XTech 2008 Schedule

In JavaScript there is a beautiful, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. My intention here is to expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding dynamic programming language. Within the language is an elegant subset that is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being more reliable, readable, and maintainable.

In the year since XTech 2007, changes of interest to Web developers have been made to Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer and the engines that power them — added/improved support for standards (and non-standards), new versions for mobile devices, and more. This session takes a look back at what the changes have been — as well as taking a look ahead to see what may be on the way next.

Best Practices Deployed to Performance-tune Large Ajax Applications

An experimental study of the relative performances of a traditional HTML application and a set of comparable AJAX applications that use several different update data methodologies: partial HTML, XML, JSON, and CSV (comma separated values). A wide range of response sizes are included. Advantages and disadvantages of each are discussed, as are applicability in special cases such as mobile clients.

Web Applications (and widgets) have historically had little or no access to the device and the user's data, making it a safe, but boring haven. This is about to change. This presentation will focus on securely allowing access to the device and its data through natively integrated components and native JavaScript plugins.

Validator.nu is an (X)HTML5 validator and a RELAX NG and Schematron-based validator for generic XML. The architecture of the software, its RESTful XML/JSON Web service API and its reusable HTML5 parsing library are presented.

By looking at how we can use sites like Wikipedia, Freebase and DBpedia as authoritative sources of content and meta-data and utilising services such as del.icio.us to provide a measure of popularity and currency (_what_ is being discussed at _this_ point in time) we can generate additional meta-data that can be used to provide new routes through existing content archives.

We motivate and propose using extensions to the well-known Trackback protocol to support the notification of citation information between repositories of research outputs, particularly academic publications and scientific data.

This presentation will look at the process of publishing open data and review issues surrounding stability of both data and vocabularies, as well providing some recommendations for how to publish open data.

The wider developer community is increasing its understanding of the "Web of Data," as users demand the right to own their data. Unanswered questions include how to fit this data into other structures and how to link across them. We will discuss what Linked Data is; what it tries to fix; hurdles in developing a Linked Data system; and how Linked Data fits with the Data Space philosophy.

To be confirmed

Open Mashups is a complete tool suite empowering non-programmers to create their own applications by assembling existing functionnal components. Unlike existing solutions, the system is fully expandable and configurable: it uses code generators to target various platforms and devices (like mobile phones, web pages or desktop widgets) and provides a pluggable components model.

XML was published as a W3C Recommendation in February, 1998, a little over ten years ago. It was a huge success. What made it do so well, and what can we learn from ithis? What were some of the milestones of XML history? And how are things looking for the future?

The XQuery Update Facility is an eagerly awaited W3C standard for updating XML data. This important addition to the XPath/XQuery/XSLT suite of XML processing languages, in preparation for almost three years, has almost reached final Recommendation status. An example-driven close examination of the language, this talk also looks into likely further enhancements.

XML Schema is in an odd position: everyone is using it, but no-one really likes it. It's clearly fit for purpose, or people wouldn't be using it; but it attracts complaints both because of its immense complexity and because there are basic features that it doesn't provide. Version 1.1 in on the way: this talk surveys the new features and tries to assess whether they will solve the problem.

Web services and XML extensibility and Versioning This talk will go into the details of what can and can't be done to enable extensibility and versioning of XML Schemas, documents and Web services. A detailed analysis of the versioning mechanisms in Schema, and the pros and cons of different versioning techniques is provided. XML Schema 1.1's vast improvements in versioning will be described.

Applications built on 'skimming' principles are very loosely-coupled, and can run on just about any server-side architecture.

Real-time interaction is becoming a necessity on the ever-more dynamic Web. Jabber is a powerful established protocol, already used by over 10 million people worldwide, and ideally suited to web application development. Whether you're an API developer or writing client apps, this workshop offers real experience and practical advice.

This session looks at some of the main themes behind Web 2.0, commoditisation, innovation, portability and enterprise 2.0. It proposes that a common pattern exists behind them all, and that the "open" meme is a significant driving force behind these changes.

Opening keynote

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