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.