XTech 2006 – day 0/1

The flight was bad, as always with LOT Airlines. I landed around 23:00, found Termie and Nadia, they got me to their place (which is awesome!), I took a shower, and went for a beer with Andy. Few beers, few hours and we were back home got some sleep. Day 0 is ready. (shots from Amsterdam: [1], [2], [3], [4])
Day 1 started at 08:30 am, shower, cornflakes, short web lurking, and went to XTech.

The first talk was awesome. Simon was presenting the JS framework that seems to be great. After few minutes of lurking, I see that their library is not that great (Animation module seems to be very poor),
but it’s still worth contributing and I’m considering using this as a JS lib for Bugzilla. (shots: [1], [2], [3])
They also made a poor job on browser detection, and I hope it’ll get better now.

Next talk was led by Termie on behalf of Alex Russel from Dojo. Termie’s speedtalk was without of slides which was good, because if people would be forced to try to understand termie at his speed talking, and scan the screen, they’d be doomed. Termie/Alex was talking about Web 2.0/Ajax culture, reasons behind it (it’s evolution, not revolution, it’s the logical next step, not a buzzword).

Short break, and we got to OpenLaszlo talk. OpenLaszlo seems to be very, very powerfull platform, with possible drawback on code cleannes. It allows you to create rich web applications and then select the result technology (actually – flash or dhtml/ajax). It could be extended to work with XUL, XAML etc.

Next talk was about Hijaxing. I’m happy that someone did a talk about the way I believe Ajax should be developed. It was basicly against-ajax-lock-in talk about creating pure HTML code first and the putting fancy Ajax on top of it to simplify the world for ajax-capable browsers. Actually, in my work on Bugzilla UI, I’m doing even one step earlier: I model the UI first, do usability, review, then code pure, accessible HTML, and then put Ajax on top of it. I’m using this approach since my first Ajax-y work, and this made me not understand W3C freaks screaming that Ajax is “not accessible” – Ajax has nothing to do with accessibilty or it’s lack. If you want to create accessible page, you can. Also, “Web 2.0” is also about standards, usability and accessibility, so it’s obvious that more web 2.0 means more fun for people with disabilities.

Then we went for a lunch with Pike, Termie, Andy and Gijs. Lunch took us a bit too much time, so we missed Developing Enterprise Applications with Ajax and XUL.

I didn’t like the Adobe’s talk, which came next. Possibly, I’m just too much anti-flash and sad-that-adobe-focused-on-flash-instead-of-svg, but the talk was pure marketing and I never enjoy marketing talks.

Then, after next small brak, the talks went crazy, not following Schedule at all, which makes it impossible for me to report what happened. The lightning demos didn’t show anything new to me, but it’s nice to see people focusing on usability and user workflow quality more these days.

After the talks we got for a free wine/juice/water+small junks of food sponsored by Mozilla, and then we went for a dinner with Michael from Opera, Tristan, Ian, Termie, Gerv, Gijs and Hish. Dinner was great, food was good, and beer was … well, beer 🙂 We got some pictures of toast made by Opera, Flock and Mozilla all together! :] (shot: [1])
From dinner place we did move to drinking place, and then to another, another, and we ended around 2 am with Ryan from Technorati, Ian and Andy walking amsterdam streets and steping in every possible pub on our way 😉 It was great.