New Delhi Times

Its 9 AM and around 10 of us are here. Adobe office is pretty awesome. Sessions are broadly categorized in 4 sections – “Web 2.0″, “AJAX”, “Mobile”, and everything else. We will kick off around 9:30.
I will try to update this post through the day.
Introductions done. Around 40 participants registered so far. Everybody described themselves using three “tags”. How much more web2.0 can you get?
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First Session – Ruby on Rails by Manik Juneja
RoR apps: basecamp, tadalist, writeboard, Campfire, 43things, odeo, Blinksale, numsum
Philosophy: Dont repeat yourself! + Convention over configuration
Models have data as well as business rules that apply to it (eg. validates_presence_of)
Row level operations happen at object level while Table level operations happen at Class level.
Dynamic method names??? find_by_first_name would automatically figure out that search is on column named first_name. Holy crap! How cool is that?
You csn define relationships for models.
ActionPack – two Ruby modules for V and C of MVC.
ActionView – templated based html rendering
Q&A
1. How do you integrate RoR in existing applications/database schemas?
A. It is possible but not as productive as starting from scratch. Default can be over ridden so definitely possible.
2. How do you install?
A. Check the website. It runs on Apache. IIS not recommended because of some issues.
3. What were the three projects you implemented in 4 months?
A. Drag n drop shopping cart, basic CMS, gaming applications
4. Performance?
A. Yes, there are issues because MVC doesn’t scale.
5. Developing mobile applications?
A. Not sure, not my domain.
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Session 2: Making Magic Happen: Predictive fetching in RIA/AJAX by Jon B
Quotable quote: “RIA was a term first used by Macromedia to describe what you can do with Flash which is not annoying”
prefetching data as a cost v/s benefit tradeoff. Use metrics and real world usage data to determine what to prefetch.
I think it makes sense to capture mostly Q&A from now on. The slides will be available online anyway.
Q&A
1. Can we really use a heuristic based approach for critical business apps?
A. Sure you can. There is no harm in pre downloading business data because they anyway have access to it.
2. Its not really heuristic because its based on actual metrics.
A. Yes. Some sort of self learning system can be developed. (Interesting thought!)
3. Handling multiple simultaneous requests at the same time can be hard technically.
A. You bet!
4. Is prefetching really needed when there are fat pipes available?
A. In m experience pipes are never fat enough!
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Session 3: Flex
Why Flex?
1. Easy to learn and maintain the code – OOP model, flex builder based on exlipse
2. Easy to extend
3. Integration with legacy data sources
4. SDK free
5. Active community (flexcoders.org)
Q&A
1. (my question) All RIAs have this issue that the middle tier (and database) is essentially exposed as a web service. So how do I prevent somebody else from developing an alternate RIA using my middle tier.
A. The enterprise edition will have some support for that.
2. Usability of RIAs
A. Flex is a technology. Up to people how they use it!
3. How does client side JS/Ajax talk to Flash?
A. Kevin Lynch has a sample application on his blog which demos that.
4. Costs?
A. SDK will be free. IDE will not be free. Pricing TBD
We will have to split into two sessions after the next session. Both the tracks have really exciting talks. I am torn!
Session 4: Flex demo by Manish Jethani
Manish is developing a flex app live using vi on Wndows. Vi on Windows! Never seen that before!
Oh, this is reminding me so much of Avalon development I used to do in Microsoft.
Missed most of this demo but Flex looks cool. Must check it out!
There seems to be some cool Javascript support which I missed out on.
You can apply CSS to Flex apps. Cool!
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Flickr feed is here http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/barcampdelhi/ Rakesh has already posted a few pics.
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Break for tea!