P@ Log

I arrived in London yesterday and will be in Europe for the next 3 weeks, first for Google Developer Days in London, Paris, Munich and Madrid, then in Denmark for JAOO.

I will be talking mostly about OpenSocial, which gained a lot of traction in Europe in recent months. We will share the stage with many european social networking sites who have commited to OpenSocial: Netlog, Hyves, Viadeo, Xing and Lokalisten.

It should be a fun trip and expect to meet many developers. If you attend one of these conferences and want to chat, drop me a note.

David Sapiro de l’equipe Plone a gentiment accepte d’etendre l’apero Plone de mercredi soir a la communaute open source interesses par les APIs Google. C’est super sympa car c’est lui qui loue la salle. Moi je paierai les pizzas:-)

C’est a la cantine, a 18h.

C’est la veille de Google Developer days Paris, donc on sera pas mal de Googlers a venir, et mes amis de l’ossgtp (au moins Didier Girard): une soiree sympa en perspective. Si vous venez au GDD Paris, passez nous voir a la cantine la veille.

On aura plein de sujets de discussions: opensocial, app engine, plone, zope, gwt, les apis google, les derniers projets des gens de l’osgtp (xwiki, exo, …). Ca va etre sympa de se faire recontrer des pythonistas avec des java guys (ils font tous du groovy ces jours ci de toute facon).

Dave Johnson announced projet Socialsite at JavaOne last may. Socialsite is an open source (CDDL/GPL) social network server based on Apache Shindig (Java) that implements the database and User Interface for a full fledge social network. Since it is based on Shindig, it implements OpenSocial. A smart decision they made was to implement the user interface (manage you profile and friends) as widgets, so that you can embed it in an existing site that is not necessarily developed in Java.

I have talked about Socialsite in all my presentations since may, but the source code was not available yet.

On friday they finally released the source code for Socialsite: time to svn checkout and play!

I expect that Socialsite will be very popular with corporations who want to create a corporate internal social network, or a controlled extranet social network with their suppliers and customers. Socialsite is the first OpenSocial open source server I have heard of: now that Shindig Java and PHP start to get quite mature, I expect there will be others.

Congrats to Dave and the Sun team

Here’s a quick guide to the Project SocialSite bits that are ready today:

Project SocialSite homepage on Java.net, with mailing lists and more:
https://socialsite.dev.java.net

Project SocialSite source code in Subversion:
https://socialsite.dev.java.net/source/browse/socialsite

Installation and build instructions:
https://socialsite.dev.java.net/files/documents/8682/106449/INSTALL.txt

Screencast that illustrates the project concept:
https://socialsite.dev.java.net/screencasts/mediawiki_demo.html

Our downloads page where you can find the latest build:
https://socialsite.dev.java.net/downloads.html

From P@ Travel

Yesterday I gave a talk about GWT at the Cologne JUG in Germany.

I presented some old slides about GWT from my Isidro Parodi talk last year, as well as the more recent Google I/O slides from the Bruce Johnson. I highly suggest to look at Bruce’s IO videos, this is very interesting material if you want to dive into GWT.

Examples I mentioned were Alenty, who is revolutionizing web analytics by measuring engagement thanks to GWT DOM API, and myerp.com who’s doing to ERP what Salesforce did in CRM.

Also the 2 important related projects I mentioned were xml vm, by Arno Puder, and Volta by Microsoft. Both are using javascript as the assembly language for the web, as Arno explained at his tech talk at Google last year, xml vm compiles from java bytecode, and Volta from MS IL.

There were 35-40 people, and I had very interesting conversations with Michael Hüttermann, Fabian Lange, Sven Tiffe, and Marc Guillemot from WebTest/HTMLUnit, and Peter Voss from Krugle. Cologne seems to have a vibrant Java community.

Thanks for inviting me, I hope to see you al at Google Developer days Munich september 23.

From P@ Cool Famil…

Vacations in France are sweet: on the road to Isle of Groix, we bumped into a TV crew who interviewed us about how we entertain our kids during long car rides. It ended up in yesterday’s mid day news on France 2🙂

The most relevant feedback I gave them, that was cut at editing time, is that compared to the 15 hours flight from San Francisco to Paris via Washington, during which I watched Horton 3 times, none of us slept, and my son broke untold records playing Pokemon Diamond Version and Mystery Dungeon on the Nitendo DS of his sister, the short 6 hours car ride from Paris to Brittany was a pleasure cruise.

Here are the slides for the 2 sessions at the Octo IT University conference:

• Be Googley, a corporate culture for innovation, with Marc-Antoine Guarrigue
• Google APIs for the Enterprise, with Philippe Kernevez

The conference was excellent. French philosopher Michel Serres gave the best talk, the first day. He started with an ethymological exegesis of Robin Hood, the one who bears the magistrate robe in the lawless zone, around the themes of internet and law that Larry Lessig develops in Code. I was surprised he did not mention Lessig at all.

Then he explained how computers create an evolutionist transformation of our cognitive capacities: as our memory is outsourced to computers, this frees us to develop new totipotent capabilities for our mind, such as innovating. A thought provoking session, narrated by a master pedagog.

Here are the slides.

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Yesterday I gave a talk about OpenSocial and Google App Engine at FZI in Karlsruhe.

The room was packed, 100 people, who asked many interesting questions ranging from business models to technical aspects of OpenSocial and App Engine. FZI has a very strong computer science research program (they have many PhDs who stay there to do research), and Stefan Tai is creating a new cloud computing program. I hope he can collaborate with Chris Bisciglia, from the Google Code University program, and IBM, to replicate in Karlsruhe what they did at the university of Washington.

Markus Klems who studies with Stefan created excellent slides to explain how to create an OpenSocial application using Google App Engine. It seems like the fact that I mentioned his slides in my preso generated a P@ effect on his blog traffic:-)

Thanks to the FZI team for inviting me: we have a lot of interest in common, I hope this is the beginning of a long friendship.

Here are my slides from yesterday.

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Summertime started on saturday and it starts with a few speaking engagements, followed by a nice cool 4 weeks vacations in France!

Tuesday June 24th, 11:30-12:15 PST, Voice Peering Forum Summer 2008 in San Francisco

With Charlene Li (Forrester), David Jones (Friendster), Anil Dharni (hi5), and John McCrea (Plaxo… or should I say Comcast?-), we’re doing a panel about federating social networks. I really look forward to this one: I have not met Charlene yet and liked her Future of Social Networks GSP West 2008 presentation very much. Only issue with this panel: my surf buddy Stephane Teral is in a panel at the same time and I really wanted to see him wearing a not wet suit:-)

Wednesday June 25th, 18:15-18:35 Paris time, Electronic Business Group General Assembly in Paris

With Jeff Clavier, Henri Moissinac and Philippe Cailloux we do a panel over video conference from Palo Alto, talking about the next steps in web innovation. You can send us questions using this Google Spreadsheet form. We’re talking just before the french prime minister: I hope we will keep the audience awake:-)

Friday June 27th I fly to France for 2 months.

Saturday June 28th at noon, OpenCamp Paris at Musée de l’Informatique on the roof of the La Defense Arch.

This BarCamp organized by my friends Christophe Ducamp and Philippe Jeudy should be a good opportunity to chat with developers about OpenSocial, OpenID, other APIs and whatever the developers who come want to talk about. Philippe wrote a nice summary about why he organized the event.

Monday June 30th at 6 pm, OpenSocial and App Engine talk at FZI in Karlsruhe. Thanks To Dr. Stefan Tai to organize this one.

Tuesday July 1st, Paris, a talk about the Social Web and Brand Advertising at the french direct marketing association, organized by the “french Seth Godin” Henri Kaufman.

Wednesday July 2nd, Paris, 2 sessions at the Octo IT University conference:

• Be Googley, a corporate culture for innovation
• Google APIs for the Enterprise

My friends at Octo who organize this event are co-founders and long time sponsors of our open source group in Paris OSSGTP. I’m impressed by the lineup of speakers they gathered: Neil Armstrong, Michel Serres and Bjarne Stroustrup! I need to find my old copy of “Design and Evolution of C++” to ask Bjarne for an autograph. Thanks to Octo and Marc-Antoine Guarrigue for inviting me.

After that I have a much needed one month break in France.

Then I’ll be working in the Paris office from august 4 to august 22: if you are based in Europe and want to meet about OpenSocial or Google APIs, don’t hesitate to contact me. For now all I have planned is:

August 11th, talk about GWT at the Cologne JUG.

I hope to meet many developers during that trip to Europe. Enjoy the summer!

One of these mornings
You’re going to rise up singing
Then you’ll spread your wings
And you’ll take to the sky

George Gershwin, Summertime

This morning we had 2 talks about OpenSocial at the GSP East 2008 conference. Here are the slides.

OpenSocial + Google App Engine Technical Overview, 9:05am – 9:30am Wednesday, 06/11/2008

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OpenSocial: Open for Business, 11:15am – 12:00pm Wednesday, 06/11/2008

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