hackdiary

XTech 2006 wants you

The XTech 2006 Call For Participation has just been published, and you should be submitting something. You have until January 9th 2006.

XTech is a superb European tech conference covering internet, XML, browser and open data technologies. This year's conference has a Web 2.0 flavour - think AJAX, tagging, identity, digital rights, owning your own data and opening up information for reuse. Don't think business models, think really great demos.

I had a great time at last year's conference - check out last year's schedule for a flavour of what went on. I'm proud to be on the programme committee again this year.

The Krasnapolsky Hotel, also recently home to Euro OSCon, is a top class venue right in the middle of Amsterdam. See you there in May 2006.

London Web Frameworks night was great

I had a great time presenting yesterday evening at the London Web Frameworks night. Huge round of applause to Dean Wilson for putting it together. I learnt interesting things about Catalyst and Django from the other speakers, and did my first public demo of the BBC Programme Catalogue. I'm immensely proud of the site, and I think it came across.

I had a great blessing from the demo gods. Simon Willison had borrowed my laptop for his talk. I was just about to demonstrate a search I'd pre-planned, but Firefox autocompleted my typing with 'appleseed', a term Simon had used to demonstrate local band search on lawrence.com. I took a deep breath and just hit 'search'. The BBC archivists didn't let me down - we found "A SERVICE FOR SCHOOLS, JOHNNY APPLESEED SUMMER 1981" that was broadcast nearly 25 years ago on Radio 4. I went on from there to show what else had been archived from that day in 1981, demonstrate other searches and show off the full FOAF and RSS feeds for every item.

For completeness, I've posted the slides, which are done in S5 as usual. However, I've been reading Presentation Zen recently and they don't really stand up by themselves. I've really gone off bullet points, and I find that if I use them then I read off my slides rather than talking to the audience. Oh, and I only tested the CSS on Firefox/Mac. They did look quite pretty on the night, I reckon.

REST On Rails

XML.com have just published an article I wrote for them last month entitled REST On Rails.

It outlines one approach that I've been developing for the API in the BBC programme catalogue. One of the things I like a great deal about Rails is its URL routing and dispatch mechanism. Creating mappings from URLs to model instances makes a resource-oriented style feel very natural, which sits very well with REST.

Isn't this a wonderfully literal interpretation of the article's title?