Jim Holden Blog

FOWA (Future of Web Apps)

February 22nd, 2007

FOWA (Future of Web Apps)

I was at the conference this week and it was pretty good. Some interesting things were shown and said and I’ve come away with perhaps a few more ideas and new things to try out.

I have to say that the conference does seem to be a lot about the sponsoring companies getting significant air time to big up their own products which isn’t something I really appreciate.

Chris Wilson did a decent talk about Internet Explorer, it’s evolution and where it is today but I was more interested in his ideas for the next generation of web browser. For me personally, I felt as though this was more a talk and promotion of MSIE 7 than a talk about where we are going next. He is obviously influential in the development of the browser and it would have been great to hear about what things he thinks and perhaps we are going to see in future revision of the browser.

Rasmus was awesome, I thought he gave a decent enough talk and the tools he was using to profile PHP loads was very interesting. If you can get a hold of his notes then you should, I scrawled down references to KCacheGrind, Valgrind and Callgrind, all of which combined to profile the load times within a PHP script. Very cool.

Simon Willison was good too actually. He was enthusiastic about openID (which looks good) and he gave a decent rundown of what’s involved and why its good but also bad. I think we’re a long way off from seeing this adopted in the mainstream but I think with some time and development it will become big. I think the best question from the floor came at this point when asking about single logins from non-web applications. Simons answer was that we should solve one thing at a time (UNIX style) and he has a point. Bringing up a small browser window in an application is no big deal so login could be easy and information easily obtained back into the main application – actually I may try this tonight.

Anyway, it was a good day and it’s good to see other people hyped about all this stuff and ending on Brice’s talk about contactoffice.com was great – he was awesome 

Entry Filed under: Technology, Programming, Code, Discussion