From Web 2.0 to BarCampBrussels
Haven't had a lot of time to blog lately due to a busy schedule. With this a quick overview ...
Last week I participated in an internal summit on the evolution of the web in Switzerland. Tom Raftery - well known blogger - presented his view how things are evolving on the web. During these 3 days we had a look at the industry trends that happened since 1995 till today. A lot of talking about Google, Yahoo, MSN, Windows Live, Technorati and other companies that brand themselves as "Web 2.0"-ready. Also a lot of discussion on Microsoft's postion in this whole story. Will Microsoft be able to catch up? Will the Client OS still matter in a couple of years? Will the competition wth Web 2.0 drive the next generation platform of Windows?
A lot of questions. Tons of answers, ideas and plans. In any case we'll have to wait a couple of years to knowwhat the web will look like in the future.
Yesterday I attended BarcampBrussels which took place in the SAP Lounge. Barcamp is what's called an unconference for anyone who's interested in technology, the Internet and related topics. Peter Forret did an excellent job in organizing this event for the second time. A big thank you to Clo Willaerts of Skynet for taking care of the venue, catering and t-shirts.
First session in the morning that I attended was one on the integration of Microsoft AJAX libraries with PHP. The talk was delivered by Grégory Renard and Aurélien Verla. It was interesting to see Microsoft Atlas (JavaScript) client-side libraries integrate with PHP. Unfortunately 30' wasn't enough to cover the full story.
Next talk was one hosted by Bruno Peeters who discussed trends of blog community platforms in Belgium. Interesting to see that some attendees don't consider myspace.com and spaces.live.com as regular blogging platforms because mainly they don't have content that could interest them... On the other hand I'm not really convinced that 16 year old bloggers on Live Spaces would be interested in the content posted on more serious platforms like TypePad, WordPress, etc. Both platforms serve different purposes and audiences.
"10 Lessons from Prøn Industry" was a talk hosted by Clo discussing 10 facts that happened first in the Prøn industry before becoming mainstream. Not really new stuff but interesting enough to attract aprox. 30 people and keeping them interested during 30'.
Next Bart De Waele hosted an interesting session on Google's dirty little secrets. Check out his blog post for the glory details!
The last session I attended at BarCamp was one on Ruby on Rails. Denis Lamotte gave a demo on how Rails can be used as a web platform. I like the idea of Rails and some of the concepts it uses. Despite that I'm not really convinced this can be considered as a "trusted" platform for building large web sites. Denis confirmed that Rails, as a language, is rather slow and the memory consumption on the server can be problem. Nevertheless this is a platform that I'll start watching mor closely in the future.
All these sessions, the interaction between attendees, the location made it a great "unconference". Check out some pictures of the event on Flickr tagged with BarCampBrussels.
Today we hosted the .NET Framework 3.0 event in Kinepolis. This event resulted - as previously reported - in a full house of developers. More details to follow ...
