FOSDEM 2005 Report
Unlike last year, I am now at FOSDEM. This is the last day of the event, and I'm now at the Jabber Booth. Yesterday, I gave two presentations on Jabber: 'Crash course into Jabber' and 'Publish / Subscribe and its use in Jabber'.
The first one was very well visited. The room was packed, and some people were forced to stand. I gave an overview of the history of Jabber, what it is, what it is used for, and then went into protocol details. Of course, I also showed how easy the protocol is. There were many good questions and lots of interesting ideas, which barred me from showing an example of making a protocol extension. Also, there was no beamer in the room (although requested), so I had to make due with having the laptop on a chair on a table, with the screen facing the audience. The protocol pieces were too small for the far end to see, so I did those on the blackboard, and promised to publish the presentation sheets online.
After that presentation, Ian Sollars was up for his. His talk was titled "Gradient: Integrating XMPP with an SVG Browser". Unfortunately I couldn't not attend his presentation.
Then it was my turn again, this time about pubsub. There were about 20 people in the room, which was a fair number. I tried to convey what pubsub is about, starting from the Observer Pattern, and graduately adding to that. I'm not sure if everybody was able to grasp that, but I found it hard to explain well. Fortunately, there were a significant number of people that did understand (some because of my talk), and again, there were some very good questions.
So, the presentations went very well, in my opinion. This morning, we used the Jabber developers' room for discussing protocol and exchanging ideas for new application domains.
Besides the Jabber Developers' Room, we also have a Jabber Software Foundation booth, where a lot of interested people have come by and asked questions. There was some confusion this morning on where the JSF table cloth went, but it reappeared this afternoon. See the picture for an idea of our spot.
I'll post the rest of the pictures early coming week, as well as the promised presentation slides.