Michael's Unofficial Guide to OSDC Day 2

Notes from the second day of conference paper presentations:

Keynote: Richard Farnsworth - "Open Source Synchrotron" - More physics than software, but judging from the questions from the audience, this talk was very well received.

Pitty, Keith - "J2EE and Open Source Innovation: The Relationship between Open Source and Standards". A number of J2EE frameworks were presented - including "Spring" which is focusing on JavaBeans instead of EJBs. Now popular enough to have it's own conf. Also mention of the GPL'ing of J2ME|SE|EE.

Richard Jones - "Shiny, Pretty Things". Fun talk on a new python library, pyglet, "not-yet-alpha" which eases OpenGL in python. Richard showed off a bunch of games (incl Funnyboat, Neely's Rooftop Garden, Power Core) to demonstrate how cool stuff is easy to hack together in python. Demonstrated Wings3D as an alternative to Blender (aka "anyone can use it"). Richard presents well, and does cool stuff. I'm looking forward to pyglet getting released.

Mark Rees - "Development of Mono Applications with Agile Languages". Good talk on a topic that's been done many times before, but this time by a core contributor to one of the projects :-) Introduced the fork of Iron Python (http://fepy.sf.net) so that the community can contribute back - take the Microsoft releases when they happen and add in patches - not sure if I like the myriad of licenses it uses though. Also talked about Boo - which is something I played with before IronPython got a better license.

Patrick Sunter - "Open Source on the Scientific Bleeding Edge". Preventing fragmentation of a large vertical niche market largely-OSS application. Interesting to see the adoption of more formalised XP (as opposed to just hacking :) Good war-story talk on boostrapping up a development process that is maintainable - and over the past 3 years or so it appears they've grown the project well.

Lightening Talks - besides the pr0n there was some cool stuff - including a call for help on The Python Papers, but the wackiest was Jon Oxer's OSDc mini-langauge (you are one sick puppy, Jon!).

Andy Todd - "Accessing Relational databases with Python". Introductory talk about Python's DB-API. Quite rushed, but a good point made was regarding Python DB-API's lack of support for SQL injection vulnerabilities :-)

Afternoon Keynote: Anthony Baxter - "futurepython". Started with IronPython + fepy.sf.net. IronPython (on win) faster than CPython for pystones, but half the speed for pybench. Shows the problem of optimising for benchmarks :-) IronPython on Mono is like 1/7 the speed - need for some improvement here. Covered cross platformness - esp System.Windows.Forms etc. Then moved onto Python 3.0 - won't be 100% backwards-compat, but Guido suggests this is a "once in a lifetime chance" to fix niggling python problems to achieve world-domination ;)

My vote for Talk of the day is Richard Jones with "Shiny, Pretty Things"

Postscript: No, there are no photos from me. The camera was left at home so that I didn't need to check any luggage on the flight over.

| 08 Dec 2006 | #