Trends and Transients

 

Over­view

Each year there are more new tech­no­lo­gies to keep track of, more ways to organ­ise your life and your company’s inform­a­tion, more ways to com­mu­nic­ate. This ses­sion will intro­duce you to new tech­no­lo­gies, dis­cuss older, under-appreciated tech­no­lo­gies, and enter­tain you at the same time. Our expert speak­ers will debate cur­rent issues and tech­no­lo­gies, giv­ing you the bene­fit of their wide exper­i­ence and dif­fer­ing points of view, so you can decide for your­self which tech­no­lo­gies will meet your needs and which are a waste of your time.

Classes for 2009

This year’s classes cover a range of top­ics which XML prac­ti­tion­ers may need to con­sider. Not all of them use XML dir­ectly, but all are issues that impinge on your use of XML.

Are Rich Inter­ac­tions killing the Web?

Taught by Paul Downey.

It could be argued that much of the value of The Web has arisen from its being a open, under­stand­able repos­it­ory of declar­at­ive doc­u­ments, eas­ily pro­cessed using XML and simple HTTP tools. How­ever there is a trend towards the Web as a set of inter­act­ive applic­a­tions, driven by increas­ing use of JavaS­cript and Ajax along with pro­pri­et­ary tech­no­lo­gies such as Flash, Sil­ver­light, and JavaFX. Whilst such Rich Inter­net Applic­a­tions (RIA) are cap­able of provid­ing enjoy­able inter­ac­tions and beau­ti­ful visu­al­isa­tions, they can be highly inac­cess­ible, lock­ing semantics and data away from developers. Even “cool” Web 2.0 sites with simple, read­ily parsed HTML con­tain­ing Micro­formats, and RSS or Atom feeds, often remove such fea­tures as they grow and become “richer”. What is a humble XML developer to do in this brave new, inter­act­ive world?

Clouds on your horizon?

Taught by Rich Salz.

The eco­nom­ics behind Cloud com­put­ing are com­pel­ling: most of the time, the com­puters in your data­cen­ter are idle, build­ing to handle a peak load for five minutes of a 24-hour day is expens­ive, and so on. If you’re think­ing of a star­tup that out­sources its com­put­ing needs, or an exist­ing organ­iz­a­tion that wants to move some of its data­cen­ter into the cloud, or provide a cloud as an internal IT func­tion, there are sev­eral factors that need to be con­sidered. This class will review some of the major cloud offer­ings, and dis­cuss some of the most import­ant issues to con­sider in cloud deploy­ment: data loc­a­tion, use and pro­tec­tion; lan­guages and envir­on­ments sup­por­ted; avoid­ing lock-in; policy and ser­vice agreements.

How XML Could Have Aver­ted The Recession

Taught by Tony Coates

What caused the latest world­wide reces­sion? Who was respons­ible? Could it have been aver­ted? A light-hearted romp through one of the most ser­i­ous issues facing the world today, and how things might have been so very dif­fer­ent with some judi­cious XML.

Trends and Tran­si­ents Panel Discussion

The final ses­sion of the day gives you a chance to hear the Fac­ulty Board mem­bers give their opin­ions on this year’s most-discussed tech­no­lo­gies. This will be fol­lowed by a panel discussion.