Paris Developer Day
24 June 2007Congratulations to Tristan, Anne-Julie, and Mike Shaver for putting on an absolutely fantastic Developer Day here in Paris. The venue held about 80 people and it was filled to capacity for most of the day. Shaver kicked us off with his usual good humor. Neil Deakin followed-up with a discussion of XUL present and futures – this sparked a lively discussion with the large number of XUL application developers in the audience. That discussion flowed into one of developer tools for the Mozilla platform and the web.
The Demo Session went over 2x as long as planned, partially because scheduling is not one of Shaver’s numerous talents, and mostly because they were so compelling. I encourage you to checkout the applications demoed as they are too numerous to mention here. They ranged from a screen reader, a document management application, to a slide show viewer and editor, and an application from TomTom that ships with their GPS devices which has been re-written from wxWidgets to XUL, and Joost’s dazzling combo of SVG, animation, and peer-to-peer video on demand.
It’s pretty clear that there is a very healthy, engaged, and innovative XUL developer community here in Europe. Although other less-mature application platforms have very slick demos, the Mozilla Platform has shipped hundreds of applications to hundreds of millions of people over the last five years or so.
Sheppy lead a fantastic session of MDC localization – you should check out his thoughts on it. Vlad showed off his OpenGL ES bindings for canvas which is just as amazing each time I see it. I can’t wait until he releases a build for all of us to play with.
I packed my flame suit specifically for the session on Challenges of Hacking on Mozilla in Europe. But I didn’t even get it take it out of the bag – the overall mood was really really upbeat. Shaver took detailed notes – but the items that stuck out to me was the difficulty in finding available Mozilla hackers (along with some great ideas on how to help this), the slowness of several critical developer webapps like Bugzilla and DevMo, and single IP connection limits to IRC.m.o. All issues we can definitely improve.
Dinner was a blast at La Bodga. Check out Tristan’s pictures of the event.
Overall the event was a rousing success – big kudos to everyone involved. It was, as always, a real treat to spend time with the Mozilla community here in Europe. It is inspiring to be able to be part of such a passionate and talented group of people.
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