The plenary speaker was Tim Bray, “Distinguished Engineer” and Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems. Tim listed several important new realities he is tracking:
- It has always been easy for anyone to build web sites – these days, it is easy and cheap/free for anyone to build a database driven web site, or a community web site. His example was Ravelry.com, which has 500,000 registered users and 900 new users each day. It was created in 2007 and has just one web developer. Ruby on Rails (and similar technologies like Python/Django) is what makes this so easy. Tim suggested that everyone in the audience read Programming Ruby 1.9 (with picture of pickaxe) – not necessarily to learn how to use it but just to get the philosophy.
- REST (Representational State Transfer) allows us to create apps that allow other people to build apps that use our content, in ways we wouldn’t think of
- Relational databases are becoming outdated for some applications, since new social sites (Facebook) would be too slow if they ran on a relational database. The new standard for this type of site is “eventually consistent” meaning that Facebook does not aim to have a perfectly up-to-date database all the time (unlike a financial web site.
- While it’s true that only a small percentage of people have smartphones, there is a renaissance in the use of mobile SMS services (
- We are creating more text than ever before
- What is the Internet for? What is the killer app of the Internet? The answer has always been the same: Other People.
Biggest takeaway: an audience member asked Tim “Managing all these blogs, IM, cell phones, blogs – how do we do that? Also what about the human aspect of it? People just using their Blackberries all the time and being rude”
Tim’s answer to part 1: You just need to buckle down and figure it out
Tim’s answer to part 2: The technology is not the problem, it’s a behavioral / human problem.
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