So, it’s time to wrap up the annual crazy week in San Francisco. This year, we had a two days conference entirely dedicated to WebObjects (WOWODC 2009) on the weekend right before the week-long WWDC. As I had about 12 hours with nothing to do inside two US Airways planes, I wrote quite a bit of text, that I’ll split into 3 different posts. Here’s the first one, about WOWODC.
WOWODC
WOWODC 2009 was, by far, the best WOWODC ever. Last year’s WOWODC was good, but a large part of the content, although interesting, was stuff not used for the majority of WebObjects developers. This year, the organizers and speakers have decided to talk about stuff used daily by most of the WO developers to get their work done, covering from some nice EOF details to the WO 5.4 templating system, and of course, new Wonder stuff.
But that was not everything. Apple was there too. 16 of the slightly over 100 attendees were Apple employees. One talk (the WO 5.4 templating system) was given by Drew Davidson, from Apple. But, there’s even more: Mike presented Gianduia, a stunning technological preview of a new framework the Apple guys are working on, with an amazing approach to handling Ajax and client-side programming in a logical and powerful way. This is the framework already being used internally by Apple on the One to One application (for those who don’t know, the One to One is a service provided by Apple on it’s stores, with the purpose of assisting users with their computer usage).
Watching Apple employees attending and presenting on non-Apple events is rare, and public previews of what they are working on is almost unimaginable. Yet, it did happen, and it shows how committed Apple is to WebObjects and it’s community.
One interesting detail was the fact that Mike, due to medical reasons, could not be there, so he did his presentations (three of them) using iChat audio conference and screen sharing. It was amazing how well it did go (specially with the crappy network the hotel provided us). Mike did an amazing job on this, and it really seemed like he was there with us.
Above all, I want to thank all speakers, all the Apple people who went there (including Pierre who is making an important effort inside Apple to push WebObjects forward), and above all, Pascal Robert, and he’s incredible personal (and financial) effort that, once again, made WOWODC happen, and in style.
