A look back at OSCON. I’ll do my best to weave together some impressions under my
three themes of PHP, Productivity, and Trends. I’ll also mention a couple of things (collaborative editing, and
wireless video) that will undoubtedly come into play in future
conventions.
Any wrap-up
after such a wide-ranging conference is bound to be a sliver
of a sliver - there were lots of Perl, Python, Ruby sessions
I never went to; not to mention many non-programming sessions,
such as legal issues (SCO vs IBM, Intellectual Property Law Basics for Open Source Developers). Indeed, there were often 11 things going on at once!
PHP
Sterling kicked off the week with a great tutorial
on Advanced PHP. I wrote about this in my Monday ORN blog.
A key area of interest in Sterling’s talk is performance. I’ll be checking
out the PEAR package APC - Alternative PHP Cache very soon. PHP can take longer to compile
classes on the fly than to execute them, so a cache can really
speed things up.
I got two looks at doing web services with PHP. The more
theoretical talk was Sterling’s “Web Services with PHP”. Adam Trachtenberg did a more applied version
with his “Web Services in PHP” (yes, titles are similar). Want to
come up to speed on Web Services with real data? A first step
is to be a client that consumes a web service. One possibility
is to head over Amazon, sign up ( ) and experiment
with product searches and how you can output the data.
(such as smallest shop)…
Some places to explore PHP & SOAP:
Use PHP? Check out PEAR (pear.php.net), which provides libraries
much in the same spirit as CPAN does for Perl. I wrote about
Shane Caraveo’s talk on PEAR in my Wednesday blog entry.
A flip side to this may be how PHP is used at Yahoo. Michael Radwin
of Yahoo gave a talk (also mentioned in my Wednesday entry) where
a key point was: “use abstraction sparingly. Don’t add a bunch of layers, as it can be costly”. It is good to know that PHP has
matured to the point where a wide range of developers can
approach it from different angles. Want ease of getting
started? Go to go-pear.org, follow
the instructions, and then try some Pear packages (like PEAR::DB). Want performance? Use PHP calls
directly, or better yet, write a C/C++ extension using PECL.
Yahoo has written about 70 of them.
Shane also gave a talk on PHP5, with slides available at talks.php.net/show/php5-intro-oscon-2003. I mentioned this on Thursday. There
are lots of improvements in PHP5, and if I had to pick one
that will really help me out, it would be exception handing
(try/catch/throw). I am eager to get away from a myriad
of “if” statements! The “Objects are automatically references”
aspect is also great. SimpleXML and SQLite are also crazy sexy cool.
Productivity
There are two main projects that I will mention that can
do a lot for productivity. Jabber is useful today (but also
falls easily into my notion of trends). Eclipse is
intruiging, and I managed to keep it mostly away
from my PHP writeups.
Jabber
Jabber is so much more than an IM and group chat client.
In the context of productivity, though, I’ll point out the
following:
- Multiple transports - need to talk to someone on AIM, MSN. Yahoo Messenger? Jabber talks to all of them
- Multiple platforms - yes.
- Encrypted? Compressed? - yes, can do
- An application can effectively have YOU on its contact roster, and send notifications when it needs attention (errors, jobs that have finished, status updates, and so on) - this frees you up so that you don’t have to keep watch over a process
Eclipse
Eclipse is a highly extensible IDE for whatever you would like to customize it for. An angle that
interested me was Christopher Judd’s talk “Eclipse PHP for Developers”,
which took a look at how to construct an environment with
debugging, navigation, and other traditional IDE features.
I’m about to try out the TruStudio tools, which sit
on top of Eclipse. It will be great to have a true debugger,
as opposed to watching statements flow into an Apache error log.
Another site for finding eclipse plugins is eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/index.jsp
Three Trends
Crossing over from Productivity to Trends, I still have
things to say about Jabber. But first, I will mention
once again a tidbit from Tim O’Reilly’s talk: networking enables collaboration.
I can easily remember Usenet days in the 1980’s, and
how software development projects were posted to newsgroups
(shar archives, anyone?) Patches to those projects (as in, Larry Wall’s
Patch program) would be posted to newsgroups as well. The next
leap was the web, where every project seemed to have its
own .org domain. Networking enables collaboration.
Does Jabber have the potential to take this a step
forward? It’s two XML streams per connection, one
in either direction. Apple’s iChat uses Jabber.
File Transfer is there, and the potential to ask
a program for a custom file is there. The potential for a Hydra
clone (for multiuser collaborative editing) is there.
The potential for videoconferencing (perhaps Out Of Band?)
is there. I think we are going to see interesting
applications where Jabber is used for a transport
to enable web services (it’s much more efficient
than HTTP). Keep an eye on jabberstudio.org/
Another big shift revolves around the idea “I like my
custom web site, but I want to use your data”. Amazon
Web Services are one of many examples of this.
Jeff Barr, Amazon Tech Program Manager, stated
a simple goal: Enable discovering and buying from anywhere.
A few examples of it in use:
For more information on Amazon Web Services: http://amazon.com/webservices
Amazon is just the tip of the Web Services iceberg. Google
is also leading in this area with their offerings: http://www.google.com/apis/
See webservices.oreilly.com/ for a lot more information.
I’ll ignore all things blogging, so far as trends go. As Clay
Shirky has put it, we could have been doing this 8 years
ago with web forms. It just took some easy to use front
ends (like Moveable Type) to get it going. What’s more
interesting to me is the wonderful world of Wiki.
A Wiki that got lots of use before and during OSCON
was Brian “ingy” Ingerson’s Kwiki powered oscon.kwiki.org
Wikis allow for a very diverse group of users
(grannies running www.quiltzilla.com/,
geeks running londongeek.org/) to
evolve a website that can capture, organize, and make searchable
a lot of information. The emphasis is on the information,
more than pretty presentation. Get Kwiki at http://kwiki.org/.
What happens when Wikis start calling web services?
What happens when Wiki links can fire off a jabber session,
possibly leading to the automatic update of other Wiki pages?
I can visualize a lot of intersections, and while it is
true that some of them will be skipped, it is also true
that it is getting easier to glue functionality together
in any of the three P’s: Perl, Python, and PHP. Stay Tuned!
Future Conventions
Note Bene: These are my personal opinions, which may
or may not reflect what the O’Reilly staff is thinking.
I haven’t talked to them about things to do with
video from laptops. I do see it as an issue on
the near horizon that they, and indeed any tech
convention organizer, will need to ponder.
Hydra was used quite a bit at the Emerging Tech Conference,
but was much less in evidence at OSCON. I found this
puzzling, and wrote an entry, “Hydra Missing”, in my personal blog. The gist of it is: we need a
Hydra clone for all platforms, and we need people
to trust the process of collaborative editing. My selfish
interest in it is that I want a more complete set of
notes from a talk (even ones where I am not in the room).
No one person can capture a talk like a group.
The capabilities of iChat AV and iSight should be
considered by conference organizers going forward.
There are a couple of reasons for this: bandwidth,
and the notion of broadcasting a talk (permissions).
Imagine a conference like OSCON, with up to 11 simultaneous
sessions. Now, 2 or 3 people in each session decide
to open up iChat AV or its equivalent, so that the
talk can be seen in other rooms, captured, etc.
That’s about 20-30 decent quality video streams.
What happens to the network?
I suppose one can say “capture it, and make it
available via BitTorrent later”. There’s
IM and IRC, Jabber and Hydra… all mostly text,
and consuming pretty
low bandwidth. Cheap laptop video has the potential
to consume the majority of available convention wireless
bandwidth, and it will start happening within a year.
Heads up, conference planners!
Which leads to the whole permission aspect. There
will be a need for clarity as to whether it’s cool (in increasing
levels of permissiveness) to a) video capture a talk for yourself, b) share
it later, and c) share it live
Did you go to OSCON 2003? What were your impressions? If you did not go, was the coverage helpful?