Posts tagged barcampgrandrapids
Mapufacture
Aug 23rd
Posted by James Stewart in Commentary
One of the projects demonstrated by Andy Turner at BarCamp Grand Rapids was Mapufacture. Developed by Andy, with Guilhem Vellut and Mikel Maron, the site functions as an RSS aggregator with a difference. As well as pulling in the latest content from feeds, it also extracts GeoRSS data from those feeds and plots the results on a google map. You can read an announcement here.
Mapufacture is one of a number of apps that are demonstrating one of the key ways that I hope the web is going to move on from the ‘Web 2.0′ phenomenon, showing how open data can begin to be leveraged using tools designed for average users. Open APIs are all well and good, but it’s only as their potential is opened up to non-traditional users that I think we’ll really begin to see the potential.
The first generation of mashups, created by coders, usually for coders, are an important testing ground and serve to show people the power of open data. But once it becomes easy for people to realise their own ideas of how to combine data we suddenly have a much larger population of innovators.
Aside from Ning—which, with its emphasis on “apps,” may appear a bit heavier than most people think they need—there aren’t many examples in the wild that do more than aggregate RSS in various ways and/or plot data on maps. But the more advanced tools can’t be far off, can they?
BarCamp Grand Rapids 2
Aug 21st
Posted by James Stewart in Commentary
This weekend was the inaugural BarCamp Grand Rapids. I was only able to make it for the day on Saturday, missing the previous evening’s introductions, talks, and trip to Grand Rapids Brewing Company, but it was good to be able to attend, and even better to have it just a short bike ride away.
It was a fairly small group that was gathered, so almost all of the sessions ran in a single room. Java developers were in the majority—probably not a surprise given that it was the local Java Users’ Group that put the event together—but those of us working with dynamic languages made sure that those languages got their share of mentions.
If anyone was hoping for a serious conflict in the ‘web frameworks smackdown’ they will have been disappointed, as we quickly seemed to come to an agreement that most of the time maintainability and scalability are down to the quality of the code as much as the choice of language/framework, and moved on to a quick demonstration of the building of a Rails app, and a discussion of the potential of JRuby.
Having never really worked with java, I enjoyed Kyle‘s demonstration of the DWR ‘Easy Ajax for Java’ library which I’d read about but not seen in action. It still seemed like more work than RJS, but for those with an existing commitment to java it seems like a great help.
I had various ideas I’d contemplated presenting on, including ActiveResource, my Collage project and its use of Atom, and microformats. But time didn’t allow me to prepare the former two, and Andy had microformats pretty well covered in his (very interesting) ‘geo’ session, so I ended up running a quick demo of the Smart Pill Filemaker/PHP plugin, that seemed to be well received.
Overall, it was good to find some other people around Grand Rapids who have a good grasp of what’s happening in web development at the moment. Not being in a big city or getting to conferences, it can sometimes seem like all the innovation is going on elsewhere. Most of it is, but at least a few people around here are involved in working out where the web is going next.