Geert JM Vanderkelen

Florian Bailey opened with a talk about Facebook applications. It was quite interesting. To me these applications are just annoying, but I can see now how they are used, and how success can mean making money within Facebook. They made also a test application called ‘Who is the Kitchen Master?‘ (needs account).

I did also try to talk about something, but I didn’t prepare anything. I don’t like to do unprepared presentations. It was a bit about scale up vs. scale out. Lucky sometimes the audience did sidetrack me and we could make some discussions.

Funny details: they used a MySQL book to put the beamer a bit higher!

The rest of the evening was filled with lots of good discussions, meeting new people and drinking lots of bee.. water.

Thanks again for the great evening, to all that attended, and especially the folks at insertEFFECT. Oh, and the pizza did indeed good!

Looking forward to the next Web Montag in Franken!

Michael Vog talked about the Google Web Toolkit or GWT. This was probably nice of the Web Designers in the audience. Particular interesting for me was the talk about Selenium IDE by Thorsten Biedenkapp. I’ll probably never use it, but I made something similar in my previous job testing regressions and errors in websites. The last speaker, Sebastian Fastner, introduced the audience to OSGi. So, quite some Java stuff that evening!

Next Web Montag in Frankfurt am Main is on 1st September 2008, and if all goes well the following is on 1st December. Hopefully more talkers will be present, and not doing to much technical stuff. Maybe some ‘tracks’ can be introduced, but that might it make to complex again.

Was a nice evening, hope everyone enjoyed and learned something. Or at least got interested in checking out more stuff!

The show started at 18:00 and people were already discussing stuff. I thought I was to late, but at 18:45 we started with a welcoming speech and going around the big table so everyone can introduce himself.

The first presentation by Tobias Lampe was about a new idea: WhatsYourPlace (de). Interesting because people can virtually buy a spot of the world through Google Maps for real money. So they become virtual owner and take care of the place online. It reminded me of the nutcase in The Netherlands selling parcels of the Moon, but this is not to become real owner thus, more a game with real money (like, poker?!?).
The project is pretty new, started November 2007, but I’m curious how it evolves. To bad it’s not open for everyone yet, only in German right now, a problem of lots of companies and startups: not thinking global while the medium, the internet, and the market is global.
Now, I forgot to ask if the backend is MySQL, weird. (It is written in PHP.)

Second talk by Daniel Cieslar (de) was about Novinet‘s new tool to make “nice”, funky, animated banners, on the fly, using a web application. I’m not sure if it’s really that new, but the tool behind looked pretty neat. It’s a bit like making images on the fly really. Well, I’m not for banners, but it keeps the world turning (no pun intended).
Another tool presented was Calcolo (de). A tool to make invoices, offers, kind of CRM thing. However, it’s downloadable, and consequently can run on localhost, and that makes it again interesting.

Then it was me. After folks got refreshments, I started presenting again MySQL’s history as a company and the Sun Microsystems deal. It was a bit like last week, but I left out the technical stuff, or didn’t go in detail. Instead I went on talking about MySQL Proxy which might be interesting for startups or for new projects. This was well received, but I didn’t do a very good job explaining it (partially because it was in German and the matter still a bit new).

The planned presentations were:

• Andreas Demmer gave a talk about how web designers can run browsers not written for the OS one develops on. He mentioned among other things VMWare, VirtualBox and Wine.
• Matthias Kehm (de) spoke about how to get the search engines read your Flash enabled websites. Trick is to get the content into a javascript thing, so when the browser is looking at it, it will show the flash. The robot will get just HTML. I’m not a Flash lover, but that was pretty neat. Nothing knew, but you have to know!
• Dirk Friedenberger presented a Ajax bomberman game (de) with Tomcat backend. I must say I was quite impressed what he made there. Nice showcase!

I went also on stage, and for the first time doing it in German! And I must say I really really enjoyed it. The audience was also cool, so that helped to overcome my little stress with the language in the beginning. The talk went a bit about the history of MySQL as a company. Still lots of people have no clue there is a company behind it. I continued with the acquisition by Sun Microsystems, mimicking Kaj Arno‘s talk in Munich (Germany).
The talk ended with an overview what’s coming with MySQL 5.1 and 6.0, since I really didn’t prepare for it. However, I had a blast! Feedback was great too!