London Sencha Touch user group Roundup

Tuesday evening saw our inaugural London Sencha Touch User group kick off in the salubrious surroundings of the Forward Technology amphitheatre with a few slices of pizza and a beer or two.

After a brief intro the evening kicked off with Patrick Hamann giving us a fairly pain free (tech ‘lite’) introduction to the Touch framework and giving us his opinions on where he thought it fitted within the plethora of development tools available.

Firstly giving us a bit of a low down into the development stack and providing us with some incites into when using the Touch framework might be a consideration, he went on to provide some useful examples of apps that have successfully utilised the framework and touched upon the useful templating and leveraging of SASS that is inherent in the framework.

Slides for Patrick’s talk can be viewed here:

Following Patrick, Matt Spence from the University of Kent providing us with an interesting view of how their dev team were pushed to consider developing ‘something’ mobile for the university. Whilst he admitted this wasn’t the best approach to starting a project he went on to demonstrate how, with little development time available, his team were able to produce some rather useful student tools such as building locator (using maps), desktop availability (how many desktops are available in the various public spaces) and timetabling accessed via a student login. Matt demonstrated how the readily available university data can be made available as a useful mobile service for their students and how the rapid application development nature of Sencha Touch enabled them to get their mobile ‘something’ out to a testable market within a 4 week period. We look forward to seeing the results of the next 4 week sprint on the project.

Slides for Matt’s talk can be viewed here:

Rob Squires completed the trio of talks with a discussion primarily focussed on building cross-platform mobile apps using Sencha Touch 2.0 but also giving us a more technical ‘under the hood’ view of the framework. Rob showed us a re-usable technique he had developed utilising the MVC nature of the framework to tackle various challenges that building cross-platform apps can throw such as differences in UI/UX that mobile users come to expect with their particular flavour of devise and OS.

Slides for Rob’s talk can be viewed here:

This post was written by Kirsten on January 31, 2012 at 5:56 pm

Come to our first London Sencha Touch User Group Meetup on Tues 24th Jan 2012

We’ve got a great venue sorted and finalised a date of Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 6:30 PM to come and chat, share, listen and learn about all things Sencha Touch. If you are interested in cross platform mobile development (native and web) built in web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript then please come and join us.

Our user group can be joined here: http://www.meetup.com/London-Sencha-Touch-User-Group

We’ve been lucky enough to have Forward host the event in their amphitheatre in the heart of Camden. Details of how to get there are below:

Forward Technology
Floor 2, Centro 3, 19 Mandela Street, London, NW1 0DU, United Kingdom
http://forwardtechnology.co.uk/venue

Transport Links:

• Underground: Camden Town, Mornington Crescent (Both Northern Line)
• Train: Euston, St Pancras International, Camden Road
• Bus: 274, 46

Being our first event we will be starting off soft with overviews into Sencha Touch and mobile development with an aim of getting a feel from the community as how we want to structure the events and what we all want to learn and share with each other. With that in mind we are on the look out for those of you who want to give a talk at this or future events. They can be anything from 5min lightening talks up to 30min in-depth slots: show us something you’ve worked on or something neat that we’d find useful. Please do get in touch if you want to contribute (it means you wont have to listen to us too much!)

We’re really looking forward to meeting the rest of the Sencha community in London and learning more about mobile development.

UPDATE…. WE HAVE AN AGENDA:

We have 3 sessions planned for this event each lasting 20-30 minutes with an open floor Q&A session following each. We will start the group with a beer and a slice of pizza and move onto the 3 main sessions detailed below:

An Introduction to Sencha Touch

Patrick Hamann is a Front-end developer living and working in London with a keen passion for creating great mobile experiences using HTML5 frameworks. His talk will be a taster session introducing you to Sencha Touch giving some insight into why you might consider it as a solution.

• What is Sencha Touch?
• A walk-through of the Sencha Touch structure
• Capabilities and UI features
• Real-world examples of it out in the wild

Kent Mobile: Building a mobile “something” for the University of Kent

Matt Spence is from the IS web team at Kent University and will be providing some incites into their experience with Sencha Touch.

• The pressure to deliver something on a mobile platform
• How we arrived at Sencha
• What we’ve done
• Where we’re going

Building cross platform apps using Sencha Touch

Rob Squires is a Lead Developer with UVd with a penchant for utilising well established programming methodologies with new technologies. He is a Sencha fan and keen squash player.

His talk will focus on some techniques and considerations involved in building cross platform apps using Sencha Touch

• A quick look at common cross platform challenges
• Some techniques that could be useful for a Sencha project requiring cross platform deployment

This post was written by Kirsten on January 4, 2012 at 4:35 pm

Full Frontal 2011

Earlier this month I attended Full Frontal Javascript 2011 conference hosted by Remy Sharp in lovely Brighton. I’ve wanted to attend since it started three years ago but have always had something in the way. So I jumped on a train at stupid o’clock on a very cold and misty morning and managed to finish off ‘Mobile First’ on the commute before grabbing a well deserved coffee with Tom Parker at Coffee@33.

The conference was held in the beautiful ‘Duke of Yorks’ independent cinema in Preston Circus, meaning the comfy sofa seats were a serious upgrade from the normal plastic seats I’m used to at conferences. Perfect to settle into for a day of insightful talks after my early rise. I won’t discuss all of the days content as we’d be here for weeks, but here were my highlights.

CoffeeScript Design Decisions – Jeremy Ashkenas

I was extremely happy to see Jeremy on the bill for Full Frontal, as we’re big fans of Backbone.js in the office and try and squeeze it into every project. That said he was actually on the bill to speak about Coffeescript, a new approach of writing js in a minimal fashion that at the same time tries to smooth out some of the ‘gaps’ in the language. I won’t go into the details of Coffeescript as you can learn more here, but Jeremy explained the core concepts very well; you would hope so from the creator;). The main points I took home were ‘It’s ok to cheat!’ why should we have to re-wrtie the book every time we start a project, but at the same time using Coffeescript we can extend/bend js language to our own.

“HTML5 is about taking js seriously!”

Excessive Enhancement – Phil Hawksworth

Phil’s talk was on a subject very close to my heart about ‘Excessive enhancement’. With the boom of Javascript over the last couple of years, especially surrounding UI development and DOM manipulation, he raised some very important questions. Are we over doing it with our ‘Browser sizzle’? Is it ok to load in 10mb of images on page load for some fancy effects or should be loading them in lazily? Whoever thought the hashbang /#! was a good idea? That last point was probably the most important, are we going to look back on this era of the web as the years of lost content. Start using the History API and .pushState() today!

Scalable Javascript Application Architecture – Nicholas Zakas

The talk I was looking forward to the most, if you’ve ever done any research into js design patterns or application architecture you would have found Nicholas’s name; he didn’t let us down. The talk was full of clear and concise definitions of architecture principles such as the module and mediator patterns and went on to describe how to structure your applications for re-use , extensibility and scalability. It really drilled home to me the importance of planning ahead in your application design to try to loosely couple as many components as possible.

“A scalable js architect allows you to replace any block in a Jenga tower without fear of it toppling over”

If you haven’t already done so, I strongly advise checking out his slides here.

Beyond the planet of geeks – Brendan Dawes

A very controversial move to have a designer most famous for his ‘Flash’ work to talk at a JS conference… but I bet everyone was happy he did! Extremely insightful for me, forcing us to take a step back and remember that our work can still be fun.

“If you don’t go into the woods, nothing will ever happen in your life.”

Drawing from his obsession of collecting weird objects such as pencils, to his work at Magnectic North, Brendan showed us that we should ‘obsess about our tools’. He also expressed the importance of continuing to experiment and explore new technologies and interfaces, canvas, svg e.t.c as they are here to be used today. His talk was summed up by my favorite quote of the day.

“When you get good at something try something different”

Although agnostic of languages or platforms, Brendan hinted towards the end of the Flash era and even stated that although it will always have its uses to become ubiqutus we may ‘need to leave some things behind’.

You gotta do what you gotta do – Marcin Wichary

What can I say, this guy has the best job in the world. For 20% of his time Marcin is one of the interface engineers for the ‘Google Doodles’. Be it Pac-Man or dancing lady, he has worked on some very cool projects. In this talk he showed us how they have used some very clever techniques to overcome the issues you can have trying to serve a project to 6 billion people. For example crushinator which cuts up animations into individual frame sprites that get overlaid on each other or using the devices accelerometer to control submarines. By far the funniest and most interesting talk I have seen this year!

Overall the day was a great success for me. I was very glad that the subjects of the talks were well rounded having something for everything and not just about how we should be caching our for-loop vars. All were educating and insightful, which leads me to think that the lack of video recordings is a shame as this knowledge may be lost forever (but I know that Remy is working on this ☺). Although, at the very reasonable price of the conference I don’t blame the man, in this day an age of conferences costing towards £1000 Full Frontal is an absolute bargain and extremely good value for money. Finished off with good discussions with friends and a nice drink by the seaside. What more could you want from a conf? I’ll definitely be back next year!

This post was written by Patrick on November 30, 2011 at 4:22 pm

London Node.js User Group

Last night we attended the inaugural London Node User Group or to those in the know l-nug #lnug. We have been experimenting with node.js internally here all year and are extremely excited by the prospects it may hold for our clients and us in the future, aside from the fact we love all things javascript and who wouldn’t want to write asynchronous code….

The event was hosted and sponsored by the fine chaps at Forward in their rather swanky Camden offices and kicked off with a lovely round of free drinks and pizza (courtesy of Forward), some great informal networking and discussions surrounding the likes of the new Kindle Silk browser and Facebook’s plans to take over the world. A good warm up to get the brains ticking for the night’s 3 main talks:

Forward’s own Andy Kent started the night with: “Real time data analysis over unbounded streams” a look into the libraries he has been producing internally at Forward for real-time keyword data analysis specifically his Creek streaming aggregator used in production to track popular words and urls across different data streams. We were particularly impressed to see it being benchmarked in production environments clocking 500 hits a second without even flinching.

Garren Smith gave a very insightful talk “These are the ORM’s you are looking for” discussing a few options you have for ORM’s in node to create abstraction layers between your code and your lovely NoSQL db’s for object relational mapping bliss (and we are big fan’s of ORMs). Specifically LazyBoy which he wrote for couch (our personal favorite NoSQL) and we have used for personal projects. Bringing support for defaults, CRUD, relationships (hasmany e.t.c) and couch view goodness.

Rob Tweed finished the night with a rather controversial (well at least at a node group) talk on the Globals database, a very reliable high performance in-process (i.e. no network layer) NoSQL database (tongue twister) that predates the NoSQL era, abstracted from Caché db. My favorite quote of the night was from Rob, when discussing getting into node.js:

If Douglas Crockford is talking about it, then it must be good!

Not for the faint hearted, Globals is a extremely low-level storage engine for which you have to write your api’s yourself, even indexing! However, this allows you to be a lot more flexible in creating your db’s. Rob’s interesting point was that after a lot of testing and benchmarking he found that when using Globals and “blocking” on high performace enterprise level projects, synchronous db calls where faster than the as aysnc possibilities node gives us. This led into a great Q&A session from the all the aync fan boys in the room.

After the event we all headed to the grand union for some post-event discussion, where I discussed the possibility of using Node in some upcoming mobile projects we have, with some great ideas coming from people for real life uses for sockets and node in mobile development, so watch this space.

Overall the event was a great start to what – we hope – will be long running user group, a great community of people all pushing the technology to new and exciting places. Firmly rooting the fact that server side javascript is here to stay, and is ready for production use! A massive thanks to Andrew Nesbitt and Andy Kent and Forward for being great hosts. We’re always happy to meet new friends in the london tech scene so why not follow us on twitter: UV^d Patrick Hamann

I will update the post once the slides/videos for the night have been released.

UPDATE: Forwards Flickr photoset from the night.
UPDATE: Video of Andy Kent’s talk “Real time data analysis over unbounded streams”

This post was written by Patrick on September 29, 2011 at 10:17 am

London JS: node.js & express.js

Last night we attended our 3rd London JS meetup, held at the offices of the event sponsor Poke, in Shoreditch.

Hungry from another busy start to the week, we were once again pleasantly surprised by Poke’s generosity who had provided 15 (we counted) Papa John’s pizzas and enough Peroni to put a Pizza Express to shame. There were 3 talks on the agenda + we had been particularly looking forward to hearing what the speakers had to say about Node.js.

Paul Kinlan started proceedings discussing and demoing LeviRoutes, a javascript routing framework he had built for Google.io. Using the HTML 5 History API, this looks like a bloomin’ useful bit of kit when you’re developing single page apps.

Alex Young then gave us a great account of implementing Node.js + Express in the real world, providing some particularly useful + comical tips on how/when to persuade a client that node is the way forward.

Michael Smith ended the evening with his introduction to Nodejs, discussing the wider applications (other than as an HTTP server) that node is suited to and even fitting in some live coding before his battery run out!

Another great event from London JS, thanks guys…looking forward to the next one!

This post was written by Rob on September 20, 2011 at 12:53 pm

Global Ignite Week 2011!

Last week was Global Ignite Week 2011.

Described by it’s sponsors O’Reilly as “Fast-paced, fun, thought-provoking, social, local, global”, the global Ignite concept has given rise to a large number of events held across the world, each sharing a common premise. Volunteer speakers present to enthusiastic crowds, with each speaker bounded by the Ignite Week rules :

1. 5 minutes
2. 20 slides
3. slide autoscrolling -activated-

With 5 events planned for the UK, including Liverpool and Bristol, we were eager to sign up when we heard about the 4th annual event in London – IgniteLDN4.

On arrival we were greeted by the giant Wall of Tweets, showcasing the ongoing tweeter battle from within the audience who were fuelled by the chance of winning some O’Reilly memorabilia.We were also introduced for the first time to the 18 speakers who over the course of the evening, would be trying to keep their pace on a great range of topics….From Michael Reeves’ first-hand account of attempting a random life in the style of the Dice Man (from the 1971 novel of the same name); Steve Barry’s epic story of how George Lucas’ merchandising machine bought about the decline of the British toy industry and Jemimah Knight’s twitter patisserie (#knightpatisserie) including evidence of some deliciously geeky seven-segment display brownies arranged into those classic inverted calculator words…

Of course, being interested in everything web and creative, we were particularly pleased to listen to quite a few talks on technology and design. So without further ado, a round of applause please for our picks of the night!

Aden Davies

Can Silicon Valley/Roundabout/any other geographic location where tech companies live, disrupt the world of banking?

Aden provided us with a snappy insight into how us “Silicon Roundabout types” have recently been jumping in the ring with the big banks to bring new ways of banking to consumers. Aden identified how developments in hardware and software (such as RFID and NFC) and social networking are sprouting new web start-ups around the world, as well as giving the large banks something to keep pace with. He painted the picture that eventually we will be able to pay for goods using NFC enabled devices such as mobile phones (Google’s Nexus S is the first phone with this technology) and introduced a number of social banks, (Zopa is an example), that facilitate peer to peer lending. As a man in the industry, Aden alluded to some of the challenges facing the adoption of these new technologies, namely the difficulty in integrating new technologies into the highly structured and protected global banking infrastructure.
Aden’s blog is a good place to start if you want to find out more: http://www.adendavies.com/

Maxwell Roberts

Underground Maps, Design Challenges and Challenging Designs

Author of Underground Maps After Beck, Maxwell plotted the evolution of the original London tube map from the earliest 20th Century, to Harry Beck’s design in the 30′s and finally to the European tube maps we are familiar with today. Giving us a quick insight into the topology rules that Beck developed, including a common 45 angle on all diagonal lines, Maxwell went on to showcase his experiments with the London Tube Map that adhere more closely to Beck’s design principles.
Maxwell continually articulated Form into Function, identifying the reduction in time taken to calculate a given route that could be achieved with each design.

Tom Scott

I Know What You Did Five Minutes Ago

There seemed to be a definite wisp of hype surrounding Tom Scott’s talk. With his talk “Flash Mob Gone Very Very Wrong” from IgniteLDN2 still ranked @ No. 2 within all Ignite talks, Tom took the stage as the final speaker and it has to be said closed IgniteLDN4 with a bang! This year Tom chose to showcase just how much personal information can be gleaned from Facebook and Twitter if you’re not up to speed with your privacy settings. Starting with a few gentle anecdotes regarding online privacy, after about 3 minutes Tom launched into his show piece. In an algorithm driven, “pseudo-real-time” scour of open Facebook profiles, Tom quickly collected the name, profession, mobile number and mother’s maiden name of one random user and quick as a flash called up the gentlemen to leave these now not so personal details on his voice-mail.

Once the dust had settled on the talks,we couldn’t help but feel we needed to reflect on what we had seen. Given that we were in Brick Lane..we thought it would be rude not to go for a curry.

..and that’s exactly we what did…Bring on IgniteLDN5 in October!

This post was written by Rob on February 15, 2011 at 12:35 pm

DECODE: Digital Design Sensations

http://www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/decode/

We decided to have a company outing to Decode @ V&A last Friday and trotted off to West London (yes, we do venture out of East London) to see what we could see.

The blurb states:

“Decode: Digital Design Sensations showcases the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small, screen-based, graphics to large-scale interactive installations.”

And

“Decode is a collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero, a contemporary arts organisation operating internationally with a remit to promote innovation across all forms of moving image and interactive arts.”

From a visitors perspective the exhibition was interesting enough; quite a lot of interactive art installations which capture, record and insert the audiences contribution (for example a video ‘wall’). And other works which use interesting data sources (such as stock market data) to as the source of algorithmic animations. In some ways though there was nothing we hadn’t seen before in terms of technology and this is where we became a little critical of the exhibition: for all the slickness of the works, it felt to a few of us that something was missing – what was the meaning of things? For instance, a lot of the work in the exhibition played on the fact that people seemingly love to have their 5 minutes of fame and hence fall over themselves to be filmed, pictured, captured in some way and displayed for others to look at. But what is the intended meaning of the art? Is there any actual cultural or personal message hidden in them? It didn’t look to me like there was and as such the exhibition fell short of what art can offer people (excite by all means but also get the audience thinking). I didn’t see any obvious cultural references, or personal messages existential or otherwise. As an example, there was an algorithmic animation which was generated from stock market data according to the blurb. All well and good but no further explanation was given, it looked nice but think of the possibilities involved in this subject of telling a story, making a comment about capitalism / money and the state of the economy and what effect this has on society (obviously poignant now). It’s a shame it didn’t explore these meaningful avenues or if it did that the blurb about the work didn’t even mention it (they often sided on a practical explanation of how it was achieved / built).

As such, some of the exhibition felt a little more like the interactive section within the science museum as opposed to any great art exhibition – great fun and visually stimulating but lacking an underlying meaning (of course the science museum obviously has an educational remit it fulfils). I wonder what people in 100 years will think when they look back at this period of digital art? I suppose they may come to the conclusion that the early 21st century signified the beginning of a new art movement but at the same time, as art goes, was a little naïve; getting carried away with new technology at the expense of what art is actually all about.

I might be looking at this too critically and I guess there is nothing wrong with showing off techniques and new found skills, after all the great artists of the renaissance and beyond have often done just that but I would like to see an industry I am involved in attempting to merge the technology with the fundamental reasons why art is so important to everyone – to get us thinking about things (anything!).

This post was written by Kirsten on February 18, 2010 at 1:17 pm

More Accessible User Interfaces with ARIA

On Tuesday I had the pleasure of attending Todd Kloots Yahoo! Dev talk on “More Accessible User Interfaces with ARIA”, apart from the added bonus of being located in the new Skills Matter conference and events centre. Todd made a very good presentation and a solid introduction to ARIA for those not aware of it. Rather than boring the audience with long spouts of text from the W3C ARIA spec he instead chose a more hands on approach showing everyday examples of ARIA on widgets he had developed with Yahoo and the YUI, whilst at each point stopping to show alternative options of implementation and which were the best practices and why he thought they were.

For those of you who are not familiar ARIA (or “Accessible Rich Internet Applications”) is a way further conveying a specific elements role within a webpage or application through the use of enhanced semantics. This allows for screen readers and assistive technologies to more accurately define to the user how to interact with a websites controls, in turn creating a richer user experience. It is especially useful to define the use of more advanced user interface controls (that are becoming increasingly more popular ) made using javascript and ajax, that have states that constantly change.

For the more interested developers out there, ARIA is applied to your applications by placing extra attributes within your elements tags, most commonly using the role=”" attribute.  One of the most important aspects of ARIA is the ability to apply multiple attributes to an element (as you would do with ID’s or Classes). This is because each element can have multiple properties:

• It’s Role: role=”menu”
• It’s State: aria-disabled=”true”>

• It’s Properties: aria-haspopup=”true”

A simpler way of describing this may be to show you an example of the markup one would use of a simple two panel tabbed interface.

<ul role="tablist">
       <li role="presentation"><a href="" role="tab">Tab 1</a></li>
       <li role="presentation"><a href="" role="tab">Tab 2</a></li>
<ul>

<div role="tabpanel">
       <p>Content</p>
</div>

<div role="tabpanel">
       <p>Content</p>
</div>

Although this is clear when visually displayed like that, the only true way of showing ARIA in use is to see (and more importantly hear) it working within a supported browser or screen reader. Though, as with all new or unfinished W3C specs, browser support and implementation varies across all vendors, with JAWS and Window-Eyes supporting the most amount of roles and states attributes. This leads us to the question of ‘is it worth all the hassle?’, my own personal answer: YES, being a big supporter of progressive enhancement, as long as it aids a better user experience for some of your users then it is worth the small amount of extra time to implement it.

Overall, Todd’s talk was very insightful and good to see how Yahoo! are going about creating much richer user experiences for people with specific needs, and even more so educating others about the best practices which can hopefully lead to a more accessible web!

I will certainly be trying to force and implement the use of ARIA in future projects here at UV^d, so keep your eye out for more info and posts around the subject in the near future. Though in the mean time I have included some further reading to feed your ARIA thirst, and start trying out ARIA yourself. But as Todd said himself:

Reading the documentation only gets you so far.

So try actually testing your new aria goodness with a screen reader, two of the links below are to help your setup a screen reader testing environment on your machine.

Enjoy!

Further reading:
WAI-ARIA Best Practices

YUI Configuring screen readers

How to use NVDA and Firefox to test your web pages for accessibility

This post was written by Patrick on November 20, 2009 at 2:52 pm

FOWD Tour -Bristol

Whilst Gareth was attending the1^st linked data meetup I was on the other side of the country in lovely Bristol attending the FOWD Bristol Tour.  The day long conference was designed to let people get a chance to experience what the normal FOWD conferences are like in a place nearer to them without having to go to London or New York (And for a fraction of the price!).

Though, as I already live in work in London, the main attraction for me to travel all the way to Bristol was down to the fine line-up of speakers for the day. With the likes of Elliot Jay Stocks and Bruce Lawson I had no valid reason not to attend, and the small factor of being able to catch up with some old friends.

Elliot kicked the day of with ‘A Perfect Portfolio’. A talk aimed at highlighting the key strengths and weaknesses in portfolio designs, and some very valid points that you should take into consideration when designing your own. A subject that is very topical here at UV^d at the moment due to us being in full swing of our own re-branding. It was very interesting to see the amount of points that came up that we have spent hours (coming up to years) discussing and deliberating over, such as the importance of showing your featured work on your homepage, to how you go about showing the process of your work: Elliot summed up the presentation succinctly:

It’s not about the finished project, it’s “How you get there!”

The next discussion of the day was from Paul Boag of Headscape titled “The Battlefield of Design – Designers vs Clients”. The first interesting thing to note was that Paul had decided not to use any slides at all and to rely purely on his memory (and cue cards) to educate us. Although, even with his new controversial style of presenting, it turned out to be a very insightful look into the process that Headscape use from brief to sign off. With the main aim of including the client throughout the design process rather than “designing behind doors”. I picked up some good tips from this, which we will be hopefully be putting into practice here in the future.

The HTML5 working spec is something that I have been following throughout the year and starting to become very passionate about. Therefore there was no doubt that in my opinion the best was saved until last, with Bruce Lawson’s talk on the Future of HTML5. He covered a wide range of basic HTML5 knowledge, from the introduction of new basic tags such as <header>, <article>, <section>, <aside>, and <footer> to some of the more advanced such as <video>, <audio> and my personal favourite <canvas>  which enables the dynamic rendering of graphics on the page through javascript, a good example of this can be seen here.

The most important thing to take from Bruce’s talk though, is the fact that you don’t have to wait for the HTML5 spec to be complete to start using it. That could be years and even more so for the browsers to fully implement it, the pages with the new doctype<!DOCTYPE html> will still render in the browsers we know today, and most will accept the new tags. So why not start experimenting and playing! We certainly have, as you’ll see if you take a look at the source of this very blog.

Overall FOWD was a very enjoyable day, yet there is no way I could have covered everything in one small blog post. So for more info Bruce and Elliots slides from the day can can be viewed here:

• The Future of HTML5
• Stop worrying and get on with it

This post was written by Patrick on September 29, 2009 at 10:44 am

1st Linked Data Meetup

One of the most beneficial and exciting parts of being a web developer in London is the welcoming and engaging community which exists here. There are continuous events and workshops being held (usually for free) on various technologies and topics relating to our industry. My expectations of these usually small scale and low key events were massively surpassed by the 1st Linked Data Meetup I attended last Wednesday. A large portion of the Linked Data community were present and some of the leading developers and thinkers in this field were there to showcase applications of Linked Data.

For those not acquainted with the phrase and its meaning it would be beneficial to watch Tim Berners-Lee’s introduction to Linked Data at the TED conference. But in brief it is one of the many possible methods of incorporating meaning (semantics) into the abundance of information that is available on the World Wide Web. Essentially Linked Data could bring us closer to a Semantic Web or as Tim Berners-Lee calls it the “Next Web”. His image is of a web where explicit URIs are used to represent things in the real world (people, places, events, objects, etc). Once this URI exists, as a representation of a concept or object, it can then be used as a reference point to be talked about or linked to by other sources of data; hence creating linked data.

I cannot begin to cover all of the information relayed during the half day event particularly that relating to the formal specifications of linked data. However one of the messages of the day was the importance of exemplifying the incredible potential of Linked Data by either blogging about it (tada!!!!) or by creating compelling applications which utilize it.

Firstly we will be endeavouring to use RDFa in our future web projects to embed rich metadata into our web documents and I strongly recommend that other agencies and developers do the same. Secondly I would like to draw attention to a couple of the projects which were illustrated at the event which exemplify the possibilities of Linked Data.

MusicBore
A project completed during the Music Hack Day in London which uses Linked Data to essentially remove the need for radio DJ’s. \o/

Data Incubator
Data Incubator is a project which is focussed around taking mass datasets from willing participants (NASA, Discogs, OpenLibrary) and opening them up for wider reuse. They do this by converting the data into accessible linked data and through a community of developers maintain the dataset with the intention of eventually giving it back to the original owners. As stated on their site; “the goal is not to steal, but to show that there is a better way.”

Sig.ma
An RDF search engine. If for example you typed your name into sig.ma, you will receive results from various different online sources which already embed RDF, RDFa or microformats into their sites. An impressive array of information will be returned which is eerily specific to you rather than any of your namesakes which you tend to find on Google.

On a personal note I am very proud of myself (and Marc who I attended with) for not screaming like girls and demanding the autograph of Tim Berners-Lee when he arrived at the conference and sat at the table with us! I wish I was wearing my I LOVE THE INTERNET tshirt!

This post was written by Gareth on September 16, 2009 at 10:29 am