Bob's blog

London in April

I spent most of last week in London or travelling there. I arrived Tuesday morning for the Internet World UK conference , held in Earls Court. I took the redeye Monday night so that I'd arrive with some time to rest before my session on Tuesday afternoon. As they say about the "best laid plans", rest was nowhere to be found before I had to present. I was really happy with the attendance at the conference and the room for my session was almost full. There was a good crowd and some interesting questions, although my references to Diesel Sweeties and xkcd were not completely familiar to the audience in London.

My session was titled "Web 2.0 Scale" and talked about some concepts and expectations around the web sites today, especially how community and participation can impact your strategies for applications and scaling. The concept of architecture has changed from Web 1 where we talked about architecture in terms of "blueprints" to provide a firm foundation to Web 2.0 where the focus has shifted to patterns and dynamic services that have a more loosely coupled foundation but retains the same requirements for stability and scalability. The toolset is very important to help build and maintain the application and infrastructure, so I reviewed a bit about NetBeans and OpenSolaris.

I spent the rest of the week in the office and meeting with both customers partners, plus I was able to explore a little bit of Chelsea. It's a great neighborhood with a lot of history. There's a lot of interesting old houses from the 18th and 19th century that are really remarkable. I walked by the Chelsea City Hall where some celebrities have gotten married and I did like the sign on the drinking fountain. They did tell me that the area used to be country and was somebody's hunting lodge nearby.

Posted at 11:35PM May 04, 2008 by bs in Web.next  |