OSCON 2010 day 2

More good sessions today. I split each of the tutorials in two, attending the first half of one and then attending the second half of the second. By jumping between sessions, I got to see four and not two.

The morning sessions covered mobile web app development and performance improvements for Python. The mobile web app session was a bit disorganized. It was clear that the presenters had not practiced the talk before the show. But despite the problems, I learned a lot. The key thing I took away was that development for mobile web apps is fragmented along hardware lines. The big platforms (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Meego, and Windows) all have their tool suites and on over-arching tool is quite challenging. For now, building a web app for multiple platforms means building multiple web apps.

The afternoon sessions talked about Grails (Java's Groovy on Rails) and Smalltalk's Seaside web development environment. I was impressed with both. Grails is a not a direct port of Ruby on Rails but it is fairly close. Anyone familiar with RoR will pick it up quickly. Seaside is a different approach to web apps, in which small modules generate fragments of HTML pages and you combine the modules to build an application. It is an interesting take on web apps, one that is not like the JSP/ASP pages of yore or the Rails concept of today.

Tonight will see the OSCON Ignite talks and the O'Reilly Open Source Awards. And then maybe some sleep!