SAPO Codebits Day 1

November 13, 2008

Yesterday I arrived in Lisbon, Portugal, and today I gave a presentation on XMPP at SAPO Codebits. There were quite a few people in attendance, and we explored XMPP APIs for a fictional server monitoring application.

I also saw a presentation on Dojo by Peter Svensson and Jan Lehnardt’s presentation on CouchDB. CouchDB is one of my favorite up and coming projects, and it has definitely made databases cool again. Jan implied that some big companies are deploying CouchDB now for applications that will be announced shortly.

I didn’t see the presentation on server side JavaScript, but everyone was talking about it afterward. I think a server side toolkit would be great for getting people started in Web development. They would only have to learn one programming language, not two or more. They have some real hurdles to overcome first, most of them related to the lack of any kind of library support for things like disk access and sockets. Between those ideas and Peter’s talk about moving processing to the client, the client-side templating and rendering frameworks that are popping up are starting to sound pretty appealing. We might as well be making use of all the computers accessing our services.

I had a great time today, and the SAPO folks are putting on a great conference. It’s certainly clear that Portugal has a lot of talented developers.

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