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I’ve been Barcamped

Posted on September 15, 2006 | Filed Under Adobe Flex, Local Happenings, Ruby on Rails 

I attended Barcamp Birmingham recently. A big congrats goes out to the organizers! This was the first event of this type I’ve ever attended. I had a great time, met some nice folks and learned some things.

The most notable topics for me personally were…

• Virtual Server overview - I’ve been familiar with Virtual PC for years. We use it to easily test our applications in multiple OS versions configurations (Windows 98, 2000, XP, various server packs, etc.). Virtual server brings this concept to the server level. The presentation was well thought out and presented.
• Ruby on Rails Q&A - I was really hot on RoR when it first hit the scene. While I found the language and framework to be very elegant and efficient, I eventually cooled off on it due to it’s client side being HTML-based (browser compatibility issues anyone?). Need proof? Check out this entry at 37signals’ blog (RoR creators) about their most recent product launch. My own excerpts here: “The biggest headache was IE 6 support…”, “Drag and drop events in IE (it works great in Firefox and Safari, but IE 6 wasn’t playing nice)” and “some minor design issues that we had to introduce in all browsers in order to accomodate for IE 6 (bastard!)”.
• Building Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex - I’ve been hitting Flex 2.0 hard and heavy for the past six months at my day job, so I thought it would be fun to jump into the Flex session. I’m really glad I did! Harris Reynolds, one half of the dynamic duo at The Midnight Coders, came down from Huntsville to tell us about their newly-released WebORB for RoR (and PHP). WebORB makes it possible to communicate with a RoR, PHP or .net backend via Flex’s FDS (Flex Data Services) interface. They currently support the RPC functionality of FDS and are working on the messaging and client synchronization subsystems. Schweeeet! I’m now combining my favorite RIA front-end in Flex with my favorite RIA back-end in RoR on my personal projects, thanks to WebORB!
• Putting Birmingham On the Tech Map - Curtis Palmer (from techbirmingham) put on a great presentation on the size and makeup of our fine city’s technical industries. The most interesting thing of all to me was some charts that showed the top ten or so large companies (100-500 employees) and the huge pile of small companies (1-100 employees) here in town. He overlaid the companys’ number of employees in 2002 and 2006, making it easy to see who is on their way up, or flatlining, or, well, you know…

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