Friday wrap-up #2
CASCON was running this week from Monday to Thursday. I didn’t realize this was a free conference for everyone, including people outside IBM. I saw a bunch of professors from McMaster also, some were giving talks.
I went to the Ruby on Rails workshop and it was going OK until one of the presenters starting comparing Ruby on Rails (RoR) to PHP. People need to get something straight: Ruby is the programming language and Rails is a framework. Comparing RoR to PHP isn’t fair, since PHP is the programming language with no framework. If you’re going to compare them, make sure your using some type of template engine like Smarty, etc.
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I had a display at the Technology Showcase from 11:30am to 1:30pm, presenting WDSC and JWL. The experience was good, I met a lot of great people really interested in AJAX and JSF.
Doug Crockford is a smart guy, he’s a JavaScript guru and the creator of JSON. Earlier this year he wrote a paper describing JSONRequest, here’s the abstract:
XMLHttpRequest has a security model which is inadequate for supporting the next generation of web applications. JSONRequest is proposed as a new browser service that allows for two-way data exchange with any JSON data server without exposing users or organization to harm. It exchanges data between scripts on pages with JSON servers in the web. It is hoped that browser makers will build this feature into their products in order to enable the next advance in web application development.
It’s a good read and not a bad idea (though received a lot of criticism). There has also been heavy discussion about this on the Dojo mailing list. Doug’s personal website is filled with great JavaScript articles and resources – especially this article on objects in JavaScript.
I read Chapter 5 of Roy Fielding’s dissertation, which introduced REST or Representational State Transfer. REST is a lot like the Relational Database, conceptually its easy, but has the potential to revolutionize how we do certain things.
