Well ex-colleague Richard Rutter’s company Clear Left managed to put on a fine event at Brighton’s Corn Exchange today: to summarise it was a day conference to discuss best practices for developing web applications. Note web applications! With the advent, and the marketing noise, of social networking, web 2.0, blogs, and flickr the internet has started it’s slow but sure transition from a document delivery mechanism, i.e. static web sites of text to sophisticated, feature-rich web based applications.
Let’s face it what’s the point of building your event booking system, or calendar so that it can only be accessed from your company’s office: why not build it using current web technologies and ensure that it is inherently available 24-7 across the internet, can be scaled to deliver it’s funtionality to a global audience, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world.
Ok so it’s only an emergent technology,it’s early days, with the primary examples of flickr and google maps. But these feature rich applications have been made available to developers like ourselves so we can integrate them into our applciations for you. OK not specifically very exciting per se but if Google can build such a slick web based Calendar application then why can’t we deliver similar functionality to you using similar technology. Well we can and have.
The d.construct running order included:
Web Services from Amazon - you know they offer you unlimited online data storage for anything and virtual servers for a very very reasonable cost. They are also in the process of releasing the most interesting product on the internet ever - the Mechanical Turk. The Amazon mechanical turk allows you to programmatically use human beings across the world to solve problems for you. Say you need to recognise if a picture contains a human face for example, you have two options, 1. write a complicated artificial intelligence program to determine the attricutes of a face or alternatively you use the mechanical turk to emply humans at very low cost to determine it for you and then return the results.
Web Services from Yahoo - they offer the ability to integrate photo sharing, mapping, and their search technology into your site. Well! Unfortunately they’re a little late - we’ve already built this functionality and shipped it with the Mewburn web site and I’m afraid it uses Google functionality. I really appreciate the effort Yahoo are making to win over the techie developer market, they’re showing up to events, they’re speaking, they’re releasing stuff to our community and they are sponsoring our activities: Google aren’t. It’s just Yahoo have got a few years to catch up on.
The Joy of API - an overview of some of the available web services from a pure wow or cool point of view, unfortunately there were a few key admisions - namely Google and Ebay.
Flex My Mash Up - Aral Balkan showed us how the new Flash plug in is going to enable us to build amazing new feature rich applications that run from the internet. Applications that go far further than your normal web application - they can deliver a really responsive intuitive experience from searching properties for sale to mixing live video and audio. Oh how I wish we had the time and energy to investigate this delivery platform - Flash has come out of it’s accessibility douldrums and is back with avengeance.
Accessiblitiy and Web 2.0 applications - basically Derek featherstone told us that if we build our applications to deliver usable solutions, following te existing guidelines we’d be half way there to delivering web applications to the partially sighted or blind users. And if we take this methodology and go one step further and really think about how our users would use our web application without sight we’ll be fine.
Understanding Folksonomy - I was really excited about this talk and looking forward to categorising and tagging our products and the web sites we have developed for you. However the actual logistics were a little dissapointing, only 4% of internet user understand tagging. the top level analysis of this talk was that if you are a big business you can gain vital market insight from the Folksonmies people tag your products from but erm that’s about it.
Designing the Complete User Experience - Jeffrey Veen, one of the major interface gurus from Google took us through his development process. Basically the story is simple: be strong; stand up to your internal politics: for your web site to succeed you must deliver what your users want not what your CEO wants and you mut consult your users early in the project and frequently - otherwise how are you really going to know what they really really want? Jeffrey’s project management evangilism followed on nicely from Marcus’s talk last night about Agile Project development: please please remember it is far cheaper and cost effective to change your projects (and take on board user feedback) early on in the development process rather than after launch!
Overall clear left’s D.construct conference reinforced our beliefs in project development, our techniques and our delivery, and on top of that it meant I got a great day out by the sea side and gained two free t shirts too!