Linde002::PHP

At the end of each day there is an hour of lightning talks, 5 minutes per person and you can ramble on about whatever strikes you.

The highlights for me were the geek-my-ride talk and the SQL magic talk.

Geek my ride consists of a Mazda R8 (or something sporty like that) that has an inbuilt computer, 3G data uplink and some usb ports that connect to the engine management system. The cool thing was that he SSH’ed into his car while giving the talk. He could read out Voltages, Air intake, speeed, etc.

The second cool thing was the guy who used bizarre SQL to create fractals as a resultset and solved the travelling salesmen problem using pure SQL.

So another session I visited yesterday was given by a hydrodynamical engineer (if I recall correctly) that used PHP to help him generate floodmodels. At first this didn’t sound like a task you would consider PHP to be good for but then he explained how he used it.

He has written a library that ‘glues’ all the seperate FORTRAN / C programs together using PHP so he can input raw data at the beginning and at the end it comes out the way he wants to without the need for him to input-output-input-outpunt-etc all the data into every seperate program. In between he uses MySQL and flat text files to save the intermediate data.

After all the processing is finished he then takes PHP with the GD extension and creates charts, animations and even small animated flooding movies from the data he has stored in the database.

The actual work, even though impressive, wasn’t that interesting to me, the interesting thing is that this engineer took PHP to do a job that it was good at, glueing components together. Utilising it strengths and acknowledging it’s weaknesses allowed the engineer to make his life easier. This should be a good lessen for all of you.

I attended a session on Dojo yesterday and I can’t say I’m impressed. The speaker was good and enthousiastic but it just felt like another general purpose ajax-enabled javascript framework. Especially the remarks that DOJO is inherently slow and includes 40 other .js files for one request if you include all the features were adding to my suspicion that I was right in never giving it a go.

The thing that really struck me though was that you can circumvent the 40+ include problem by, here it comes, recompiling dojo with a custom made built script that is read by java which will output a compressed dojo package that you can use.

IMHO, if you need a java packager for a javascript framework you might want to rethink your approach.

The second workshops of google’s hackathon centered around opensourcing mapping applications. None of the top 4 mapping providers, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Mapquest, have opensourced their mapping applications. So if you want to develop open source geographically aware applications you need to use open source alternatives like Openstreetmap in combination with OSMA render.

If you want to be able to abstract your map coding from the data provider and / or the tile renderer you can use either OpenLayers, which is an open source JS/UI that works together with open source data providers and tile renderers to create map that can be used within your applicaition, or MapStraction, which is an abstraction layer for other javascript UI’s like Googles or Microsofts mapping applications.

A fun fact was that OpenLayer is often used in combination with Google Maps because it provides better event hooks than the Google API.

OSDC 2008 started today with the Google Hackathon, an all day hackfest based around google technologies and specifically geared towards the open source crowd.

It started with an overview of Google’s OpenSocial technology, a standardized API for creating social networking ‘gadgets’ (not widgets, not sprockets, not wadgets, etc). The technique is centered around XML specifications that contain the HTML, CSS and JS neccesary to run your gadget within a OpenSocial container.

This OpenSocial container contains the ’social’ information that makes a application social like friendslists, if the current viewer is the owner or just a viewer, relationships etc.

After you’ve finished writing your XML file you upload it to a publicly availble URL and add it to your OpenSocial enabled social network to make your app work.

The link to the hackathon site (and from there to the opensocial tutorials) is: tinyurl.com/osdchackathon