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!

If you are attending or speaking at Mobile Web Americas too, and want to catch up, please let me know. There are still some spots open, so don’t miss out this cool conference and register!

My position paper is about the Frost Ajax library. The only other position paper I have come accross is the one from Mark Baker of Coactus Consulting. It’s entitled “The best mobile Ajax application … is the one that’s never written“, so there’s probably gonna be some interesting discussions.

At 7 pm the actual BarCampBlock Party started with free drinks and food at the Blue Chalk Cafe right after the DemoCamp which featured many interesting demos from various companies. Among many interesting people I also met Tim there, who started the Webmontag (Webmonday) in Germany.

All in all: great event, great atmosphere, many interesting people, I am looking forward to the next one!

Mobile

XTech’s moto this year was “The ubiquitous web” – naturally almost all presentations I attended dealt with ubiquitousity in some ways. To cut it short, for me there were two major topics: widgets and mobile. It felt like everybody was doing something with either widgets or in the mobile space, but this might partially be related to my choice of talks.

Compared to XTech 2006 with 3 talks specifically about mobile topics, XTech 2007 featured 5 talks in the mobile space. From the questions in the audience, especially in widget-related sessions the interest in mobile applications in general is growing too. The conference was divided into 4 tracks and I guess other tracks were less widget/mobile oriented then the ones I attended.

The talks of Ralph from Jaiku and Guido from Nokia were very interesting. Guido even managed to do a live demo of his Application – something many other were not able to do.

I also had extensive discussions with many people from Opera, met Hakon and some others again, Arve for the first time. Opera Mobile 9 should come out in a couple of weeks, 2 months at most I would say (Opera’s policy on this: it comes out when it’s done). The new browser will have support for widgets, but due to security issues will not provide access to many device capabilities yet (although it’s possible).

Widgets

The “major players” at the conference in my view were 3 companies/organizations: W3C, Opera and Joost. The first day’s birds-of-a-feather (BOF) sessions were a prime example for that, at least the ones about geolocation and widgets. The BOF session about widgets sounded a bit pessimistic. Problems over problems and different issues, partly solvable, partly very hard to come by were discussed. But that’s probably what a developer conference is about: discussions about how to deal with problems when implementing something new. Charles from Opera and Robin from Joost MC’d the session. These were the main points/problems covered:

• security (in general and especially when widgets get access to applications and hardware)
• privacy (how much can a user influence to which extend a widget can get access to the user’s data)
• interoperability (widgets talking to each other)
• portability/interoperability (widgets working in different widget engines)
• standardizations (how are widgets implemented)
• mobile vs. desktop widgets

An interesting (although obvious) though about the last point is:
Even if widget engines use the same implementation for widgets (i.e. XHTML/CSS/JS) on both the desktop and the mobile, there is still an issue of screen size (your desktop weather widget might not fit on your mobile screen) – that’s where the media attribute/different media types for CSS files come in handy. The mobile widget engine should therefore always prefer the CSS files with a “mobile” media attribute – this way, a widget could use the same code, but 2 different presentations and therefore become interoperable and usable in desktop and mobile engines.

Standards

Another big topic is standardization – of widgets, of device APIs that widgets can access, of geolocation information, of Ajax in general – there’s a lot to do in this area. One interesting project is Ryan’s http://www.locationaware.org, a project aimed at standardizing the way a web application can get access to the user’s location information.

My Presentation

My presentation went pretty well, Hakon introduced me to the audience and there I was presenting my 1st very own presentation at a conference. I made one mistake however: answering questions in between sections of my talk. This costs loads of time and can be quite disrupting, especially if people oppose your basic naming conventions:

There were some people in the audience that were not happy with the term “Mobile Ajax” because it hints towards “Mobile Ajax” being something else as “Desktop Ajax”. I tried to clarify this and my basic opinion on this is: technically it’s of course nothing else, but in the mobile space you have a different environment (browsers/run-times/java apps) and you have to deal with different problems.

Therefore I still think the term “Mobile Ajax” is a valid description of what we are looking at. Currently I also feel that a general approach to implementing Ajax accross devices and desktop cannot succeed and that currently you will have to do specific research in the mobile space, especially when it comes to Ajax and related technologies. That’s what I wanted to present at XTech and from people talking to me after the session and from the questions raised during the Q&A session this appears to be a good approach.

Here’s my slides from the presentation.

My presentation will be about “AJAX on mobile devices – making mobile web apps ubiquitous“.

During my presentation I will try to show that AJAX can be used to improve the usability of mobile web applications and to solve some other problems, e.g. concerning bandwidth. Another point will be that due to the varying degree of browser support it is rather difficult to develop a universal application that runs on all the different devices out there. Some best practices will be explored and new approaches to JS frameworks paired with browser detection algorithms will presented using real-life mobile web applications.

If you are attending or speaking at Xtech too, and want to catch up, please let me know. There are still some spots open, so don’t miss out this cool conference and register!

After an hour of networking and before Felix Haas of amiando could begin with his presentation we started going around the room introducing ourselves one after the other by giving ourselves 3 tags each. The audience was pretty mixed: software & web developers, startup entrpreneurs, marketing executives and also people from well-known companies such as the Boston Consulting Group, Süddeutsche Zeitung or Autoscout24.de – even a doctor joined this Webmontag :)
After his introduction Felix got a chance to start with his presentation about amiando, a web service to invite people and send out customized invitations to your events. Talking about founding and funding the company as well as developing the platform amiando, he gave us some interesting insights and good advice.

Then Florian Steger of Kupferwerk talked about Micro communities and how brands, media companies and organisations can enhance their customer life-cycle through online communities. It was also a very interesting presentation with quite interesting marketing insights on top.

The last presentation was held by me about Mobile AJAX. There were a lot of questions about the mobile web in general and the use of AJAX on mobile devices. Unfortunately we ran out of time, so Martin had to postpone his presentation to next Webmontag.

After the three presentations I got another chance to network. Although it was planned to change the location and go to a pub, amiando offered us their office and even provided us with some free beer – very cool!

The event started at 7:00 pm and the last people left after 12 midnight.
All in all it was a great evening, very social and a great opportunity to meet new and interesting people, to discuss business or technical related topics and to talk to start-ups and entrepreneurs like Johannes from kesto.org (web based password manager). Even if you look for a job in the IT business, it is a great opportunity to meet your new employer. Right now every company that presented is looking for new employees. So get in touch! Also refer to some pics of the evening.

I also brought up the idea of doing a PechaKucha (20 slides with 20 seconds each) session next time – just like what we have done at last years XML conference in Boston. It was a real blast there and maybe a perfect way to do presentations (or at least part of them) at such an evening, because of the limited time reserved for presentations. So I am encouraging everybody interested to respond!

I am really looking forward meeting more interesting people at the next Webmontag.

This was my first presentation at a conference except a lightning demo at this year’s XTech conference about CarCulatr (price finder for used cars to demo mobile AJAX using Opera Platform) and I have to say it could not have been worse…

We learned a big lesson this day: prepare, prepare well!
Michael planned on showing a demo of Soonr, one of the first Mobile AJAX applications (unfortunately only works on the Mobile Opera Browser) on a Nokia N93, which has a TV-out connector. He had the phone shipped to the hotel 2 days before, but unfortunately some clever guy at Opera forgot to include the TV-out cable. Unable top find a shop to sell those cables he ended up showing the mere phone to the audience and focusing more on his slides – oops there was the second problem.

My crappy old laptop sometimes goes on standby and forgets that it it equipped with USB ports, so I fiddled around for about 10 minutes to reboot the thing and pull Michael’s slides off a USB stick – oops third problem – the slides were not on it. Apparently Michael’s somehow managed to not copy his slides to the USB stick and we ended up having nothing to start with.

After Michael had expanded his introduction to about 20 Minutes, I continued with my presentation, which apparently went not too bad (haven’t read otherwise yet). When I asked the audience if everybody knew “.mobi” I was a bit surprised to hear somebody yell “dotmobi is evil!” – as it turned out it was Paul Downey. We ended up having a little discussion/explanatory session after my talk.

Lessons learned, except the big one mentioned above, include that it is not as difficult as I had imagined it to be to present on a conference and that nobody will rip your head off if something goes wrong – not even at “The world’s oldest and biggest XML conference“.

I thank everbody at the conference commitee for allowing me to speak there and especially Michael for giving me this chance. I hope there will be more presentations to come, because it is just the best way to make yourself heard and to get people to respond to your thoughts.

In my talk I was refering to our Mobile AJAX demo application, an event finder for the conference.

The first day of the conference featured a Vendor PechaKucha Night, which Michael had proposed to the conference committee and which he moderated together with me. I want to share some insights to this experience here.

The concept of Pecha Kucha is pretty simple – it is a special type of presentation where every speaker brings 20 slides and gets 20 seconds to present every slide. This results in 6 minutes and 40 seconds of presentation time and thus helps to keep the audience interested – add the fun the audience has when the presenter runs out of time on a slide and some free beer sponsored by JustSystems and you have an interesting and funny night.
Many of the presenters handed in their slides in the last half hour before the presentations started, there were also some last-minute changes to the order of presenters. As a result the first presentation started and ended after 10 seconds, because the presenter had handed in the wrong slides – we continued with the second presenter – it was really funny.

Unfortunately we did not know what an effect 3 presentations from the same company in a row can have, especially being vendor presentations. So we ended up loosing many people in the audience because it got a little boring.

I found it particularly bad that the presenters pitching their company’s products to the audience this way were leaving after they were done with their talk. So the audience, that initially was about 60 people (the event started late and after free beer), had shrunken almost by half at the end of the session.

Another lesson learned was that it is just ideal if presenters set up their slides so that they skip to the next one automatically after 20 seconds, this saves a lot of hassle for the moderator who otherwise has to make sure that he changes slides every 20 seconds manually.
Also it should be made sure that there are really 20 different slides in a presentation and not 10 slides with headings and content appearing every few seconds – this can lead to unexpected skipping of content, as it was the case with the last presentation of the day. The presenter there ended up having only about 4 minutes in total, because I manually changed slides and did it in a way so that every 20 seconds there was a complete new slide, not just a new element on one slide.

There were some highlights in terms of the way people did their presentations. Especially Ken Holman of Crane Softwrights managed to grasp the audience’s attention by demanding that everybody say “ping” whenever a slide changes, so he didn’t need to look back to the screen.

Overall the Pecha Kucha night was a cool event. The format of the presentation really keeps the audience interested and there are many laughs and funny situations only because 20 minutes appear much longer when creating the presentation than when you actually do it. It was too bad there were not many more people attending.

I really hope I will have a chance to do another Pecha Kucha event sometime.

The whole event, apart from the keynotes, was held in panel discussions with panelists also taking some time for presenting on their own. The most interesting topics for us obviously was everything related to the mobile web and to browser based applications of which there were not many to be seen. The highlights were the presentations and demos of:

• SoonR: nice AJAX job on the Opera Browser for mobile devices
• Mobile Launchpad: Peter Vesterbacka and his many companies, especially 3jam.com with their brand new REST API for sending out SMS to many people at once
• Arun Ranganathan of AOL: he pointed out some interesting basic principles like using WURFL for detecting browsers and the need for an API to access phone features from within JavaScript in the mobile browser (as side information while speaking about his real topic)
• dotMobi: Ronan Cremin presented the brand new validation tool, their Mobile Ready Report generator (nice!) and the developer section under http://dev.mobi (thanks for the T-Shirt)

What have I learned?

• there are not so many relevant mobile browsers as initially thought (OpenWave, Access Netfront, Opera +mini, IE, minimo, S60 should cover > 95% of all devices)
• some SonyEricsson phones use the Netfront browser
• apparently many people call the “Pocket IE” (or “IEMobile”) “Compact IE”
• battery life can be heavily decreased if there are AJAX applications running (need to test this)
• carriers can be a pain and they also slow down browser and phone hardware development (many phones would have much more features if carriers would allow them to)
• funambol.com pays you 25 bucks if you contribute a test on your mobile phone to them
• instant messaging on phones is all over the place and there will surely be some application to be seen in the mobile web area pretty soon

What did I get confirmed?

• the easier an application on a mobile is, the better
• SMS is still important and will continue to be, also in the mobile web
• browser capability detection is important (WURFL)
• mobile AJAX powered services will replace installable applications somewhen
• people will use the mobile web heavily only if there is a real killer application (or some of them)
• the future is browser based, not installed
• the big thing that is still missing is the access to the mobile phone’s features from within the browser (like a Javascript API to access the GPS module or the contact and calendar info on the phone)
• making stuff work in many different browsers means making it degrade gracefully and bulletproof

Special thanks go out to Tony Fish for signing my copy of his book and to Michael from Opera, Rick and Yong from Access (Palmsource) for being such good discussion partners and for making this event even better with their questions and remarks on the mobile browser landscape ;). Also thanks to all the guys from Opera who joined us in the free beer extermination after the event and who also were amazing discussion partners.

Let’s hope there will be many more of these events!

PS: Also check out Paddy Byers extensive summary about the event on the Open Gardens Blog! And thanks Paddy for our nice chat after the event and good luck to you for the next couple of months.

PPS: Also check out the comments of Mike Rowehl, one of the organizers of the event, who was not quite happy with his own event. I think I have to disagree with him that Mobile 2.0 “didn’t quite do it”, because at least for me it was quite a good experience.

PPPS: Scott Rafer also seems to have found this event to be under par – check out his comments on it here. Btw. the comment from the audience about the “hiding” of the user agent in Opera Mini caused quite a discussion at our table between Mike from Opera, me and Rick and Yong from Access (Netfront Browser).

PPPPS: Rudy De Waele on Richard MacManus’ weblog Read/WriteWeb shares some interesting views about what Mobile 2.0 is and what companies are there at the moment. He also included a list of “Recommended mobile 2.0 reading” (we’re not in it).