A general invitation to two seminars in Canberra on Thursday 22nd July
Venue for both seminars:
Australian National University (ANU)
Room N101 on level one of the Computer Science and Information Technology
Building which is nearest to the Barry Drive entrance to the university
(building number 108, sector G4 on the ANU campus map - see the links below:)
Department of Computer Science Seminar
4:00PM to 5:00PM
Blogging and Syndication - Trawling the Internet for Meaning (The feeding, reading and seeding of Blogs) - James Robertson (Cincom Systems )
Canberra Linux Users Group (CLUG)
from 7:00PM
Blogging and Syndication - Trawling the Internet for Meaning (The feeding, reading and seeding of Blogs) - James Robertson (Cincom Systems )
plus
Customisable XML presentation technology using WithStyle - Michael Lucas-Smith (Software WithStyle)
Abstracts:
Michael Lucas-Smith's presentation:
Recent years have seen many software development projects moving away from desktop clients to Web Applications. Unfortunately, whilst today's Web Applications offer some benefits (particularly for implementors), they constitute a significant step backward for users. Usability and productivity
suffer as user interfaces are 'dumbed-down' to fit a request-response model reminiscent of green-screen terminals. The IT industry has again manufactured new limitations that need not exist.
WithStyle WebUI is a 100% Smalltalk user interface technology that frees user interfaces from the limitation of Web Browsers that were not designed to meet the UI requirements of business applications. The quality rendering capabilities of the With:Style technology prove the strength of Smalltalk as a first-class user interface platform that need not be fragmented and tied to Java or Windows-specific front-end technologies.
As a customisable XML presentation technology, WithStyle offers many deployment models and even more possibilities for rich, 'hybrid' user interfaces through integration with Pollock (a new GUI framework for VisualWorks). It fits in naturally with server-side Web applications and emerging Service Oriented Architectures. Demonstrations will include XML Editing and Scripting client-side behaviour with Smalltalk.
James Robertson's presentation:
This session will discuss blogs, blogging, and some of the associated technology (RSS in particular). The focus of the talk will be whether blogs are something of relevance - for project managers, marketing staff, or developers. I expect an interactive session with many questions, as well as an interactive introduction to what a blog is. I'll be taking the tack that blogs are, in fact, useful and worth investigating. I have my own blog - http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView - and I also sponsor other blogs on our site - http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs. A quick check of the InfoWorld site, the O'Reilly site, Microsoft or Sun will demonstrate that many of the industry analysts and evangelists have started blogging - what this talk will explore is whether anyone in the audience should be.
The talk will reference BottomFeeder - an open source RSS/Atom news aggregator. Other technical issues covered will include:
- Development issues (dealing with RSS, character encoding issues)
- Deployment issues (building a deployable and installable application)
- Cross platform issues (Unicode, character sets, libraries, look and feel)
- On the fly updating of a deployed application
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