Last week I’ve attended to the 2008 London Edition of FOWA which was quite interesting.
Being the geek I am, I mostly preferred to watch the keynotes on the developer track, rather than the business track, but the good news is that the organizers are publishing the videos of all keynotes for free, so I’m catching up the ones I missed and so can you.
Some of my favourite are
How to build a desktop app from your web app
Jeremy Baines will explain how to take advantage of the knowledge you already have as a web developer to build desktop applications.
How oAuth and portable data can revolutionise your web app
I think it becomes more and more obvious on a daily basis that every site can provide a better service to users if it can identify them, but at this point, this means having an account on every site you get in. Not only this is boring, but is also dangerous. Most people won’t be able to keep one password for each site and, chances are not every site you will register to is completely honest.
What about mashups then? A mashup will only work if it can have access to a few of your web accounts on your behalf.
Enter oAuth! Chris messina will cover the subject of openids and keeping a consistent identity through different sites securely.
And more…
Also very interesting is Kevin Rose talking about The Future of the News and Francisco Tomalsky on Building Desktop Caliber Web Apps with Objective-J and Cappuccino.
As far as I can tell, not all videos have been uploaded yet and one of the ones missing is Yahoo’s own Christian Heillmann talking about Y!OS (Yahoo! Open Strategy), look forward for this one, because Y!OS is changing to reach more developers to use Yahoo!’s APIs.
3 Comments
Good to see your blog is alive and kicking!
Thank you for sharing FOWA with us.
I do not agree to with authenticating on every web sites. If the applications wants to gather behavioral data about me that can be used to improve my experience they can do so by the use of cookies. Most of the times when I see web site requiring registration I walk away! (that of course if I’m not really interested in getting to the content). Not only I don’t want to waste my time registering and waiting for a confirmation email but I’m not about to give my password to every site out there.
@Bitstar – I hear you. I see your concern and that is why technologies like oAuth and OpenId are so important. They allow you to have a single identity, a single account and use it to authenticate yourself safely in any site without having to register for it.
For instance, if you have a flickr account, you can use it as an OpenId. By using a similar method to the one by which you allow apps to access your flickr account (possibly with restricted permissions) you can authorize and put limits to sites willing to use your flickr openId to authenticate.
You don’t have to register and you don’t have to upload your password. And the day you want to revoke permissions, go to the Id Provider (flickr in this example) and revoke them. Bam, they’re locked out.
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