BarCamp London - Day Two
Apparently ‘early to bed’ gets you the best seat sofa in the house – much more comfortable than the floor. I must be getting old, I could hardly keep my eyes open much past midnight – not for me the going-until-6am Werewolf game! I woke to find that my UI analysis of the toilet door had been further expanded upon during the night (although it was removed before the end of the day).
Presentations
I missed Matt Somerville’s session on trains, maps and mashups, but it sounded really good. My own session, ‘Thinking In Objects – Applying Object Oriented Concepts to Javascript Applications’, was fairly under-subscribed (Andy Budd was in the next room) but went well and generated some discussion afterwards.
Over lunch there was a lengthy discussion of privacy issues led by Matt Rink, although I don’t think we actually reached any firm conclusions. Tom Hughes-Croucher of Y! mentioned the Open Rights Group who campaign on digital rights issues – check them out.
One of the most fun sessions I attended was Matt Westcott’s demonstrations of what can be accomplished in 3D with Javascript. Although mostly demos of pretty but pointless stuff you can do with JS, image manipulation and complex math (including spinning ASCII art which was pretty cool), he also showed a version of Doom done in Javascript (sweeet); a 3D engine he built featuring movable lighting and camera moves (which got a round of applause); and announced the release of the Canvastastic JS library for 3D canvas rendering and modelling, with which he had built a dancing robot. All very cool stuff – now we just need some real-world uses!
Simon Willison, incidentally, is infectious enthusiasm personified.
PHP frameworks
It was surprising to hear that Yahoo! have been investigating using PHP frameworks – one would assume they would write their own, a la YUI – but Tim and Ed from Y! took us through an enjoyable hour on frameworks, and Code Igniter in particular (excellent, as it’s my chosen framework).
Some notes from Tim’s part of the presentation:
- Frameworks generally consist of scaffolding, data abstraction, view management and url routing (REST-style, which is good for SEO)
- Helps with “partitioning change” – good term for OO approach
- Can distribute MVC across different machines (relevant for large scalability org like Y!)
- Potential problem is that code that should be in the Controller end up in the Model – Model should only have code that talks to the database, not stuff like validation
- Active Record pattern – database persistence/abstraction, provides query methods, attributes, persistence
- Looked at CakePHP, Symfony, Qcodo and CodeIgniter
They showed a table of rankings for these frameworks in various categories; Code Igniter was classed as having ‘Weak’ Models but ‘Strong’ Views and ‘High’ Performance.
Ed then ran through some of the pros and cons of using Code Igniter – escaping database content, xss filtering, limited url characters, destroys global variables, full page caching only, basic unit testing mechanism, no i18n (although this was a failing of virtually all frameworks according to Tim).
Pecha Kucha
The highlight of the weekend according to those who were lucky enough to be there were the Pecha Kucha sessions, and especially those powered by Salted’s latest invention, the Del.icio.us Pecha Kucha presentation creator, which creates a 6-minute presentation from your last 20 del.icio.us bookmarks, each of which are displayed for 20 seconds for you to talk about.
Watching people struggle to remember what the hell they were thinking when they bookmarked that t-shirt site or gastronomy review blog was immensely enjoyable, and I can see it becoming a mainstay of the web standards conference scene.
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