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The 11th Australasian World Wide Web Conference

2nd to 6th July, 2005 @ Royal Pines Resort, Gold Coast, Australia
There were 3 papers in my session, with 4 presenters, the session chair and an audience of about 20 people. Mine was the second paper, I was up there for about 18 minutes or so going through my slides and demonstrating the template editor and FO output plugins. After all 3 papers, there was a general Q&A forum where all of the presenters fielded questions. One issue raised was why we had used Java so heavily rather than a pure XSLT system (XHTML and OfficeML). Someone else asked “what does the Oracle database do?” There was also some speculation about how well the Excel output would handle 3rd party XML, formatted using a custom FO template. I explained that we did not yet have a XSL 1.0 compliant implementation, and to the extent that we had not implemented all of the FO elements there would be visual discrepancies between the ideal (PDF) output and its spreadsheet equivalent. A Web developer from RMIT also raised a question about maintaining all of the FO templates in the face of changes in the XML Schema Definition. This is definitely something we should look at w.r.t. XDO/FRM (some process for taking an existing FO template and updating it to match a revised XSD)
There is definitely a resistance at AusWeb to “death by Powerpoint” or being “talked at”. Allan Ellis, the conference chair, made the point that a format of brief presentations followed by general discussion makes better use of the physical co-location of the delegates. I feel that you are much better able to demonstrate the depth of your knowledge of a topic by fielding questions, rather than by delivering a rote presentation. It also means less pressure to “entertain the audience” and more pressure on the attendees themselves to read your paper and come prepared with intelligent, insightful questions.
In total, there were about 100 delegates at the conference although some years there has been up to 350. Besides technologists and academics, there were also a number of T&L people (educators), librarians and the armed forces. The food and accomodation at Royal Pines wasn’t too bad, and evening activities such as the trivia night and BBQ were great opportunities to meet people who were using XML for a wide variety of purposes. I will give a brief overview of some other papers and poster sessions that I attended:
Keynote speakers were not that great – the IBM guy, the lawyer but particularly the entrepeneur were clearly there to push an agenda (and/or to sell stuff). The librarian from Berkeley gave a fantastic talk, however, that covered a heap of areas and issues in his field.
13 papers were presented in the Technical & Standards track, although due to overlap I was not able to attend all of them.
XUP seems to have a lot of potential as a next-generation paradigm for developing highly interactive enterprise GUI. There is a big shift away from installing applications on the client computer, and the current trend of using ECMAScript to implement interactivity in proprietary software has some major downsides. The alternative proposed by XUP is to define the user interface using XML on the client, defining event listeners that trigger a SOAP request (either synchronous or async), which is handled on the server. Lower maintenance costs, coupled with tighter control over IP (since all business logic is implemented on the server side) could make for a very tidy solution.
DotNotelets and DotTegular are interesting from the perspective of Agile methodologies. This Web application presents a user interface for creating a hierarchy of resizable, moveable notes. Clicking on a note drills down to the next layer of detail. Although originally developed for concept maps, it seems like an excellent tool for documenting use cases (the "planning game").
Xinq (XML-inquire) made excellent use of XQuery and the XML:DB API for rapid prototyping of searchable and updatable browser interfaces.

Insert shameless plug for my AusWeb conference paper here ...

San Diego, I am willing to consider ... but Texas? Colorado??



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In the morning we had a much smaller breakfast, bloated as we were from the curry the night before. We walked over to the cinema, and watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (an absurd and hilarious movie which Aileen sort-of enjoyed, or at least tolerated). Afterwards we had lunch at Cairns Central shopping centre before heading to the boardwalk, kicking off our shoes, and sitting in the shade reading our books.
We went back to the Tradewinds and collected our luggage from the concierge, who ordered a taxi for us. An uneventful flight back to Brisbane, to discover that Amie had missed us more than Natalie! Dinner at McDonalds, then home to fall asleep exhausted in our own bed.

view from our hotel balcony ... of the mud flats. For some reason, whenever we walked past the water, the tide was always out.

Buffet breakfast is included with the hotel room, so Aileen & I headed down there at about 9 the next morning. After 2 plates of hot food, we felt like we needed some exercise so we strolled down the boardwalk to the wharves, to see the navy ship in port. Of course there were police cars everywhere as a group of protesters in white lab coats were denouncing tyrannical US imperialism, etc.
Next we walked up McLeod St to the shopping centre and bought gifts for everyone back home. By then it was well after 1pm and we were feeling exhausted. We enjoyed a hot spa and then snacked on junk food for lunch. We had picked up some mudslides on the way back to our hotel, and so we cracked open a couple of those as well. I had a couple of hours' sleep, and Aileen woke me up at 6:30 so that we could go out for dinner. We ended up having a dodgy curry at Mother India, which played havoc with our digestion. We headed back to the hotel to watch Shadowlands on DVD: an evening of CS Lewis & CS Cowboys.

USS Blue Ridge

Cannes?
Flight landed at about 8:30pm. $12 taxi to the Tradewinds, where we had dinner at Latitude 351: grilled barramundi in white sauce with chorizo sausage, a lychee mojito and a cappucino for moi; gnocci with spinach, an iced chocolate and a sticky fig pudding for madame. Went upstairs to our room to watch the Cowboys triumph over the Bulldogs 48-12; Aileen fell asleep so I got changed and headed on over to Spence St.
The USS Blue Ridge was in town, so it was Hip-Hop night at Sporty's and Troppo's. There was a live DJ at Metbar, but I passed on that because my first priority was the club where Mark, Miguel, Smasher, etc. used to work. Sporty's was very different from the sports bar in Surfers (I don't even know if it had a video screen) but reminded me very much of The Edge. After a couple of hours and a handful of bourbons, I felt right at home. The finalists of the Cougar Bachelorette of the Year were on stage, which was an added bonus. I caught the last half hour of the DJ's set at Metbar, then headed back to Sporty's - by which time they were also playing house music. Stayed for one more drink, and was home in bed by 3am.