Κυριακή 13 Φεβρουαρίου 2011

FOSDEM 2011

Another FOSDEM (Free Open Source Developers European Meeting) conference took place in the same location, the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in 5-6 February 2011. A lot of participants, really, most of the rooms were full and you had to queue a lot of time in advance in order to find a chair to sit.
As a result I missed some interesting talks. A lot of stands of companies too, of OSS but also of OSH (Open Source Hardware) this year.
Some interesting talks:

A number of insteresting stands, as already mentioned:
  • Manpremo a remote management system designed to allow you to control dozens of computers with ease and power
  • CACert - provides free certificates issued to you
  • OpenStreetMap
  • OBM is an enterprise-class messaging and collaboration platform for workgroup and enterprises which includes Groupware, messaging server, CRM, LDAP, Windows Domain, smartphone and PDA synchronisation...
  • Yate - Yet Another Telephone Engine
  • Haiku-OS
  • BeagleBoard
 A summary of the HTML 5 presentation follows.

HTML 5 introduces a lot of goodies like: autocomplete box, email text field, color and date picker, range controls , search bar, input validation, placeholders, autofocus etc. Its main advantage is that for the first time it standardises Javascript, that means you don't need to write different javascript code for the different browsers.
It introduces a Canvas to draw images, play videos etc.
canvas.getContext("2d");
img = document.createElement("path/to/img");
img.addEventListener() ...

Since SVG is also a very powerful library for vector graphics, what does Canvas bring more? Well, use Canvas for speed and SVG for interaction.
<video controls><
<source src="..."  type="video/mp4" media="..."></source><
<video>

It provides a lot of methods for interacting with the video, e.g.
load(), canPlayType(type), play(), pause(), stop(), addTrack() // for subtitles 
etc.
Using these methods you can interact with e.g. a Flash video which was a black box up to HTML 4. CSS3 allows you to interact with the video.
While HTML 4 is stateless, HTML 5 is statefull, i.e. it allows you to store session variables to the web storage.
sessionStorage.setItem(key, value);
localStorage.setItem(key, value);
There is also support for webSQL and indexedDBs but also many TODOs:
  • WebWorkers for multi-threaded Javascript
  • WebSockets for realtime multi-user interaction
  • Audio analysis
  • Face detection
  • Image generation
  • Server side rendering
  • Multi-touch interfaces
  • Device input support (e.g. cameras)
Check the speakers' blogs (found on top of this topic) for more information about these amazing features. And as they finished their presentation:
"We can't change history but we can change the future".

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