d.construct06 : report
First of was Jeff Barr talking about the web services that Amazon provide. There was a whole host that I didn’t even know about such as:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Beta) - EC2 allows you to use amazons servers for doing processing when you need it, “…a true virtual computing environment”. The great this is you pay only for what you use.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) this is an online backup system. One of the great features of this service is that you can host your files and then if you want to get access to them via your bit client just add ‘?torrent’ to the end and away you go!
- Amazon E-Commerce Service – you can virtually create an Amazon store on your server and sit back and enjoy the commission.
- Alexia host a few services such as
- Amazon Mechanical Turk Through http://www.mturk.com you can “Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers.” One great example of this was one chap wanted to get a 1000 sheep drawings and used Turk to do this, check out the results here: http://theSheepmarket.com
- Amazon Historical Pricing
- Amazon Simple Queue Service
- Visit the Amazon Web Services home page to discover all the resources and information AWS offers.
So why would you want to use any of these services?
Amazon has spent ten years and over $1 billion developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers the Amazon web sites for millions of customers every day. Using Amazon Web Services, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology.
Indecently Jeff gave a similar chat in Second Life – check out Rik Riel post on that here http://www.rikomatic.com/blog/2006/09/jeff_barr_web_e.html
Next up where Paul
Hammond and Simon
Wilson talking about “Web services for fun and profit”.
Yahoos has a lot of APIs which you can access via there developer site http://developer.yahoo.com. Yahoo
encourages innovation through its company and one way they do this is through
Hack Days. Developers mash up the API services that they Yahoo offer and if
anyone hits on something great then they take it to the next level, one ‘hacker’ was
so successful that he got hired and works on the Flickr Map.
They are a company that ‘eats their own dog food’. The travel
site for example mashes up the Map, Search, Editorial comments
and Answers API.
Here are some other APIs:
Check them out.
Another thing that they brought up was that if you have good
APIs that external companies can lock into, do you still need you sales
man? APIs
could get rid of the middle man.
There term
extraction API could be great for building Tags on your site.
The Term Extraction Web Service provides a list of significant words or phrases extracted from a larger content
You could then take these words and they use them to tag your page.
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Jeremy Keith was up next talking about the
"Joy of APIs"
One of the most interesting things from his presentation was that if you are a company leading the field you really need to get APIs out into the market place and if you’re the 1st to do this then you can dictate the standards for other web services with your space. Take delicious for example – the 1st major social bookmark application (SBA) which all other SBA application now follows.
Jeremy spoke a bit about REST (Representational State Transfer) vs SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and I have to agree with him I much prefer a REST when dealing with web services; my main reason for this is for simplicity. For more info on REST vs SOAP check out this post: Giving SOAP a REST
A nice website that Jeremy brought to my attention that I had forgotten about
was http://www.programmableweb.com/. It
lists APIs, Mash ups and lots of other information.
Some people get a little worried when you start saying to them – “you
should get some APIs man!” They think it’s a big deal? Well
to be honest most of us already have an API if you have a RSS feed. It’s
an API in a static state. People can take your data and do what they
want with it, ala API!. If you’re a little unsure about
creating them then try dapper. This
site tries to extract an API from your site using a screen scraper.
Check out Jeremy’s API list here: Joy of APIs
Aral Balkan was up next with his flex mash up. He showed how simple it is to use Flex to pull in API. I’ve done a bit of work with Flex so I found this presentation a little low level but still nicely presented – and what’s with the roller shoes Aral? Check out his blog for more information. Also if you do anything with flash check out http://www.osflash.org/.
One of the big problems with building a ‘Post 1.0’ web platform is accessibility. Derek Featherstone gave a great presentation on seeing the site from another point of view. Screen readers, zoomed in content are things that we should all think about when developing website. As a simple test zoom the text on a website to full size and see if you can still navigate around easily it (or tab for that matter).
Thomas Vander Wal talked us though Folksonomy – better know to me as tagging/categorising. The main point that I got from his presentation is that if you allow people to categorise (tag) the content on your site then you can see how people perceive the content. “Every person is an expert in their own vocabulary (tags)”. With this information you can then categorise your content more accordingly, thus allowing this and other users to find the content more quickly on your site. Amazon has started using this and it shows some great examples.
Last of it was Jeffery Veen – check
out his PDF here for a
run down – a great presenter.
Some great buzz words of the day:
MicroFormats - MicroFormats 2
XFN
MetaAPI
SAAS – Software
as a service
E48 XML
AlphaGeek
Hardware as a Service
After the event was the party which was nice but due to me just recovering from a cold I didn't stay to long. I did meet Dave Child from ILoveJackDaniels.com who sounded like he was on a mission! I hope the head wasn't to bad on saturday Dave.
Update Watch the talks online now here
Heh, no, not too bad at all actually. One of the reasons I love Jack Daniel's is that I tend to feel pretty good after a night out if I can stick to that and avoid the beer. :)
