XTech, Day 2

Yesterday was the second day at XTech 2006, and the first conference day. We had a very entertaining albeit a bit provoking keynote by Paul Graham about what it would take to reproduce Silicon Valley somewhere else.

I attended talks about real-life Ruby on Rails (BBC), XBL 2 (Mozilla), and Jabber. I also chaired two sessions, one about the Google Data API, and one about algorithms to implement numerical constraints in XML Schema, a very technical talk but quite well presented by Henry Thompson.

XBL 2 appears to be a perfect technology to use with XForms, and people like Mark Birbeck in fact have already implemented XBL in conjunction with XForms. The promise: using XBL as way of implementing new XForms components, whether written in markup and Javascript, or whether written with XForms themselves. In OPS, we could implement XLB 2 server-side and use it to provide an easy way to both encapsulate existing Ajax widgets as well as allowing users to define their own compound XForms components.

The Google Data API talk mainly revolved around Google Calendar. The cool thing is that this API is based on the Atom format, and supports updates. The demos showed how you can use C# to access that API. I almost fell off my chair while thinking that this should be much easier with XForms, as you can access XML services directly! For now, this is a new opportunity for a cool mashup demo.

The day ended with lots of discussions about XForms with the subset of the XForms working group present at the conference, and sightseeing from the roof of our working group chair's house.