Hi folks! Just a quick reminder:
Ajax Pub Nite
May 12th, 2008 @ 7pm
The Rhino (1249 Queen St. W)
Come join us at an excellent neighborhood pub for a pint while we
discuss web application development, Javascript, web standards, and
whatever happened to “remote scripting”.
There is no price for admission, but there are likely to be several
eeePC laptops on hand to take advantage of the free wifi. Perhaps this
month we can get a Helma server farm working?
Just a reminder to everyone, our fourth Ajax Pub Nite is happening tonight at 7pm at The Rhino (that’s 1249 Queen Street West). Come have a beer with us and engage in some nerdy JavaScript talk. You can RSVP on the Facebook event page.
Hope to see you all there!
Well folks, it has been a busy month!
James Newton-King has released a new version of Json.NET that apparently has a new easier syntax that allows for developer friendly querying and creation of JSON code.
Pownce (a Kevin Rose project) has released version 2.0 of their API and apologized for taking so long in getting it out. They claim that it has been made developer friendly and they hope to start to compete with twitter on the 3rd party client metric… hmm… we’ll see how that goes. It sounds to me like we are getting into the realm of GMail 2.0…
Jeff Atwood posted a hilarious storming viewpoint on DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) calling him a “Douchebag”—its a must read as Jeff calls David on “…gets off on putting other people down.”
Hot off the press it appears that Joey deVilla (Global Nerdy, The Accordion Guy)—(formerly of Tucows; NOW formerly of TSOT) has moved on to work for B5 Media! As stated this morning he has moved on… the question now is why?
Have a great day all!
Remember Monday March 10th is the next Ajax Pub Nite!
I want to send props out to Chris Zumbrunn of Helma fame. What is Helma you ask?
There has been a recent surge of interest in more light weight approaches for rapid web application development, highlighted by the rise in popularity of RubyOnRails, especially amongst the Java/J2EE developer community.
But using a framework like RoR means Java developers need to learn not only a new language, but a new class library and completely different ways of working, giving up their very valuable experience and knowledge of the Java and J2EE.
Helma, a server-side Javascript web development framework offers a compelling alternative. Built on the Java platform and using technologies (Servlets, JDBC, etc) familiar to Java web application developers, it provides much of the same functionality as RoR while still letting Java developers have easy access to any Java libraries they need. Likewise, using JavaScript as the scripting language means that Java developers have a more familiar language to work with and one they may already be familiar with if they are building AJAXy, Web 2.0 style applications.
Helma is also being featured in the latest OpenExpo which looks to be shaping up to be a great event. (Note: You might need to know German to get the full value of the event – no I do not speak or understand German but google translate does a decent job)
It was also featured in a Linux Journal in and around September 2007 (I’ll post the issue when I look it up again) from it I started HelmaBlog.com which can help you get a simple feed reader project under way.
Helma is worth checking out if you are into JavaScript development. I’m working on a comparison of Helma and Grails and Groovy On Rails – we’ll see where that goes.
Thanks to Ian Irving for helping us come up with a new tagline for this site: “Asynchronous Beer and Geeking“. Heck, it’s a lot better than the ones I came up with.
How bad are the ones I came up with, you ask? Well, for your entertainment (and my personal embarrassment), I present you with my list of rejected site taglines (I want to warn you in advance that a lot of these—if not all of them—are kinda out of left field, and didn’t quite represent both the Ajax and Pub Nite aspects in a way I liked, which is why they were rejected), so bear with me):
Ajax Pub Nite #1 was a smashing success! We had around 25 people show up—not at all bad for a first event—and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves quite well. We were at The Rhino—same place as Rails Pub Nites, and a appropriate venue, if I do say so myself. Thanks to everyone who came out!I was so caught up in all the whole thing that I forgot to call to attention two things I wanted to discuss: coming up with a half-decent tagline for the site Update: that’s been resolved, and brainstorming some ideas for a good enough parody for JSOFF (as opposed to JSON). Oh well, there’s always next month I suppose 
.
Brent took some photos, as did I:
Hello Everyone! We’ll be updating this space with more information about Ajax Pub Nite (and eventually AjaxCamp) as it becomes available, so stay tuned! I recommend you grab our handy-dandy RSS feed so you can easily keep track of what’s going on!
