We decided to join forces with Open Query in sponsoring the Open Source Developer’s Conference 2008 in Sydney that has just started. Here is Arjen’s blog post about it - you can find the details of his presentations there.

What’s Pythian has to do with open source? If you read this blog you already know that quite a few MySQL community leaders and active contributors are working at Pythian and I’m very proud to have such colleagues. You might also know that Pythian’s John Scoles maintains DBD::Oracle Perl package and that MySQL Monitoring Plug-in for Oracle Grid Control written by your humble servant.

So why did we decide to sponsor the OSDC this year? Initially, it was Arjen’s idea and many thanks to him for bringing it to my attention and joining with us. Pythian provides enterprise database management services and MySQL is one of our core expertise areas besides Oracle and SQL Server. I don’t think we should expect any new sales from sponsoring OSDC but supporting community has been also one of the top strategical priority for Pythian and comes with lots of satisfaction.

I’m very pleased that Paul Moen represents Pythian at the OSDC conference so please stop by our table and say hello to Paul and Arjen. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend as I’m in Birmingham this week presenting at the UK Oracle User Group Conference.

This year again we participated in the Eclipse Summit Europe, a premier event of the Eclipse community.

Fabian, Sebastian Marsching (1&1) - left to right

Fabian, Sebastian M., Istvan Ballok (CAS)

We were happy to see so many talented people of the Eclipse community being interested in the possibilities and vision of qooxdoo as a JavaScript application framework. This reminded us of the rather surprising interest so many Java devs showed at the Java Forum Stuttgart a while ago. It is an indicator that especially the more experienced programmers and open-minded software engineers appreciate the RIA capabilities and architecture of qooxdoo. On the AJAX side, it is unfortunately all too often "Look at my JS library, it's much smaller than yours!" or even "Frameworks suck, I do HTML/CSS/DOM/JS all myself!". Geez...

Real Men Do JavaScript!

If you haven't read the following articles by Dave Thomas, please do so: "Real Men Do JavaScript!" and "Programming the World in a Browser".

It was a real pleasure to meet him at the Eclipse Summit, where he gave quite a controversial key note (e.g. envisioning JavaScript to compete successfully with - or even supersede - Java in many areas, particularly in mobile technology). Dave Thomas is an extremely smart, well-informed and influential IT person, and we appreciate he spent so much time with us to discuss lots of JavaScript and qooxdoo related topics. Exciting.

Andreas, Wayne Beaton (Eclipse), Dave Thomas, Fabian

Thanks ...

... to all the people we met and that we had so many interesting discussions with. We are looking forward to continue to work closely with the Eclipse community (e.g. RAP, e4) and to be participating next time again.

We're back from the AJAX in Action, one of the premier Ajax conferences in Germany. It was the first time I did a qooxdoo talk at a public conference. In May I already had a presentation about JavaScript tooling at the Dynamic Language World, but this time I "officially" presented qooxdoo. My talk was in one of the smaller conference rooms in the basement of the conference center. Since I felt well-prepared I decided to attend the presentation held in the same room right before my talk. The talk was about Silverlight and there were exactly 5 people in the audience. This scared me a bit since I didn't want to talk to an almost empty room. Luckily this didn't happen. The room was filled with about 20-30 people. I was especially happy to find Paul Bakaus the project lead of jQuery UI and dojo commiter Nikolai Onken in the audience. The talk was well received and I think I was able to communicate the philosophy of qooxdoo and its current state. I have uploaded the slides to slideshare.

Since the slides don't work well without my oral presentation you can also download a version containing my presentation notes.

I really enjoyed the conference. Even more than the talks it was the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting people. It was awesome to meet so many German contributors and committers of other JavaScript frameworks. On Thursday evening there was a nice Oktoberfest organized with Leberkäse (meatloaf), Brathendl (grilled chicken) and Maßbierkrüge (1l glasses of beer). We sat together with the dojo guys from uxebu (Wolfram Kriesing, Nikolai Onken and Tobias von Klipstein), Jan Kassens (Mootools), Paul Bakaus (jQuery UI) and Jörg Kress. We had a lot of tech talk, some beer and really a nice evening. Check out the video of our "framework round table" in Tobias' blog post.

Download:

• presentation with notes.