Web On The Piste

nparker — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:12:00 GMT

Last year at WOTP I posted about the Web Jam and the Dystro/ Glenn stuff.

This year it was fun to head back to Queenstown and reflex on another years worth of development on our RIA platforms.

It was fantastic to team up with Michael Kordahi DG for the first time at an event.

There was a strong team representing the MS side of the house thanks to Tatham Oddie, Jose Fajardo and Chris Auld for their top notch sessions.

Surprisingly the conference was both more developer and UX focused than last year steering clear of media and interface design.

Without Matt Voerman and Scott Barnes in attendance this year the Blue v Red aspect of the Microsoft/ Adobe panel discussion didn't have quite the venom. Pip from Gruden commented on the WOTP blog...

"Great panel discussion yesterday evening, Microsoft and Adobe playing (marginally) happily together for a great session"

I'm looking forward for this to go online so I can remember what I actually said!

Michael delivered a killer keynote on the second day which should also be up on the web on the piste website shortly. He had prepared it previously for the Australia partner conference and it was the perfect fit for this conference as well.

Chris introduced the Runtime Page Optimizer that the actionthis.com team has built. RPO drops into the integrated pipeline in IIS7 to dynamically perform yslow optimizations on a web site at runtime. It does this by combining .js, css into single files and builds out css sprites. If you are hosting on Windows from New Zealand I highly recommend taking the beta for a spin as it vastly improves latency for your ASP.NET or PHP website.

Speaking of Web Servers I am also very impressed with Tatham's ability to demonstrate PHP running on IIS7 using FastCGI, then integrating with an ASP.NET application before finally load balancing the whole application between two servers in a high availability, automatic failover cluster all in less than 8 minutes, check out his screencast!

My webjam this year was to build a panoramic deepzoom of Queenstown and I only used half of the 5 minutes allocated!

Check out the screencast below of the steps involved and download the August update of deepzoom composer to try it out for yourself.

Both mine and Michael's resulting panoramic deepzooms are below.

Also I created a Queenstown Photosynth as well.

Paul Lo did a great job as roaming reporter for the event a produced the following video...

I'll also leave you with a couple of episodes of DG TV from the event.

See you at Tech.Ed next week.

Web On The Piste - Post 1 - The Web Jam

nparker — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 06:02:00 GMT

This is the first in a series of posts that I plan to do on the recent Web On The Piste conference that took place in Queenstown.

Scott did a great job on the weekend introducing the two C's rule for RIA (worth reading if you haven't already). I would go as far as adding a third C to the mix "concept".

This way we end with "Concept", "Content" and "Context" and Scott's statement that Context is King, Content just fuels Context.

Now let me put this into "context" ;) for the WOTP conference.

On the second day keynote Thomas Burleson of Universal Mind showed a concept (prototype) RIA application that they created for the San Francisco police to geocode crime and police and even sync in video from the bonnet of the patrol cars. It was a nice concept but that fact that the video that played was of a "famous police chase" made the audience aware that this was a "concept" application.

In contrast the Live team at Microsoft has released Contoso Bike Club, as part of the overall Windows Live Quick Apps: The "bike cam" demo on the Thames River synchronizes the video with the map display on the route via captured GPS data placed as metadata into the WMV stream and scripted through the Silverlight player. This is better IMO as it provides real data (content) and some context.

Better still was the "What I did in Auckland" session that won the webjam at WOTP.

Tom Link (also of Universal Mind) took this all one step further by showed the equipment he used to collect "real data" (the GPS watch, his camera), he then showed an actual path, photos and replay of his time in Auckland that had occurred only days before.

The difference for me is that Thomas showed a Concept, Contose Bikes took it one step further and provided Content (GPS route data sync'd with real video and source code) and Tom nailed it with Context. You may disagree w/ me but IMO this is why Tom won.

I think the lesson for Andrew and myself here is that we both took "features" for our webjam demos and tried to "retrofit content and context" into the presentations. Andrew chose LOB, data visualization and offline support (through Google gears). I chose video brush, designer/ developer workflow and Silverlight web integration.

The other lesson I have to take away is "operator error"... I didn't record all of the web jam sorry! I forgot to press record in part and I ran out of tape in other parts. I missed my own jam session completely!

Nonetheless here is what I've got!

Oh yeah and since I didn't record my JAM I took the liberty to do a screen cast of the extended version (why because I can!). On the day my 3 mins finished with me hitting F5 and running the video w/ rounded corners and reflection in the browser (just like you see below). In the following screen cast I have added, mouse click events in javascript for full screen support and also packaging and uploading the finished application into silverlight streaming in the cloud. The screen cast is 8 minutes long and I have sped up the video slightly so that it remains punchy!

The other thing I was interested in from the Webjam was Robin's quick fire presentation on the Model View Controller pattern. I am always interested in the MVC v MVP debates that crop up between "purists" at web conferences so I thought I'd link to a couple of articles that I like that describe the differences (similarities) between the two patterns... From a Flash dev side, from an MS Dev side...

If you were at the webjam at WOTP you would have seen the "high-def" video background of NZL14 sailing across the lake in Queenstown... I have added this to BackgroundMotion an open source community site put together by the team at Mindscape you might be interested in their view on MVP.

Enjoy!

Nigel Parker's Outside Line : wotp

Web On The Piste

Web On The Piste - Post 1 - The Web Jam