[CSS 2006] Day 3
This morning, I gave both my talks back-to-back and was done by noon. After lunch, I attended Scott Blum's Taming AJAX with GWT. It was a good talk with some impressive demos. I definitely need to dig into GWT more - it looks like very cool technology. I can't help but think it's the "widget framework" that JSF was supposed to be.
I was planning on heading back to Denver tonight, but it started snowing and Julie said they expect 10" in East Denver. Who knows if it'll actually snow that much (the weatherfolks are often wrong), but I don't want to be on the roads.
In the afternoon, I attended Scott Davis's Real World AJAX presentation. Scott is an excellent speaker, so it was definitely a good talk. He did spend a fair amount of time explaining basic XHTML (divs) and CSS, but he also showed some cool Prototype code (Event.observe is a great way to add behavior to your divs and other elements). Scott's books? JBoss At Work, Google Maps API and Pragmatic GIS.
I believe Scott's Roll Your Own Google Maps is the sample application for his Google Maps API book, but I'm not sure. This is a 12-step tutorial that shows you how easy it is build your own version of Google Maps. The one thing I noticed that Scott did really well was explain the basic concepts of everything; from CSS to Prototype to AJAX in general. Even more impressive was he did it in a way where you were still interested, even if you knew everything he was talking about.
For the last session, I attended Tom Bender's Introduction to Wireless Sensor and Control Networks. This talk had a lot of information that was way over my head, but I'm sure my Dad would have enjoyed it. He's a big radio/wi-fi guy and digs all the communication stuff.