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A Fun Week in Florida at The Rich Web Experience

Last week, I traveled with my fun-loving company photographer to Fort Lauderdale for The Rich Web Experience. Both my talks were on Wednesday afternoon, so we had plenty of time to enjoy our hotel, the beach and the beautiful weather.

After hitting the Hard Rock Casino on Thursday night, we decided to take things up a notch. Friday afternoon we rented a 2008 Corvette Convertible and drove to Key West for the night. I was a little hesitant to spend the money at first, but when I fired up the car and realized how fast it was, my buyers remorse quickly disappeared and an evil laugh ensued. Having zero to sixty in 4.3 seconds was a whole lotta fun!

We drove 200 miles to Key West with no plans for the night and quickly found the last room available at the Ocean Key Resort. It was right on the water, had close proximity to the nightlife and a fantastic breakfast on the balcony.

On Saturday, we relaxed at the pool for a couple hours and then headed to the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum to learn about the Spanish Galleons of 1622. This was a very cool exhibit that explains Mel Fisher's $200 million treasure hunt as well as the history and other happenings of the 1600s. I highly recommend going if you're ever in Key West.

Thanks to Jay Zimmerman for inviting me to The Rich Web Experience. The combination of a sweet room, an awesome travel partner, great weather and a fast car made for a heckuva vacation. For more pictures from our trip, checkout my Rich Web Experience 2010 set on Flickr.

Note: I shot the last 3 pictures of the bottom two rows using the Pro HDR app for my iPhone. Thanks to Tim Berglund for recommending it.

How I Calculated Ratings for My JVM Web Frameworks Comparison

When I re-wrote my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks presentation from scratch, I decided to add a matrix that allows you to rate a framework based on 20 different criteria. The reason I did this was because I'd used this method when choosing an Ajax framework for Evite last year. The matrix seemed to work well for selecting the top 5 frameworks, but it also inspired a lot of discussion in the community that my ratings were wrong.

I expected this, as I certainly don't know every framework as well as I'd like. The mistake I made was asking for the community to provide feedback on my ratings without describing how I arrived at them. From Peter Thomas's blog:

What you are doing is adjusting ratings based on who in the community shouts the loudest. I can't help saying that this approach comes across as highly arrogant and condescending, you seem to expect framework developers and proponents to rush over and fawn over you to get better ratings, like waiters in a restaurant trying to impress a food-critic for Michelin stars.

I apologize for giving this impression. It certainly wasn't my intent. By having simple numbers (1.0 == framework does well, 0.5 == framework is OK and 0 == framework not good at criteria) with no rationalization, I can see how the matrix can be interpreted as useless (or to put it bluntly, as something you should wipe your ass with). I don't blame folks for getting angry.

For my Rich Web Experience presentation, I documented why I gave each framework the rating I did. Hopefully this will allow folks to critique my ratings more constructively and I can make the numbers more accurate. You can view this document below or on Google Docs.

In the end, what I was hoping to do with this matrix was to simply highlight a technique for choosing a web framework. Furthermore, I think adding a "weight" to each criteria is important because things like books often aren't as important as REST support. To show how this might be done, I added a second sheet to the matrix and made up some weighting numbers. I'd expect anyone that wants to use this to downloaded the matrix, verify the ratings are accurate for your beliefs and weight the criteria accordingly.

Of course, as I and many others have said, the best way to choose a web framework is to try them yourself. I emphasized this at the end of my presentation with the following two slides.

My Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Online Video Presentation

This week I've had the pleasure of speaking at The Rich Web Experience in Fort Lauderdale. I did two talks, one on Comparing JVM Web Frameworks and one titled Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Online Video. Both talks had full rooms and very engaged audiences.

In the video talk, there were some audience members that knew way more than me about the topic. This made for a very interactive session and one of the most fun presentations I've ever done. It was also cool to talk about a lot of things I've learned over the last year (for more details on that, check out my team status or team hiring posts). If you don't have Flash installed, you can download a PDF of this presentation.

The first talk about Comparing JVM Web Frameworks was largely an extension of the one I presented at Devoxx two weeks ago. The main differences between this one and the last one is I extended it a bit and took into account some community feedback. However, this seemed to simply inspire anger, so I'll pass on embedding it here. You can view it on Slideshare or download the PDF.

My Comparing Web Frameworks slides often inspire harsh words, but folks really seem to like the presentation. I encourage you to watch my Devoxx presentation on Parleys.com to see for yourself.

This marks the end of 2010 conferences for me. I had a blast speaking at The Rich Web Experience, as well as TheServerSide Java Symposium, The Irish Software Show and Devoxx. Now it's time to sit back, relax, get some powder days in and find my next gig.

Hope y'all have a great holiday season!