I attended my first barcamp/democamp last night — and it was really interesting and thoroughly enjoyable. For those of you who don’t know what it is that I’m talking about — you can learn all about barcamp here and democamp here. (It’s basically a place where people can informally show off their cool applications and there’s no Powerpoint allowed.)

The best part

Before I go on to describe the night’s demos, I wanted to mention that the best part was going to the bar afterwards and hanging out with everybody. I found everyone to be really warm and friendly and hey it’s a chance to talk geek. I got to talk to David for a bit and had long chats with Eric and Sunir too.

The demos

First off there was a team from the University of Toronto who built a forum for Kids Help Phone based on JForum. The team did extensive customizations of the product to suit their client’s needs. The whole thing performed really well and, although the technology was perhaps not as novel as other presenters, it was very professional and I could see that the application was going to work.

Chris Nolan then presented his framework for working with Javascript in Ruby. I haven’t played around enough with Ruby to really understand the scope of the problem he was solving, but if you want to see an application check this out.

BlogMatrix was next. It’s a really impressive blogging engine that incorporates maps and calendar data into a blog post. The calendar’s scheduling features are really powerful and allow you to add all sorts of different events to your personal time management software. BlogMatrix uses Microformats extensively which is very geeky and very cool.

The creators of Releaseme.ca stepped up and showed us an amazing search implementation using Ruby and AJAX. They also described their commitment to the “Back” button and how they work around problems when AJAX breaks it.

Then it was Dabble’s turn. It’s an online spreadsheet application which has more power to transform, manipulate and organize your data than Excel itself. Click on that Dabble link and play around with it when you can. My words cannot do it justice.

Finally, a brave man from HP (it was already 8pm and people were restless to get to the bar) displayed HP Open View an Enterprise level user management system that works with multiple, different web servers. If you’ve got 300,000 users and run different web servers and need to manage permissions, check it out.

Miscellaneous Geek Stuff

RE: Java vs. Ruby

If you think you’ve done your job by picking your side and arming yourself with the relevant data, you’re wrong. You still have to consider Smalltalk and Squeak. (And yes, there’s a web application framework too.) The language wars include Smalltalk people!

Quote of the night

(paraphrasing) “I just felt like this application was asking to be written in Ruby.” - Pete from Unspace.ca

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Thanks to the organizers and I’m really looking forward to the next one.

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