OSCON has grown up from its humble beginnings as a conference for the hackers in the Perl language over a decade ago to the premiere conference on open source software and practices. As conference organizer, Nathan Torkington, likes to put it: “In Babylon 5 terms, open source is our last best hope for software.”
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that at Plaxo, open source is our lifeblood. Our infrastructure is built on Linux, MySQL, and hundreds of other open source tools and libraries. Ecards uses the open-source LAMP stack in order to speed development, Thunderbird was one of our first supported clients and available under an open-source and public license, The Plaxo Open API enables the open-source practice of “mash-ups” to allow you to move your data outside our “information silo”, When people see how our Address Book Widget puts that mash-up power in the hands of anyone, they think there must be a catch. The only catch here is the principle stated in our privacy policy: “Your information is yours (not ours).”—an inherently “open-source” idea.
It is because we build on it (operations and eCards), provide it in code (Thunderbird client), and live its principles (Open API and widget), that it makes sense that we would want to participate more in the community. Luckily at this year’s OSCON, we have a chance to do so in the form of three talks.
- I’m giving a talk “Underpants Gnomes eCards” in the PHP track to explain from a “developer in the trenches” perspective how a revenue product was created using LAMP. Hopefully it will be a little fun to see the things we got right, as well as some of the missteps we made along the way.
- Joseph, who wrote the Address Book Widget, will explain all the interesting problems he ran into when creating Web 2.0 “mash-up” in his “Cross-site Ajax” talk.
- Finally, I put a talk about some of the practical Ajax design patterns we use here at Plaxo in a “0-60 Ajax” talk.
If you are curious, here was my PHP Ajax talk from last year:
Beyond the talks, OSCON is a great opportunity to learn from each other even if it is in those spontaneous “in the hallways” talks that occur there or at the parties in the evening. If you see us, be sure to stop by and say “Hi!” This year’s OSCON will be July 24-28th in Portland, Oregon. Joseph and I hope to see you there! Early registration is available if you sign up by June 5th.
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ColinATL,
Actually, the Plaxo Online contacts page was made before Ajax. Load times were really bad and the data and presentation logic were separated out (moved to javascript) in order to speed the load time, not for asynchronous callback to the server.
What browser do you use on your Treo? Have you tried Blazer? I don’t know if it will work better since I don’t use my Tungsten for browsing much. :-(
Your point is well taken: for certain essential features like My Plaxo, contacts and calendar access we should have more PDA-friendly and handicap-accessible versions available or transparently switched to before jumping whole hog into ajaxifying it. Right now WAP access (WML) isn’t going to cut it for those needs.
I'll take your advice to heart in the future.
Thanks for the insight,
terry
P.S. I forgot to mention that if you click on the image above you can see the video of the talk.
Regarding your AJAX usage, can we lighten up a little? Whereas I understand why you made your address book list page the way you did, and it looks cool and all, it doesn't work reliably across browsers, and I can't even begin to load it on my Treo's browser, which I occasionally need to if our Exchange server goes down...
By the way, I am synching my address book in about as cross-platform a fashion as possible...
Treo - GoodLink - Exchange Server - Outlook/Plaxo Toolbar - Plaxo - Mac Plaxo - Mac Address Book
It all seems to be working great! :)