Matt Mullenweg - The Architecture behind Wordpress.com
So Matt was talking about WordPress.com and how it’s become the defacto hosted blogging solution in a relatively short space of time and how they’ve structured stuff. He spoke about what he calls Matts Mini Cluster using 7 servers for load balancing, db, web servers with various Open Source tools, Pound, Wackamole and Spread for load balancing, MemCache, Apache (he said well configured) Litespeed and MySql. With MySql they’re actually using in excess of 4000 databases for their hosted solutions, geographically dispersed (all in Texas :)) in Master/Slave configurations - I need to look into this more but i guess it’s to boost performance for SQL Read/Write operations.
Heidi Pollock - Taking your Application Mobile
Now this was great - and far easier that I though it would be. Heidi has worked for Yahoo, she worked on the FIFA World Cup 06 website so know’s a thing or too and i took a heap of notes. She started by saying that people are only ever going to use your mobile app because 1. they’re bored or 2. they need to. She basically said it was a minefield when it comes to developing for the mobile web. There are in excess of 3000 phones most of which have varying browsers (some built by companies who have no idea of what makes a browser) which even differ on the same phone across providers. In the end it comes down to catering for a browser of 176px wide and 10k payloads - anything bigger can cause problems. She asked for a show of hands of WML coders (few) and said that it was best to go for the xhtml-mobile 1.0 doctype, not the 1.2 type. Tags to use are div, span, p, br, b, small, form, input, select, option, textarea, table, tr, td, img, style, class. She said avoid Lists and Select boxes (and gave the example of a drop down of countries and scrolling through 200+ countries is just not going to happen. CSS is usable but again there’s a limited range of selectors etc but even suggested as going as far as reducing element names/ids down to 1 char (if possible) to keep the file sizes small.
John Resig - Cross Platform UI
Nothing like what i expected, the guy works for Mozilla and created JQuery. But rather than talking about that talked about Javascript and Firefox. Firefox 3 is going to be supporting Js v1.8 and FF 4 will be v2 Js. He spoke of the integration of Tamarin (the Adobe JS VM donated to Mozilla) into various projects (known as the Three Monkies) along with some very interesting sounding projects for taking sites off line - Google Gears was mentioned along with Mozilla and WHATWG projects. A Question at the end of the session as to the cross paths perhaps of Adobe/Mozilla here and John answered along the lines of that Mozilla stuff will be for everyone on the web whilst AIR is purely Adobe
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