h1ghlevelb1ts

Second day of SWDC is about the mobile web. The first talk by Wolfram Kriesing set the tone - the future mobile app is built with HTML. The need for native apps will simply go away. There are some things you can't do with a webapp that you need to do with a native app. To solve this problem there is Phonegap that bridges native functionality to the webapp. The mission of phonegap is to finally disappear when these features is part of the HTML spec and implemented in all browsers. It seems like a distant future. In the meantime we can build one webapp and use phonegap to get it to various devices.

Then Mikael Kindborg talked about dynamic languages on the android platform. He showcased droidscript that lets you dynamically run apps with javascript on your phone. I have seen it before and it was as cool as always.

SonyEricsson had an advertisment spot that first was an old school presentation by Claes Nilsson and then a more interesting hands on demonstration of Sonys development tools by Thomas Bailey. Also Eclipse was started for the second time this conference. It felt weird this time too.

Tom Hughes-Croucher of Yahoo! held a splendid presentation on latency arguing that bandwidth is not a problem - latency is. He made a really nice breakdown of the typical problems of performance with wireless devices. Mobile phones as well as laptops. He finished of with showcasing YQL - a Yahoo! tool to do joined queries on the server instead of joining them at the client.

Tom Blackmore - the gis guy - talked about how to implement geolocation succesfully. Lots of eaxmples, code and urls to illustrate. His enthusiasm is really something.

Nikolai Onken from Uxebu talked about human apis - his video examples didn't work but he still managed to convey his message. New smart phones combined with new smart HTML enables us to make really smart applications. One app he made shows the heart rate via bluetooth in a mobile web application. (On a jailbreaked iphone though.... :-) ) He also had some gear with him to get temperature and humidity readings. All truly imaginative stuff and a motivator for moving forward.

Googles Michael Mahemoff talked a bit (more) about HTML5 and the endless possibilities. At this point I was a bit tired and started to drift away. Henk Jurriens talk about open data sets didn't really wake me up either although the subject is really interesting.

Tim Caswell on the other hand had a lot to say about node.js. He had lots of code that I barely understood and he made a really, really cool demo where 2 web browsers on devices he brought together with several browsers in the audience moved circles around concurrently. The node.js server had no problem orchestrating several concurrent users posting loads of data concurrently. Really cool.

2 days of web development conferencing is now over and I have to return to the warm embrace of my current client and a Java enterprise portal project. How strange that I haven't heard a word about portals in any of the 5 or 6 conferences I have been to the last 18 months..... Oh well - it still pays the bills. Anyhow - superthanks to Peter Svensson and his crew for a great conference. I will be back next year!