Session: Handling Cross-domain XMLHttpRequests

This session wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. It was about how, in today’s browsers, to retrieve data from “other” websites. A range of techniques were discussed, including cooperative techniques like JSON and server proxying using Apache.

Session: Embedding a Database in The Browser

This session discussed techniques to use Java to embed the Apache Derby engine in browsers for client-side database transactions. To actually make this useful, the Derby engine needs to write the database to the local disk, which requires a signed JAR and asking the user for enhanced privileges. For the vast majority of web use this seems unacceptable… it might work in some intranet environments. The speaker, David van Couvering, was unaware of the WhatWG specifications for persistent client storage, and we had a brief conversation after the talk about whether Derby could be used to implement the WhatWG spec in older browsers that don’t have a native implementation. But it still seems that Flash client storage would be as least as useful to provide a compatibility layer.

Session: The Atom Publishing Protocol as Universal Web Glue

The Atom publishing protocol is not the same thing as the atom data format. It is a protocol layered on top of HTTP that allows applications to publish data to the web using a standardized format. It looked like a well-designed protocol, but not especially useful for me personally, since I don’t mind typing my blog posts into wordpress. I’m still annoyed that the atom data format hasn’t standardized a way to aggregate posts and responses (or threaded conversations, or references to external feeds to be incorporated as responses to a post)… if somebody posts an interesting entry, I don’t want to have to manually add the comments feed for that entry to my feed reader.

I meant to attend Extending Ruby with C, but lost track of time while talking to somebody in the hallway. It seems to me, now that Mark Hammond has implemented the work for DOM Scripting Agnosticism, that RubyXPCOM wouldn’t be hard to implement.

This entry was posted on 28 Jul, 2006 at 2:26 pm and is tagged with , oscon06. Trackback.