I love this conference so far, never saw such a lively community, the convention center is great, food is awesome :P. The rhythm is very intense, days are quite demanding but it’s a very good experience, especially being still a student; got the chance to get more focus on the industrial world.

Yesterday I was pretty much in the short talk sessions, mostly about industrial application of RCP. I gave my talk in the morning, the feedback was very good, I’m very satisfied with it.

No talks for me today, I spent the whole day making connections and talking about future works, enjoyed it very much. The poster reception was quite exciting too.

Tomorrow is the last (half) day, then long way back home.

Today EclipseCon started in Santa Clara, CA. The day was devoted to tutorials, a lot of interesting topics were discussed.

In the morning I went to the ”Building commercial-quality plugins” tutorial; I already read the book, and the talk was delivered by the authors, so I got a deeper understanding of some topics, pretty cool.

In the afternoon I went to the ”Mylyn best practices”, by Mik Kersten, and it was kinda awesome having a talk delivered by the author of the tool himself.

Anyway, so good so far, the conference is running smooth and nicely, lots of interesting topics and people. Looking forward to tomorrow’s talks…

Google Summer of Code is (almost) on this year too … sounds like some more app and approx 1000 students will be in this edition (slightly more than last year).

The IRC channel has changed since last year, so now head to irc.freenode.org, #gsoc.

Random links:

• GSoC 2008 web page
• Official post @gsoc blog
• GSoC @ Eclipse

I just booked my flight to the US, to attend EclipseCon. I will give a short talk about my Google Summer of Code project, and have the lucky chance to listen to a huge amount of interesting talks.

I will also take the chance to be some kind of a turist in the early days of my stay.

Updates will follow.

It’s been a while since my last post but I’ve been quite busy, so I’ll try to catch up with the latest news .

I got back from SWAP 2007 which was held in Bari, Italy, 18-20 Dec. It was absolutely interesting, a lot of lively discussions, good insights and nice people as well.

I presented my Google Summer of Code project (ppt here) and the feedback was really good.

The full paper is available in my publications page.

In my previous post I dealt (as the greatest part of tech bloggers) with Google Android Developer Challenge.

I just discovered in the FAQ these lines, which upset me:

Who’s eligible to participate?

• The Android Developer Challenge is open to individuals, teams of individuals, and business entities. While we seek to make the Challenge open worldwide, we cannot open the Challenge to residents of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Myanmar (Burma) because of U.S. laws. In addition, the Challenge is not open to residents of Italy or Quebec because of local restrictions.

Looks like the bureaucracy in Italy is way too complicated:

Fabrizio Giudici (post 405849595839) writes:

You might wonder what are those “local restrictions”. Well, for my country:

• prizes must be assigned in presence of a notary public and a representative from an acknowledged consumer association;
• prizes that are not delivered (for any reason, including recipient not picking them) must be donated to some non-profit organizations, explicitly listed in the contest rules;
• there are some papers to fill in and the contest must be registered to two different Ministries (you know, in Italy there are a lot of Ministries, sometimes it’s hard to understand who’s doing what) and to the State Monopoly Administration.

But above all:

• the entity which is organizing the contest must guarantee in advance a security deposit “cash loan” (not sure of the translation here, but I hope you get the point) covering the whole value of prizes.

I’m speechless… absolutely speechless.

In order to create a large and lively open source community around the Android mobile OS, Google has launched the Android Developer Challenge, which will provide $10 million in awards for mobile applications built on the Android platform.

Submissions will be accepted from January, 2nd through March, 3rd, 2008.

More info about Android and Android SDK (YouTube links):

• Architecture
• Application life cycle
• Android API

Ok, no sweat, the shift from desktop-centric offline apps to web-centric online apps started long ago, and should go a step further with Google Gears, Firefox 3 [2] and other efforts which promise offline access to 2.0 webapps.

The Mozilla Foundation is working towards a webapp browser, so Webrunner [3] (Mozilla’s XUL-based lightweight app-wise browser) is now a Mozilla Labs project, code is in the trunk and named Prism, which ships a bunch of new features [4] (extension support, amongst others) and promise integration with Firefox, to make it easy for the user to “install” a webapp on its machine and access it without the need of a full featured web browser. Some of the benefits of “desktopized” apps in [1].

The border between desktop and browser seems to become blurry, and the day we’ll see the web as a platform to run applications upon seamlessly might be quickly getting closer. The project looks quite ambitious and sparkles a lots of interesting development scenarios in my head: they declare to be “working to increase the capabilities of those apps by adding functionality to the Web itself, such as providing support for offline data storage and access to 3D graphics hardware”.

To me, this looks much closer to the actual direction web/desktop development is going to undertake than other akin technologies’, and will endow developers with the best of both worlds, bringing the user experience right on the edge of the transition.

However, even if smart and far-seeing, this is just a glimpse: in the next years, no surprise, noticeable implications will likely come from the grid/p2p/multiagent systems, and distributed filesystems/OS research areas, whereas joint efforts and results will probably bring a real revolution in our perception – and use – of the web.

“Just” another step forward.

Links:
[1] Zoli’s blog
[2] Read/Write blog: Firefox 3 and offline apps
[3] Webrunner
[4] Mark Finkle
[5] ZDNet Blogs

The fourth Italian Agile Day will be held in Bologna, on November 2007, 23.

It is a free conference dedicated to agile methodologies for development and management of software projects, aimed to share ideas and experience in such areas of interest.

Details:

• http://www.agileday.it