SWDC 2010

Posted by Mattias Sandström on June 4, 2010

Avoiding the nice sunny summer weather I have spent two days in the dark Skandia theater in Stockholm together with around 200 other web-developers at Scandinavian Web Developer Conference 2010. A fully packed and nicely mixed agenda kept us busy between 09.00 and 19.00 both days with short breaks for a quick refreshment and a view of the sun before heading back into the dark theater again for next sessions.

Front-ends
The first day was devoted to front- and back-end development of web-systems and the technologies used for this and the talks around how to develop large web-sites, collaborative development in the cloud and the BrowserWar 2010 were very interesting. Lot of time was devoted to describing HTML5 and the implications of this new technology and front-end development in modern browsers. While being a promising technology, HTML5 is not ready to replace UI Frameworks for front-end development yet and front-end developers will still have to struggle with inconsistent APIs and coding-style between the different Frameworks and Toolkits used to work-around the browsers’ quirks.

JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript... and some more JavaScript...
With the introduction of the Frameworks and Toolkits, the development language of choice became JavaScript. Going back two or three years, the JavaScript programming language was plagued with poor and slow implementations in most browsers. The last year, JavaScript performance has been greatly enhanced in the major browsers and it is now possible to write front-end applications in JavaScript and enjoy the full capacity of the client computers.

An interesting twist to the concept of front-end development was Mark Wubben’s talk over Chrome Extensions showing how simple it is to build Chrome Extensions in standard JavaScript and HTML to give functions interacting with both the web-page and the browser itself.

node.js was presented, bringing JavaScript to the server-end and allow developers a new way of communicating with the clients that is not based on the Request-Response way of communicating that has been the basis of the web since 1993. Applications written for the node.js framework can be persistently running on the server sending data to the client when needed. A very nice demo by Tim Caswell showing the publish/subscribe library for node.js on the second day really showed the capabilities of node.js.

Mobiles, mobiles...
The second day was devoted to the mobile platform and the technologies available on mobiles, for example cameras, GPS and compass. Most speakers agreed that we have the mobiles to thank for the rapid progresses in HTML5 and JavaScript as these browsers in most cases are at the front-line of the standards and performance.

The standards for mobile JavaScript development are emerging and Sony Ericsson presented their view on how access to the mobile hardware technologies using HTTP requests with the Powerbox interface which is also backed up by Google.

Tom Hughes-Croucher from Yahoo made a very interesting presentation about the latency trap and ways to handle this using YQL to reduce the number of hosts a mobile device has to connect to for better performance.

To summarize
These two days left me with a long list of technologies, standards and other interesting leads that will keep my busy for awhile. Some of the technologies I already knew but the presentations often showed new applications or use-cases of them. The conference was was well worth its fee and the agenda and the speakers were spot on for the current development path of Tangix’s products.

The crew and moderator did a very nice job of keeping the conference on schedule which is something that is really appreciated.

-- Mattias Sandström