XTech 2008 Schedule

It's been a while since Web2.0 and Mashups were introduced as an alternative method for creating simple applications. This session walks you through how such an approach can be applied to real enterprise applications in contexts that require something more than quick composition of information from various sources.

OpenSocial is an Open Standard defining a set of common APIs that work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Plaxo, Hi5, Ning, orkut, Salesforce.com and LinkedIn, among others. This allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites, reaching over 200M+ users in dozens of countries: Learn once, write anywhere.

Why does every new social networking site make you re-enter all your details and rebuild your friends list? Your contact and relationship details are already published elsewhere. If this data is published in hCard and XFN, it is readable by machines as well as people. Learn how a little sprinkling of microformats can create an ecosystem that makes portable social networks a reality.

OAuth is poised to be one of most important new standards in 2008 for anyone building with identity, social platforms, or APIs. Come find out why we designed OAuth the way we did, why it works, when it doesn't, and how to wrangle OAuth to fit your requirements. We'll cover considerations when designing an OAuth secured API including security implications, mobile user experience, and pitfalls.

Fire Eagle is a new service designed to make it safe and easy to build and use location-aware applications and services. It's a place for users to store information about their current location that trusted apps and sites can update or access. The talk covers how Fire Eagle works and how to use it to build a fire eagle client application oauth and RESTful web services to share user locations.

CouchDB is a new kid on the database block and it plays by its own rules. It is a document oriented database with a REST API and it uses JSON to store data. This talk explains CouchDB and does not shy away from the technical details that make CouchDB so interesting.

We are prone to solve technical problems addressing the needs of conference attending alpha geeks. Yet, widespread adoption is quite different to a private beta. What does this mean? How do we mitigate the desire for rapid progress with the needs of the rest of us? These hot new technologies require some psychological insight to make them meaningful. You know the technology, come and grok humans

So far we have been talking about mashing up with user centric identity and the missing connecting dots for 'deputization' and permission management. Now it's time to talk about how a new emerging open and community driven standard called "OAuth" helps in bridging these gaps. And of course more open issues that yet remain to be solved.

In this session the Access Control specification and its relationship to XMLHttpRequest will be explained and how these will impact the Web.

The CSS Advanced Layout module promises to provide Web designers with traditional layout grids, but it can also be used to layout smaller things, such as forms or mathematical formulas.

When did Flash grow up? From annoying ads and animations to RIAs, the Flash Platform has come a long way. Join Aral for an honest, entertaining, and inspriring overview of the Flash Platform. Experience RIAs with Flex, desktop applications with AIR, and mobile applications with Flash Lite. Review the state of accessibility, open source, mashups, video, and 3D on the Flash Platform.

Launched during the 2007 XTech keynote, AMEE has had an amazing year. Aggregating more than half a million users through clients such as the UK Government and Google, we'll outline our next hopes and steps for the project. AMEE has also demonstrated a potential model for the anonymous aggregation of personal data, bridging brand-equity and privacy issues.

Even as we build denser and denser communities online, they're still often disjointed and compartmentalised by language and locality. This session, led by Flickr's lead internationalisation engineer, will explore practical solutions and "pie in the sky" ideas on ways in which we can break down some of those barriers and create truly global places where people can share and communicate.

An overview of a national messaging architecture in Dutch healthcare. We'll take a look at how geography influences software design, at the complexities of real multilayered infrastructures, at security and reliability aspects, and the differences between publishing and messaging, and those between SOA and REST.

Social Networks are all about communication. How can we start a conversation with and between Social Networking services? Using Jabber/XMPP technologies besides HTTP, we can enable two-way communication between third-party clients and services (XMPP as an API), and have services exchange (events on) social objects and people. In near real-time, with built-in authorization and authentication.

Why Web 2.0 is harming the Web, and how we can fix it.

The attention economy was talked about at the end of 06 to death. Through all the hype, a couple of guys from down-under started to make sense of attention and proposed APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language).Unfortunately little is known about APML and there is a lot of mis-information on APML. As one of the working group members I will run through what it is, its purpose and why its important

We will show how guardian.co.uk has been rebuilt on a new platform involving a new information and technical architecture, and a move to a greater use of web technologies to simplify the platform.

During 2008, the BBC is undertaking a "Tech Refresh" project, replacing the platform underneath bbc.co.uk with a data-driven, RESTful service oriented, platform independent architecture. This session will describe what we've done so far, what we're aiming to do and how it will allow the BBC to support social networking, opening up our data, OpenID, and more.

BBC Programmes is a new project which aims to ensure that every programme brand, series and episode broadcast by the BBC has a permanent, findable web presence. We have developed the Programmes Ontology to expose this data following the Linked Data approach, enabling the interchange of programme information on the Semantic Web.

This presentation will examine tools that bridge the divide between objects without identifiers, objects with varying amounts of metadata, and precisely identified objects that can be connected to information networks. It will also look at tools that allow web-based information resources to communicate with desktop applications.

What does it take to add semantics to your website? The London Gazette, the UK government's Official Journal, holds a huge amount of information — statutory notices about decisions and changes at a local and national level. The government wants to expose this information using RDFa so that it becomes easy to re-use. But it takes more than just creating an ontology and changing a few lines of code.

Believe it or not, there are over 50 millions of semantically structured documents out there (in RDF.. the uppercase Semantic Web!). In this presentation i will show how to create applications that automatically locate them and process them to fulfill several use cases. Finally, i will highlight how to efficiently publish one's existing data and the extraordinary advantages that this brings.

3 years after the Google Data APIs were first released, and a good year after Atom Publication was finalised, there are lessons to be learned. When you spearhead on a working draft, you are bound to take turns that with hindsight seem less than ideal, or could be solved differently now that the standard your work was based on is actually finalised.

This talk will give an overview of designing, implementing and evolving a RESTful API.

A fast and fun session of talks of 20 slides, each presented for 20 seconds.

Silverlight 2.0 is what every .NET Developer has ever dreamed of. Being able to develop, using C# or VB.NET, Rich Internet Application as you would create Desktop Applications. I'll demonstrate, during this session, that Visual Studio 2008 along with Blend are a winning combination for creating RIA in a very efficient & robust way.