Today was the first day of the Internet World here in Munich. It is accompanied by RIA World and Mobile Vision, so you get three conferences at once. Unfortunately their schedules are not synchronized, pretty uncomfortable. This event is a mix of conference and fair. You can find and talk to a lot of (mostly) german companies and get all the infos you need. And on the other hand you can get some information about those three topics in the talks at the conference. And as usual the beer at the after-party is for free, even for those who are only there to see the fair and don’t have to pay, as I understood it. So come for a free beer :-).
Just a major flaw in the organization of this event is this big booklet that you need to look up the schedule, it’s not really handy and I wished a lot of times I had a phone that runs EventNinja ;-). Yes, this is our app. Unfortunately my SonyEriccson has no W3C widget runtime available, but hopefully their Symbian-powered phone that will come out (as I heard today) will have one, though I will probably switch to Android or the Palm Pre anyway.
The topics covered at those three conferences are not as bleeding-edge as we like them to be :-). But this is ok, since it is a more business-oriented conference. Though there are quite some old facts around and the mobile world just moves much faster than some of the talks at this conference do. It was also funny that relatively old facts e.g. about the features and some of the fun apps that exist for the iPhone still seemed to amuse the people.
But probably the worst fact about this conference is that there is no free WLAN, you have to pay 24€ for 8h, and that is the Internet World Congress? Hallo? Sorry, but this is really not state of the art, I hope the discuss&discover will do better there.
Rely on Cloud Service?
I just heard that google analytics was guilty for bringing down pages like bild.de for a day. Because the page relied on google analytics to be loaded fully, but due to the down time of this google service the page never loaded in the user’s browser. Sorry, but in this case the solution is not the SLA or kicking out the JavaScript, just look at the Dojo module dojox.analytics, which Pete Higgins wrote and which does what should be done in this case, load the script after the relevant content was loaded, asynchronously. So please make the developers responsible, not the service provider. If you are relying on this service, make sure that failure is a case you planned for. Don’t use the cloud if you don’t know what the implications are!
W3C widgets
Since Mobile Vision is one of the conferences and we are also active in the mobile space, I need to state that the W3C widgets, as e.g. Vodafone is already pushing them, had been very much ignored here. How much (mobile) vision do you get here?
Read the Introduction to W3C Widgets by PPK to get an overview of what these things are. So let me just summarize the advantages and differences of W3C widgets compared to the usual native apps.
- Allows deployment to multiple mobile platforms (and the browser of course too)
- Rapid prototyping is much faster and cheaper
- Uses the standard technologies HTML, CSS and JavaScript
- Therefore a much larger potential developer base
Of course there are new things to consider. You need to learn about the distribution ways (AppStores, etc.), how to deploy and you mostly have to sign your apps. But all those things easily outweigh the pains you need to go through when learning all the native technologies.
Well, maybe we are too spoiled from conferences like Ajax Experience, Ajax in Action and Mobile2.0.