I sat through all the Web 2.0 Day presentations yesterday, and enjoyed it quite a bit. The first presentation "What's Web 2.0" by Björn von Prollius explained in-depth what Web 2.0 really means from a technological- but more importantly from a social point of view. The presentation was so well done and well presented, I have to say I probably enjoyed that one the most.

Next was my presentation, an "Introduction to Ajax and JavaScript". Oddly enough while I was a little bit nervous before the presentation, that all went a way as soon as I stood in front of the audience. Despite the fact that I probably went a little overboard trying to explain both higher order functions and closures in a one hour presentation, I'd say the presentation was well-received. Some excellent questions were asked in the Q&A following the presentation and I received some very positive feedback afterwards (thanks for that!).

Following my presentation, Thomas Schaeck of IBM talked about "Web 2.0, AJAX and REST in Portals and Collaboration Software". While the talk was interesting, I felt that a better introduction to WebSphere Portal prior to explaining its technical details would've made it easier for people to follow the presentation. Regradless, it was interesting to see how the architecture of an Ajax enterprise application differs from what you normally see on the web and to learn that they use dojo as their main AJAX framework.

Thomas Seruset speaking on behalf of the Adobe Corporation gave a talk about Flex (a former Macormedia technology) and how it relates to Ajax. It probably wasn't easy for Thomas not being a tech person to speak to a tech crowd and while he gave a pretty good introduction to Flex, he didn't sparkle (no pun intended) in the following Q&A. I don't have anything against Flash or Flex, but if had come to the presentation with no previous knowledge about those technologies, I probably would've gone home thinking "Flex works okay for intranet applications" which can't be in Thomas' or Adobe's interest.

After the lunch break, Frank Falkenberg and Marc Böhret did a "Live Programming Session with Ruby on Rails". They asked the audience to come up with a web app they should write in the 45 minutes they had left after their short but excellent introduction to Ruby and the Rails framework. Someone in the audience suggested writing a todo-list and they went for it. Considering that they had only used Ruby on Rails for two months, they did a great job and completed the app on time. I've never used Ruby or Rails before, but from what I know, a different kind of web application would've better allowed them to showcase some of the real strengths of Rails such as scaffolding. Needless to say, it was even more of an accomplishment for them to write a functional prototype in such a short period of time. A nice bonus was that Frank and Marc seemed to enjoy what they were doing quite a bit. Something they signified by laughing whenever something didn't work. Very likeable the two.

Next, Gerrit Quast, a former student and now employee at DaimlerChrysler talked about their attempts to make software development cheaper and the final products easier to maintain by providing a common foundation (several layers of software used for persistence, security, etc.) for all their applications. After his short explanation of what their business unit does, Knut Genthe who currently writes his diploma at DaimlerChrysler talked about the difficulties of providing a common Ajax framework to application developers at DaimlerChrysler in his presentation titled "Ajax in Enterprise Environment". His main point was that they had some difficulties to get their AJAX framework to support their security layer. Knut did a great job illustrating how the decision making process in an enterprise environment can be complicated by the interests of the various parties involved. My initial though was "if the security system doesn't work well with AJAX, why not exchange the security system" but then again DaimlerChrysler probably needs to protect the investment they made into that technology.

The last talk given that day was a real surprise to me. Dr. Felix Weil who studied philosophy, psychology and computer science (now that's a combination) talked about how the "infosphere" is becoming more and more important. The talk was a real eye-opener and the following discussion was equally interesting. The whole thing immediately reminded me of a video recording (bottom right link) of Robert Scoble's talk at LIFT which I had seen only a few days before and that discusses very similar ideas and observations.

Altogether, Web 2.0 Day was a great experience. Kudos to Prof. Kriha and the team of students who planned the event.