I was at the Google DevFest Asia in Singapore yesterday. Overall, I learned a lot, although it might take a while for me to process everything since there were a lot of topics covered.
Pamela Fox, with her purple hair was the first to make her presence felt among the developers who were there. She worked up the crowd with questions like which JS framework people use, chiding jQuery, which is what I’m currently using. It seems she uses dojo. She also asked about music preferences and if people even liked music since there were only few poeple raising hands.
Before the talks started, Jason Costa apologized because apparently there were problems with the shirts — Asia was spelled Aaia. Someone from the crowd asked if he could have one anyway. And some others followed suit, leading him to ask the whole crowd if they wanted the misprint. And since it seemed that everyone wanted one he gave them away by the end of the event anyway.
Google Devfest South East Aaia 2008
Patrick Chanezon talked about OpenSocial, the rationale behind it, who the partners are and how to build your own OpenSocial app. They’re also running a contest for the best OpenSocial app. 4 winners for each of the countries. They’re giving away Wiis and iPods.
Pamela Fox talked about the Google Maps API and a lot of new stuff about it — geocoding and reverse geocoding, Flash API (which is AS3 only), Google Earth integration and Static Maps. She also talked about the youTube API. Later on she and Patrick talked about the AppEngine, the SDK of which I installed on my notebook. Hopefully I can churn out even just a simple app so I can start on learning Python and the inner workings of AppEngine.
Bruno Rovagnati of Globant talked about Shindig which you can use as a testbed when building OpenSocial apps or gadgets as most of them like to call it. You just need an Apache server to install it onto. Later on, he shared a lot of insights on caching, performance and using memcache.
Some of the partners of OpenSocial also presented their piece — eXo Platform (which offers social for the enterprise), Friendster (apparently still the top social network in Asia) and hi5 among others.
e27, the main organizer of the event also made their presence felt and shared how they said it was the first event they had wherein everyone had their laptops with them. Their vision is basically to have a mini-Silicon Valley here in Singapore, a novel idea I think.
Overall, it was a great event. I hope to attend more of these things here. It’s always good to learn from people form the other side of the world.
Heya-
We like to have jQuery debates in our office, hope you don’t think I think less of jQuery developers. I myself prefer very explicit function names, and find the $ sign unreadable. Since my job is to create useful sample code, I don’t use any framework and just use straight JavaScript, so that people can adapt to their framework easily.
I haven’t actually tried Dojo; I have used YUI a couple times, with reasonable success.
Anyway, thanks for commenting on the event. We’re taking in all your feedback in figuring out how to improve upcoming DevFests.
It’s all good. It’s always fun debating why a certain language or framework is better. I haven’t really settled on any particular framework just yet. The main reason I’m using jQuery now is I needed one of its plugins for a certain project and just decided to use it for all the projects for that particular client.
Thanks for passing by and much gratitude for the great event. I think it made a lot of developers in our region excited. It would’ve been nice if there were more hands-on/workshop-type sessions though.
And I’m from the country you forgot the name of on one of the maps because it didn’t have a label. Haha!
THE PHILIPPINES!
We’ll integrate more code walk through into the OpenSocial intro talk, and do a longer AppEngine walkthrough. Did you actually want to see live coding with maps? I’m not convinced it’s as useful as the other two – it seems fairly obvious how to get started with maps.
Right.. the Philippines, got it. I’ll learn by the time I hit Manila.
Yup, looks like a better approach to me. The code for maps is pretty much straight forward compared to OpenSocial and AppEngine, which are both relatively new. Since Maps is a service, it’s really great when presented with demos, giving a lot of ideas of what can be done.
OpenSocial and AppEngine are platforms so a little bit more live coding can encourage people to appreciate how relatively easy it can be to use it for actual projects. Analogies of terminologies between other languages and Python might also help developers who don’t have an idea of how Python works.
Hahaha. Have fun when you get there. Don’t forget to ride the jeep since the event’s gonna be in UP. They go around the whole campus — IKOT (literally it means go around) and TOKI (our creative way of saying it goes the other way around of IKOT)
Maraming salamat for the detailed account of the session and the feedback Scrufus, this is very useful.
We will definitely show more code in next sessions. It’s always a hard balance to strike between explaining what you can do with the api and showing code which eats more time.
I’d advise you to take a look at http://code.google.com/p/opensocial-resources/ where you can svn checkout a lot of code to get started with opensocial.
And as a matter of js framework, I would suggest giving GWT a try:-)
Paalam.
P@
You’re welcome Patrick. Thanks for passing by. That is the challenge I guess, as with most things — keeping the balance.
Thanks for the tip. I’ll check them out.
I tried looking at GWT and it looks daunting. It seems I have to revisit Java (the first language i learned. but we never really developed any fondness for each other) to make full use of it. I’m more of a PHP guy and starting to like Python now.
hey btw I still can’t find the blog they mentioned would have the urls for the slides.
I tried apacdevfest.blogspot.com but it doesn’t exist.. hmm you have any idea?
their twitter stream has some of them.
- APAC DevFest
- Maps API
- Youtube API
i’ll try to compile my own list.
Hi guys, thanks for coming down for the Google Devfest, glad you all benefited from it. See if you can find the information you want here:
http://tinyurl.com/apacdevfest