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by Wolf Paulus.
Original Post: Emerging Technology 2005 - Day 1 and 2
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Tom Igoe of NYU and Raffi Krikorian taught a hands-on workshop on embedded hardware devices. Devices covered were the BasicX device and the Xport from Lantronix. Both devices are available to end users and hobbyist for several years now so why cover them at an Emerging Technology Conference?
Since the main topic of the conference is remix-ing, the speakers saw the need to combine the two devices (BasicX -- serial ports -- XPort) however they completely failed to mention that beside voltage levels also noise and timing margings need to be considered before connecting the hardware components.
Moreover, there are micro-controllers available now, containing all showed component in one package, i.e. the Dallas SemiConductor's DS80C400, a $9 product that combines regular MC functions with a10/100 Ethernet Mac, 1kb internal ROM and a 16MB address space.
While I really liked the fact that embedded devices were covered, the actual content of the presentation was rather disappointing almost dangerously light.
Tuesday started off with short talks given by Rael, Tim O'Reilly, Jeff Bezos et al., an incredibly mind blowing firework of new concepts and projects that is actually worked on.
Jeff Bezos however, completely blew his 15 minute long presentation by clicking yes when his windows Laptop asked him if he wanted to install the latest MS security update.
The afternoon had two interesting presentation centered on XML and Web-Services. Google's Nelson Minar started with explaining his current work on the Google Adwords API and how much he disliked the SOAP RPC model. He though that ReST or simply parsing XML documents sent by a server wouldn't be such a bad idea at all.
Sam Ruby in 'Just HTTP' on the other hand thought that using Web Services Packages like provided for Java and .Net are the blue pill.
Eventually at about 7:30pm the BOF event for Rich Internet Applications took place.
Unfortunately, most attendees agreed that a RCA is something that runs inside a browser and is either a flash plug-in or a java script driven ajax app.
Looks like there is a real need for a definition of what a Rich Client Application really is after all.
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