Tobias, Nikolai and Wolfram

dojo.beer(2)

In the evening of 5th December we’ve had our start for the dojo.beer(2) event in a nice bar in Munich, where about 10 Dojo enthusiasts attended to prepare for the official event the next day. During the evening Wolfram placed the bet, that more than 30 people will attend during the official dojo.beer(2) event. I lost that bet, because 32 people attended and I was really excited (still am), that so many people were interested in Dojo.

The next day we welcomed all attendees with a typical Bavarian Weisswurst. After the first meet and greet Wolfram collected Dojo topics people could talk about and everyone voted on those, followed by Nikolai, who gave a great overview of the most important Dojo components.
Then it was time for our special guests Dylan Schiemann and Pete Higgins who joined us via video chat and we talked about the current status of Dojo (just before that moment Dojo Version 1.2.3 was released) and what is planned for the future. Afterwards it was my job to explain the Dojo build system and how you can optimize a Dojo driven website (slides below). My talk was followed by Wolfram, who explained several Dojo features and later dived into the functional programming capabilities of Dojo (for further info, see the post of Shane O’Sullivan and for deeper insight a blog entry by Eugene Latzutkin). Nikolai then introduced Dojos new user documentation and gave a short preview of the new Dojo website. The last lecture was given by Norman Wenk (acomo), who demonstrated the Dojo widget system and explained the pitfalls, when creating your own. After a full day of Dojoness we went to a bar and ended with several dojo.beer(s).

dojo.beer(2) from Tobias von Klipstein on Vimeo.

Thanks to everyone who attended this event and I hope everyone enjoined it. I would particularly like to thank Mayflower who donated their office for that event and also like to note, that we wouldn’t had this amazing event without their support. Many Many Thanks!!!

More info about that event:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=dojo.beer
http://your-bear.blogspot.com/2008/12/djbeer-in-munich.html
http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/375-dojo.beer2.html
http://higginsforpresident.net/2008/12/back-in-business/

Webmontag Munich

On Monday, 8th December 2008, Wolfram and I went to the Webmontag event in Munich where Mihai Corlan, Platform Evangelist of Adobe, gave a good insight into technologies like Flex, Air and Zend AMF. Afterwards I’ve got the possibility to give an overview of Dojo, where I showed how Dojo evolved during the last year. At the end I showed some videos about Wavemaker, IBM’s Project Zero and the nice training application of Sitepen called Sensei to give an impression what you can reach with the Dojo Toolkit today.

I really enjoyed the round-table discussion about open source, the open web and how companies like Adobe fit in. Thanks to the Munich PHP-UG, Flex-UG and of course Raju Bitter, who altogether organized this nice event.

A Sidenote:

Mihai showed some interesting slides about a comparison James Ward made with his Census application. He shows the speed improvements of AMF in favour of JSON communication when transferring 5000 rows and more. This is a very special use case, I rather see the latest usability and interaction patterns stearing into the direction of loading just the data on demand that are really required. In most cases this big number of data is also hard for users to grasp. There is charting and some visual presentations that might require this load of data, but the optimization on the server will probably serve a better user experience here. An interesting read is Jared Jurkiewicz blog article about comparing these numbers with Dojo today, as the comparison of James Ward was made in April 2007.