on my personal website for a few years now, I’ve become a little jaded with Microformats.

Advanced OAuth Wrangling Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Flickr (Yahoo))

Excellent talk about OAuth which simple & flexible. OAuth is about accessing protected resources.

Ni Hao, Monde: Connecting communities across cultural and linguistic boundaries Simon Batistoni (Flickr)

I really enjoyed this talk too. Mainly about i18n strategies like using symbols.

Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB Jan Lehnardt (Freisatz)

Very interesting and it has a debian package! I need to try this out some Sunday. On the down side, I am not too happy about the Erlang deps.

Data portability for whom? Some psychology behind the tech Gavin Bell (Nature)

Kinda dull for me. Gavin mentioned how unlikely people are to have NPAPI or new plugins installed. I like to think this is largely due to the difficulty installing them and keeping them up to date. WebVM would have a better chance here, as we have the ability to pre-install the software plugin. Like we’ve done for JBlend in the past.

Google Data APIs on the move: innovation vs. Standards Compliance Frank Mantek (Google)

Frank Mantek is actually a really nice guy and I enjoyed the conversation I had with him before his talk. I argued that Gdata’s Atom XML format is hard to parse and even harder to create. I think he was quite surprised to hear this at a Xtech conference. He was bemused with my proposal for a line based (CSV) protocol for interacting with Google services.

The good news is that Google is committed to JSON. Which is much better to wrangle than XML.

Client Login will be going. Good riddance, Auth sub is much better.

Future of client-side cross-site requests! Anne van Kesteren (Opera Software ASA)

Another much anticipated talk. Access control is really just about cross site requests. It’s not to be confused with widget security.

There are two parts, access control white list (like robots.txt I imagine) and the access-control-origin in which the server checks the header.

An excellent little battle of brains occurred between Douglas Crockford and Anne van Kesteren. Simon Willison, Opera guys and Henri Sivonen also chimed in. Definitely the most important moment of the event. I’m not so convinced about Douglas solitary JSONRequest request. I trust Anne’s and Hixie’s proposal more.

20:20 Lightning talks

Finally the lightning talks. This is the highlight of the event as I also gave a talk on device API landscape.

The format was strictly kept to and since I didn’t have 20 slides I was cut short after 16. In future I’ll try make sure I have 20 slides. But then again, I am no fan of slides. I guess I should have just spaced it out more. Anyway I think the talk went well and I received some good feedback. However my voice was quite croaky. I blame the hotel’s over zealous air conditioning.

I also enjoyed the majority of the other talks.

Unfortunately @projection and Opera show presentations don’t seem to scale well to esoteric projectors. Though it wasn’t too bad.

Friday 9th of May

The talks I went to were about RDFA (microformats version of RDF) which is kinda pointless IMO. The last keynote took too long and I had to leave early to checkout. In hindsight perhaps I should have checked out earlier.

Conclusion

I’ll be surprised if Xtech happens next year. I think a technical F2F conference once a year between WebKit, Mozilla, Opera and other browser vendors is sadly still left wanting. XML at ten years is very embarrassing! Long live HTML and death to XHTML.

Met some really good people IRL, though there weren’t too many new faces.