PHP freelancer, web developer, mobile web enthusiast

I was attending the Ext JS user group in Frankfurt the other night and thought it might be a good thing to write a blog post again: it was a nice event and I didn’t blog in about a year or so (at least not here).

If you are unfamiliar with Ext JS, make sure you bring yourself up to date! In short it is a JavaScript library providing a set of nicely styled and very functional widgets, such as grids and tree structures that you can use  to create rich, desktop-like web applications.

This user group was the first in Germany. Attendees were mostly freelancers, but also employees. 6 of the 15 attendees were fellow consultants from T-Home where I am currently doing some contracting/consulting work; and Ext JS happens to be one of my main topics there. Barcampy as we were we didn’t have an agenda. Yet 3 people were giving presentations and they were all worth the trip to the d.k.d offices in Frankfurt where the UG was held. I am a bad name rememberer so sorry for not giving credits here to the presenters, but honestly you all did a great job guys and I gained some good insight.

We also had some thought-provoking discussions about memory management and -leaks and about our experiences switching over to the brand-new Ext JS version 3.0. I can just encourage anybody interested in the topic to join us next time – we’re not sure when the next session will be, but watch this space or the Ext JS forum for updates.

A big thank you goes out to d.k.d, Germany’s leading TYPO3 agency, for hosting the user group and especially to Nils Dehl for organizing the whole thing and getting the crowd together. Till next time!

I am speaking at the Mobile Web Americas conference, in October in Orlando, Florida. The Mobile Web Americas conference will take place 2 – 4 October 2007.I am pretty excited, because this conference is all about the mobile web. My presentation will be about “Pragmatic Mobile Ajax – an Ajax Library for constrained browsers in action”. I am speaking about Mobile Ajax and how it can improve the user experience in mobile web applications. I will introduce the Frost Ajax Library as a tool for Ajax development on constrained browsers, such as those on mobile phones or gaming consoles. The session will show how and why the Frost library came to life and sheds some light on the underlying approach, which is quite different from other Ajax libraries. Read the rest of this entry »

After submitting a position paper, today I got my invite to the Mobile Ajax workshop in Mountain View in late September (28th). I am really looking forward to this since it is one of the rare events that focus exclusively on Ajax on mobile devices and many important and interesting people that are involved in this topic are likely to be present. It’s also the first workshop (= not conference) on this topic. So I am very excited and happy to have the chance to attend this event and meet everybody. Read the rest of this entry »

On August, 18, I attended the BarCampBlock. Although it was almost two weeks ago, I still feel like I should post about it, because it was my first BarCamp and also its anniversary (block)party. The BarCampBlock took place in Palo Alto – at the place it started. I went by bus from San Francisco to Palo Alto and it took me almost 2 hours. But it was worth it. Almost 1,000 participants attended this year. Amazing!
I met so many interesting people and of course the guys from Citizen Space :) Thanks go out to Tara, Chris, Liz, Hillary and anybody I can’t think of now, who all did a great job by organizing such a great event. The center of this whole event was the office of Socialtext, where there were an impressively huge wall with different discussion sessions. You could either open a new session yourself or join an existing one. Socialtext already hosted the first BarCamp in 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally I get to post something about my visit to Paris and specifically the XTech conference 2007. I went to XTech to speak about “Ajax on mobile devices — making mobile web apps ubiquitous” and of course to attend as many of the other sessions as possible. Here’s some of my observations:The location (Novotel Paris Tour Eiffel) was ok, I liked the last location in Amsterdam better though, because the different tracks were closer to each other. The organization was excellent as usual, special thanks to IDEAlliance and Edd Dumbill for that. I even did not have a problem accessing the wireless network – contrary to many others. Read the rest of this entry »