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Damon Oehlman – HTML5 API Soup

Photo of Damon OehlmanIn this session we will explore ways you can implement and combine HTML APIs such as websockets, web workers, local storage, and geolocation to make awesome web apps.

Michael Mahemoff – HTML5: Online and Offline

Michael Mahemoff PortraitHTML5 introduces several so-called “offline” technologies: application caching, local storage, and file access, to name a few. But these technologies are not just for purely offline apps; they boost startup performance, overcome network outages, and partition content away from the server. This talk will explain how you can incorporate these technologies into your work today and identify the features browsers will be supporting in the near future.

Ben Schwarz – Building a better web with HTML5

Max Wheeler PortraitDuring my session we’ll look at where the future of HTML lies, including new structural elements. You’ll also grasp an introduction to associated technologies that have come into popularity with the steam of HTML5: SVG, Web Sockets, Web Workers, Geo-location and making applications useful offline.

Max Wheeler – Location, location, geolocation

Max Wheeler PortraitThis session will take you through building a location-based mobile app using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Including cross-platform techniques for figuring out where your users are, and providing graceful fallbacks options for devices that don’t have geolocation support (or users that don’t want to tell you exactly). You’ll learn about geocoding to a physical address (and the other way around) and look at how to build a mobile-friendly map with local points of interest.

David Peterson – Semantic web for distributed social networks

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.

David Peterson PortraitHear how Drupal, Semantic MediaWiki and other bleeding edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basically all the Semantic Web stuff) to build a distributed social network. The focus will be not on evangelism (I don’t really care about that) but how disparate open source platforms can talk and work together. This stuff actually works and makes development more fluid. These technologies make local development easier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, classic search is still king. How can you leverage this? Newcomers such as Yahoo Searchmonkey can play an important role in the creation of a truly distributed information system.

Myles Eftos – Web APIs, Oauth and OpenID: A developer’s guide

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 1.40pm.

Myles Eftos PortraitOnline web applications are big business, with many people relying on the cloud for data storage and workflow. These days, an API is an essential part of any online system, but this presents authentication and authorisation issues for the humble web developer. Learn how to create Web APIs, how OpenID and Oauth works and what you need to do to implement them.

Gina Trapani – Better Gmail: How Google Opened Gmail’s Web Interface to Any Developer Who Cares (And Why You Should)

A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.

Gina Trapani PortraitLast year, Google released an experimental Greasemonkey API for Gmail: coding hooks that let anyone add CSS and Javascript to Gmail that enhances how it looks and behaves. Why would you want to do this? Why wouldn’t you? Hear how Google’s using Greasemonkey to distribute Gmail development amongst independent web developers–and how those developers are integrating their own product into Gmail — resulting in a Better Gmail for everyone.

Kaitlin Sherwood & Steffen Meschkat – The Business and Technology of Mashups

A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.

Mashups are the hottest web development topic today. Hear about the front-end, back-end, and business issues of mashups with these two experts who know more about them than just about anyone.

Kaitlin Sherwood: Overview of Maps Mashup Technologies

In the past two years, there has been an explosion of tools for conveying geographic information to the masses. In this talk, Kaitlin Duck Sherwood will introduce major concepts and issues, and discuss the pros and cons of each of the major mashup frameworks. Attendees will gain an appreciation for their mapping options, and information to help them better choose between them based on their particular needs.

Steffen Meschkat

A central topic of “Web 2.0” is browser-side web application programming interfaces (APIs) and the specific type of web application they give rise to: mashups.

Using the Google Maps API as an example, I put this development into a perspective that allows one to appreciate how this, on the one hand, is a natural and coherent evolution of the Web that, on the other hand, significantly alters the ways of organizing the world’s information that the Web makes possible. I also discuss the specific technologies that web APIs for mashups are based upon, and their sometimes challenging idiosyncrasies.

George Oates and Paul Hammond – Web Apps: Developer to Designer

A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.

Web apps are an intimate marriage of back-end systems and client-side interaction, but it takes two very different skill sets to build robust scalable application platforms and create smooth user interfaces that work in multiple browsers.

In this session, George Oates and Paul Hammond consider the development process from the perspective of both back- and front-end developers, and the cooperation required between them. They’ll discuss how simple architecture choices, development patterns and — above all — good communication are key to making the relationship work.

Raul Vera – Mashups, web apps and APIs

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.

Raul Vera PortraitHear all about the exciting possibilities created by these technologies from Google Australia.

Cameron Adams and Kevin Yank – JavaScript APIs & Mashups

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

Cameron Adams PortraitKevin Yank  PortraitAdding JavaScript to your portfolio used to mean more work. Thanks to the wide range of APIs springing up from the likes of Google (Mail, Maps, Ads, Calendar, Search, etc.), Yahoo! (Flickr, Maps, Search, etc.) and Microsoft (Virtual Earth), JavaScript can actually save you a lot of work these days. JavaScript veterans Cameron Adams (The Man In Blue) and Kevin Yank (SitePoint) will take a whirlwind (and somewhat irreverant) tour of the "free stuff" you get from JavaScript today, and the creative things people are doing with it.

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I had an absolute blast, learnt so much, and met so many great people

Carmen Chung Software engineer, Valiant Finance