Please RSVP to epugh@opensourceconnections.com so I can make sure we have an appropriate sized room at West Main.

When: July 24th from 5:30 to 8 PM
Where: West Main Restaurant http://tinyurl.com/5kdphs
Who: Anyone who is using Scrum, thinking about Scrum, or quit using Scrum!
Help: Eric @ 434-466-1467

I found this quotation from their Lessons Learned document interesting: “The adoption of new technology is an iterative process of innovation and learning…” While they did not use the actual term, it seems that the team which developed Open eGov utilized an agile approach to software development. Agile development does not mean a harem scarem approach to development; the team said that they spent a significant amount of time conducting research on best practices and content management systems before undergoing the customization necessary to launch Open eGov.

We are interested to see if this product gains traction. It is part of the PloneGov project, which, while claiming members in 20 countries, does not have an apparent member list, or much reach. I think that if the Newport News staff wants to extend their reach for the product, they’ll need to answer some questions:

• How can they increase citizen participation in these sites? I see surveys, but there is no way to comment
• How to spread the word about the availability of this product? The product is, from appearances, targeted at local governments.
• Is the Plone/Python/Zope package the best one to facilitate widespread adoption? The community of developers is much smaller than of other developers. Naturally, Scott Stults, our resident Plone and Python expert, believes it’s the right answer and could be seen dancing with joy when shown the Newport News announcement.
• Why not put the project into a system that allows user contribution to it? How a developer contributes to the Open eGov project is not particularly clear. Perhaps this is an intentional result of the lack of desire to be the gatekeepers of others’ contributed code.

Seeing Open eGov is certainly, to us, a positive development. Now, we’ll see what happens next. Building a great open source platform is just one part of the puzzle; developing a vibrant open source community is another kettle of fish.

Thanks to our friend James Walker at EzGov Europe for pointing this article out to me!

But one reaction I got several times was “this looks great, but our county/city controls our airport and our website, and they want us to use the county IT staff and web page.” Basically they liked what we offered, but felt like they are locked into a single page static web page occasionally edited by County staff.

As an example, compare the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport website GoCho.com with this static web page of a regional airport in Hawaii, which is part of a larger state web site. The differences should be obvious. GoCho is a dynamic site providing real time information of immediate interest to passengers, and gives them incentives to fly through Charlottesville. The Hawaii site provides a single paragraph of generic information about the airport. As a passenger, it doesn’t really tell me anything of value about whether or not this is an airport I would want to consider using during a trip to Hawaii.

If you’re an airport executive, you inherently understand this. But how do you convince your County or governing authority to give you the freedom to create and manage your own site? Here’s a few ideas for discussion points you can bring up with them. When you’ve convinced your board to build a new site, please make sure to contact us at AeroWeb so we can submit a bid!

1. Show passengers you have great deals too! If you are a regional airport competing for passengers with nearby larger airports, then you know it can be a struggle to convince passengers that they can get good prices through you. Perhaps not all your airfares are cheaper, but with our Flight Deals tab, great deals targeted to your airport will be displayed from Kayak.com. Especially with rising gas prices, if you can show passengers that they are going to get a comparable airfare through your airport, they will skip the longer drive to larger airports.
2. Give passengers the information they need. When passengers enter your airport, the first thing they probably do is check the arrivals and departures board. With our online flight tracking, you can give them the same experience on your website. We can integrate our tracking widget with your internal FIDS or with one of our online data partners.
3. Easy content management. With our inline editing tool, you will be able to manage all the content on your website, without involving AeroWeb staff or your County IT staff, and without any technical knowledge! One reason your County’s IT department may be reluctant to let you have your own website is out of a fear that they will have to maintain all the content for you. With AeroWeb, you can manage the website yourself, so there is no burden on other IT staff!
4. Managed hosting. We will host your AeroWeb site for you, which removes another area of concern your IT staff may have. They don’t need to worry about the database or server uptime, or providing you with traffic reports and other analytics about your website. We do all of that for you - so there is no extra burden on your County IT staff!
5. Provide updates to media and passengers. Since editing content on your site and blog is so easy, it can become a communications channel for you directly to your passengers and even local media. By providing the latest news about your airport online in a timely fashion, you may reduce your customer service calls and keep passengers happy!
6. Your airport website is not the same as the county landfill site. No disrespect meant to your local garbage collectors, but the fact of the matter is that your airport has more specific website needs than the local landfill. So why are they both using the same boring static pages on the County web site? The landfill is not competing for customers like you are, and they don’t need to provide timely and updated information to passengers who expect you to have a great website.
7. Providing the latest functionality on your website. AeroWeb is tuned in with the features that airports need. In addition to the features described above, we offer other widgets for weather, customized driving directions, advertising tools, and more! We can do custom development to meet your airport’s unique needs, and we are working on adding additional features too!

You can view the photos here.

The reception has been really great so far. While I think exhibitors always wish that there was more traffic by the booths, the quality of many of our leads has been very good. We are demo’ing the websites on our laptops, and have a screencast of AeroWeb running on a large monitor at the front of the booth. The screencast has certainly helped bring people into the booth, and our demos have been running very well so far and everyone who sees them seems to be impressed.

We’ve had conversations with a wide range of airports, with airport consultants who could conceivably recommend AeroWeb to their clients, with other vendors we could potentially partner with, and with industry journalists. We’ve also made a few contacts with companies who may be interested in the software development skills of OpenSource Connections, outside of our airport product.

The features we are showing airports for the most part seem to be right on. A couple of ideas that attendees have brought up have been interesting. One attendee noted that the main reason he felt people go to his airport website currently is not passengers, but vendors who are looking for information about RFP’s. So he wanted a content section with a lot of information about RFP’s. After looking at the websites of some other airports we’ve talked to, they also have at least a page with current RFP’s listed on it, and PDF downloads of the RFP’s right there. Of course, this is easy to do in AeroWeb, but we hadn’t put a page like that in our demos.

Another interesting observation made by a trainer from a small airport was “Can you schedule content to be published at a certain date?” The answer to this is also yes when you are editing content and blog posts through our back end Expression Engine administration tool. However that functionality and content versioning is not currently exposed through the inline editing tool we are primarily demo’ing to clients.

I’ve got some photos to post, so I’ll post those and more comments later today after the show ends. For now, I’ve got to run back to the booth for exhibiting hours!

As such, my exposure to quite a few other languages, features, and coding paradigms have drastically increased as I’m a sucker for new technology and things of the geekified nature minus star trek, dungeons & dragons, and obsessions with super models. Now PHP seems to be more of a thorn in my side as a programmer than anything. Since I do have working knowledge of the language, especially its Object Oriented Features, magic methods, its various editors, extensions, and its limitations and quirks, I tend to get drawn into PHP projects. Working on a PHP project makes me long for a good rails or asp.net project because PHP just makes me feel dirty as a programmer.

PHP has gone the way of PERL: somewhat usable, a few good features and scripts, but stagnating with its ability to push the language itself to compete with other modern languages.

So what makes PHP so bad to work with?

1) Its object syntax is not intuitive. With symbols like “->” or “::” for accessing methods, properties, and fields on its objects is a pain to type, especially when most modern languages use a dot “.”. At least when you use C, you get a lower level performance boost, but a web languages that is interpreted, why make it a pain to use the OOP? So even with a great tool like the eclipse PDT for PHP, it still sucks cause you have to -> which is not as easy as just typing a . (How much is your time really worth?)

2) Namespaces will not be supported till PHP 5.3.0 and its very limited. Not to mention, that if anyone uses namespaces it will not be backwards compatible with the rest of the PHP 5 versions out there which can become confusing.

3) Core commiters on the PHP internals are not exactly developer friendly. I used to be a heavy user on Site Point Forums where there is a huge PHP community. Much of which have tried to give feedback, patches, and fixes for PHP, to no avail. (The creator of simple test, Chris Shiflett and some other big names in the PHP community have hung out on those boards). If anything you usually get a sarcastic reply if not completely ignored altogether.

4) No support of mixins. Ruby, Javascript, even C# has some kind of support for mixins (bascially a friendly type of multiple inheritance) these days.

5) Cryptic and chaotic naming of functions like strstr. stristr, strpos, empty, usort, etc. This makes its increasingly hard on anyone who has to know multiple languages to go back and forth because of the extra memorization required to be proficient to know what functions are which.

6) Poor object oriented support and no php objects for value types. Array, String, etc should have be objects so that you can do something like $arr->count or $arr->sort();, or $str->toLower(); rather than trying to remember the cryptic names for things to manipulate strings and arrays.

7) Forced heavy use of things like the function “isset” instead of just checking to see if a variable is null or not.

8 ) Hidden language features like the DateTime object that comes without any real documentation or the soap extension and where to put http authentication.

9) Heavy use of building templating languages/tools like smarty template engine, expression engine on top of PHP which is a HTML template language. To make matters worse there are no development tools built for the new templating language/tool like visual studio does for asp.net tags, so the developer has to guess what is available or shuffle through undocumented code to figure out the hidden things, that is not covered in the lack of documentation provided.

10) Unicode support will not be available till PHP version 6 which has been in development for over 2 years or more.

11) There is not a standard framework to build on like rails is for ruby or .net is for c#, therefore everyone does their own thing and there is a lack of convention over configuration since there is a lack of uniform coding conventions.

12) PHP does not come with its own web server like rails has with webrick and asp.net has with cassini, so setup just for local development tends to be a pain.

13) Very few PHP applications take relative pathing into account which makes development on various boxes, servers, etc a pain to accomplish (like one developer on a mac and another using a windows box with IIS).

14) PHP just does not evolve fast enough as an opensource project should, especially now that its playing catch up to both c# and ruby. (Its now just getting namespace support and the zend framework is chasing after rails but failing to come close).

15) PHP tries to imitate Java way too much and has paid the price of doing so. Java is generally not the tool for doing web development, to which PHP is targeted for, yet as PHP tries to work with java, ruby is already light years beyond with things like JRuby and Grails and does so without trying imitate java in any fashion.

16) PHP does not get enough push to do things besides websites. PHP Gtk, PHP Phalanger (.net compiler for PHP, to which PHP runs faster when compiled as .net code) are both failures. However Iron Python and Iron Ruby are constantly being worked on and have a promising future.

17) Lack of consistency with function signatures $needle, $haystack in many php functions are always switched up.

18) Pear is simply a repository of poorly written code and holds nothing on ruby gems.

19) Most PHP software works, but is a pain to customize because its mostly spaghetti code thrown together with very little actual documentation, use of design patterns, convention/structure, and almost always has a sub par module/plugin system that is cryptic at best and lacks any kind of real API that is easy to program against.

20) PHP is like IE6 or Java, too slow, too lazy, and now too late to really make a come any real comeback to catch up with ruby or c# or python.

21) If a static method is called from a derived class, there is no way to get the derived class type without overriding the static method in the derived class or passing the type in as a parameter. Which makes creating a activerecord class with factory methods a pain as you would need to copy methods to each derived class. So it would look something like

Person::find(”Person”, array(”conditions” => array(”name = ?”, $name)));

vs

Person.find(:conditions => [”name = ?”, name]) in ruby.

22) PHP 6 is the new PERL 6. It is still coming, years later….

Granted there are some nifty frameworks like prado or code igniter, but their limited due to the language limitations…
So shouldn’t zend, the php company in Israel just scrap the language and start fresh, fixing all the language quirks? Maybe even use something like antler to speed up the process of creating a new web 3.0 language? Or maybe push PHP the community to get its act together and put something together thats not so behind the times before they go the way of the dinosaur? Or should php just march into oblivion?

AeroWeb delivers powerful features like up-to-date flight tracking, inline web editing of content, airfare deals, and flight booking—all in an easy-to-maintain and flexible architecture. It includes features such as inline page editing, flight tracking, booking and reservation engines, and airport blogs and news aggregators. Most airport websites are staid and not interactive; AeroWeb changes that and puts the airport customer at the front of the line.

We will be demonstrating AeroWeb at the American Association of Airport Executives annual conference in New Orleans from June 8 - 11. Come check us out there, or go to the website, http://www.aerowebonline.com, for more details.

So what’s next?

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday July 17th. The current working topic is Microsoft’s Silverlight. But please suggest topics or speakers for future meetings.

I built the Ruby app using Scaffolding, which was very easy and I liked alot. Scaffolding gives you the nice pre-configured classes and pages for adding, editing, and deleting records, but my survey doesn’t line up exactly to that model (ie, I don’t want anyone to go edit or create the questions on the survey, and I wanted to create a flow from creating your candidate record to then answering each question in the proper order). With some help from Eric, I soon got into the REST mindset and got the application working properly. That was cool.

I didn’t consider deployment too much until I had the app completed and working on my local instance. My plan was to just deploy it to my DreamHost account, which I assumed would be easy. I’m used to deploying .NET applications, which is extraordinarily simple, and it didn’t occur to me at first that Ruby might not be as easy. After copying my files out to DreamHost, I found this wiki page of theirs. I was a little bit annoyed at first after reading that, because I realized I would have to run a bunch of commands to get rails running and the permissions correct.

Fortunately, as Eric pointed out to me, DreamHost already has a solution. Now they use mod_rails, and all you need to do is copy out your code, check the box for mod_rails, and then use their configuration panel for that domain to point to the public directory used by ruby on rails. After doing that, everything worked great and I have to say that I am now pretty sold on Ruby on Rails. One thing I’ve always liked about .NET is that it’s pretty easy to deploy. Now that I’ve seen Ruby on Rails can be easy to develop and also easy to deploy (at least with DreamHost), it’s a much more attractive language to me.

After navigating a metric shit-ton of reports, statistics databases, and spreadsheets, I was only able to come up with the table below (which is about a third of my goal.) It’s based on a 2002 survey of small, minority, and women-owned businesses. In particular, the section I’m including represents veteran-owned businesses. There is a section of the original table that does not account for veteran status, so a comparison could be made to show its affect on customer distribution. (By the way, they do this survey every 5 years and are doing one now. The new data won’t be published for about 3 years.)

Table 1: Customer Types for SDVOSB’s

If conclusions can be drawn from this, I’d say that:

1. These businesses were 3 to 4 times more successful at contracting at the state and local level
2. “Other businesses” were their mainstay…
3. Followed closely by individuals.

Of course, there are some other considerations that are not factored into these numbers. I’d really like to know if either mentor-protégé programs or teaming arrangements affect the distribution. Also, there is an increasing trend of federal procurement through large, multiple-award “contract vehicles” which could raise the barrier for small businesses.

<rdf:RDF
  xmlns:rdf=“http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#”
  xmlns:dc=“http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”>
     <rdf:Description rdf:about=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Benn”>
        <dc:title>Tony Benn</dc:title>
     </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

The RDF code above can be parsed into the following triplet:

Which in plain English translates into, “The title of this resource, which is published by Wikipedia, is ‘Tony Benn’”. Now we could add several more tags to this example similar to the “dc:title” tag to describe many aspects of the object such as publisher, contributor, etc.

RDF can be assigned to a resource in several different ways and using different syntax. For example, Notation 3 is a syntax for defining RDF in a readable format without the use of XML. RDF can be embedded in HTML as well to define resources within a web page. Several popular web sites currently embed RDF in their web pages including www.wikipedia.org and www.digg.com.

Bob also discussed another web semantics technology referred to as Web Ontology Language (OWL). OWL is an extension of RDF Schema which is a common set of terms defined to describe a domain (A domain being something such as music, psychology or biology). Which basically means an agreed upon list of terms to be used to describe something. The Dublin Core is commonly used to describe video, sound, image and text with several metadata elements or “terms”.

Another technology discussed during the workshop was SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) which is the query language used with RDF. If you think of RDF as a huge database available on web, SPARQL would be the SQL language used to query the database. It was with this thought during the workshop that I realized the remarkable potential these semantic web technologies possessed. Now imagine all these RDF “databases” are linked together and you can query all of them at once. DBpedia is a project designed to do just that by extracting information from Wikipedia, making the information available on the Web and linking to other data sets such as MusicBrainz.

I learned a couple of things that I wanted to share:

• A great starting point for learning about WF is a demo site at http://dinnernow.net/
• meant for developers, not an enduser/business analyst product. “It’s just a DLL” - Geoff Snowman
• SharePoint heavily leverages the WF tool
• Now being used by 3rd party folks.. K2 builds an enduser focused workflow tool. They have ditched their engine in favor of WF.
• Workflow is a higher level of abstraction.. You can do it in C#, but why would you want to be in the weeds?

A big thank you to Matt Sposato for getting the relaunch of ChoDotNet started! He did a great job getting the meeting going, and with ~40 folks, I look forward to seeing the momentum maintained!

Last Thursday, as thunder pealed in the background, I turned the television on to the local NBC affiliate to see what was happening with the weather. As it turned out, our county was under a tornado warning, with high winds and heavy storms.

As the anchors talked, they said that they had checked the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport’s website, www.gocho.com, to check on the flight status of inbound flights and that flights had not been significantly delayed because of the storms (there were no tornadoes, fortunately).

The NBC 29 anchors were not the only ones checking www.gocho.com that night. Since we launched live on April 21, the website had not seen as much traffic as it did on the night of the tornado, and into the early morning hours.

Note the May 8 and May 9 traffic. The tornado warning lasted from about 10 - 11 PM on May 8, and hits to the website carried over into the next day.

The site that enabled the anchors at NBC 29 to see how the weather was affecting flights was an endeavor four months in the making. The old Charlottesville Albemarle Airport Authority website had a Flash introduction and a difficult to navigate website. The Director, Barbara Hutchinson, sought to embark on a strategy that made the Charlottesville airport Central Virginia’s airport of choice, and she wanted a website which contained all of the information that a traveler would want from an airport, with as much information as possible without clutter.

Thus, OpenSource Connections, with Birch Studio Graphics offering design and Flash support, came up with an airport-focused content management system that allowed the GoCHO team to communicate most effectively with their clients. The biggest issue that they sought to overcome was handling phone calls from the public to answer questions that they could also find on a well-designed website. By reducing the volume of phone traffic and channeling those questions to the website, the Airport Authority could focus on operating the airport and improving the experience of travelers.

Working with Ms. Hutchinson and her team, we were able to pinpoint the highest value information that travelers sought and to tailor and deliver a website that provided that information in an easy to find manner. Additionally, by implementing a content management system, we were able to facilitate the Authority’s communication of information to the public. The old site was in static HTML, and was difficult to update information, whereas the new website can be updated on the fly. JetBlast, the new GoCHO blog, is one example of ways in which the Airport Authority can now communicate much more rapidly with the general public, and receive feedback on what they have to say.

We have also tied in FAA flight information and travel cost information from Kayak to a front page tabbed browsing system so that users can find flight deals from the CHO airport, creating a one-stop destination for people who want to find out more about commercial travel at the airport.

The resulting site, we think, serves the public well.  What do you think?  Contact us and let us know!

I want to thank the over 90 geeks that showed up to spend 36 hours sharing what they know, learning from each other, and pitching in to make beCamp flow smoothly. I know of no other approach to conferences that has such high signal to noise ratio with such a low level of administrative overhead. I’d say it turned the Pareto Principle on it’s head, and 80% of the effort came from 80% of the participants!

Thank you very much beCampers, and see you next year!

Alistair started out the presentation by demonstrating the value of HTML links and how they have made web pages and the Internet more accessible. He then described SKOS as the standard means of linking data across the Internet. SKOS has concepts of a label, alternate labels, notes, broader and narrower where the label is the title, alternate labels are different spellings, notes are a description and broader and narrower attributes are used to link to related concepts.

RDF was developed as a means to declare metadata of resources in a standard way. An RDF description of a resource contains a subject, predicate and object where the subject is the title of the resource, the predicate is the type of resource, and the object can be data or another resource. RDF is basically a standard XML schema for defining resources such as music, books, articles, etc. For an example take a look at the following from Dublin Core. An example of using RDF in an XHTML file is as follows:

  <p class="contactinfo" about="http://example.org/staff/jo">
    <span property=”contact:fn”>Jo Smith</span>.
    <span property=”contact:title”>Web hacker</span>
    at
    <a rel=”contact:org” href=”http://example.org”>
      Example.org
    </a>.
    You can contact me
    <a rel=”contact:email” href=”mailto:jo@example.org”>
      via email
    </a>.
  </p>

This example contains several attributes with the word “contact” in it. Each attribute defines a piece of the contact information, for example, the attribute contact:fn defines the contacts first name.

If you have a need for linking data in your web applications take a closer look at the technologies above for use in your application.

Today I’m attending beCamp at the offices of CBIC on the downtown mall in Charlottesville.  There have been some very interesting sessions already and attendance is great.  I suggested one session, which we just had this morning.  I titled the session “How to choose languages - .NET vs Ruby vs Java vs Php vs ?”.

At OpenSource Connections, we have a wide range of skillsets covering all the major languages, and we have the pleasure of working with a wide variety of clients where we get to use all those different skillsets.  It’s a lot of fun and something I really like about OpenSource.  Often times for our projects, the client’s needs specifically dictate a particular language, but other times they have no preference or are building a system from the ground up and we get to help choose the language.  I have my ideas of the various benefits and disadvantages of the languages, but I proposed this session to hear other people’s feedback as well.

We had a great group of about a dozen people in the session, with skill sets that covered c, c++, perl, .net, php, java, ruby on rails, cold fusion, and even Delphi.  This wide range of experience brought some interesting perspectives.

I started the conversation by stating that all development languages are just tools, and the important thing is what we build at the end.  The important thing is not necessarily did we build it in .NET or Ruby, but did we meet the customer’s needs?  I prefer to be technology agnostic, and most everyone in the session seemed to agree with that sentiment.

One of the first things said in the session was probably the most observant:  the choice of language is often presented to us as developers, and that decision is actually made by the business, not development.  I think David from the Darden Business school at UVa was the one who pointed that out first, and it’s certainly very true.  The group seemed to agree with that, but with some reservation that we wish we could have more control over the language used.

Mike from Fabjectory pointed out that in reality, the framework may be more important than the language chosen.  Ruby on Rails may be the best example of this, because it’s an easy to use framework that encourages you to do good development practices.  Microsoft has release the MVC framework to accomplish a similar goal. 

There was some discussion at the beginning when Caleb expressed a hope that there would be fewer different development languages in the future so that developers don’t have to try and keep up with so much, but others pointed out that competition and having many diverse languages is part of what encourages innovation and new features.  For example, Jim pointed out that Ruby on Rails is great for web development in part because it’s geared specifically towards that process, whereas ASP.NET has procedural carryovers in the language from the old classic ASP and VB days.  Likewise, Jim expressed the opinion that C# has become a better language than Java because it is more fresh and doesn’t have as many legacy features as Java.

Your final deployment server will also drive the choice of language naturally.  If you company will only run Windows servers, then you probably don’t want to try and run Ruby on Rails on top of SQL Server on a Windows server.  You should probably stick with .NET.  Likewise, if you are going with an Apache server, you should probably consider Ruby on Rails or PHP.

Who will maintain your application after it has been deployed?  If you are a consultant, than the skills of your client need to be considered.  How much do they want to modify it themselves, and what skill sets do they already have that will make this easier.  I suggested that because of the development tools and the fact that it’s a compiled language, I feel .NET is a much more scaleable and better language than PHP.  However, if a client wants to tweek small parts of the code themselves, then Php may be a better choice because it’s easier to modify and perhaps easier to understand to a non-developer but tech savvy person.  But with that ability to make changes easily also comes risk:  If the people making the changes don’t know the whole system as a whole or good development practices, then the easily “hackable” nature of PHP may actually get them in trouble.  A more object oriented structure in .NET that needs to be compiled may be more stable and less susceptible to mistakes.

Considering how to make modifications in the future is also important.  David from Darden expressed his opinion that when using Java web development frameworks, Struts is easier to make modifications to than Tapestry.

Towards the end of the session, we also briefly touched on a few other topics which I will quickly summarize people’s opinions here.  So here are more random thoughts from the session:

•   .NET is the best option for building windows based desktop applications, but you should consider QT if you want a more cross platform compatible application.  Java Swing according to one anonymous attendee “still sucks 15 years later.”
• One of the great things about Ruby on Rails is the built in testing and framework scaffolding.
• Mono can be used to make .NET applications run on other OS’s.  Though there wasn’t much experience with actually doing that in the room, that is what some major companies are doing like MySpace.
• Building webservices is very easy in .nET, REST based applications are also easy in Ruby.

We ended the session on a funny note, when Jim made the statement that a lot of very large companies still use C for development.  Though the people he is thinking of are older developers and so they may just be tied to older languages, they are still some of the brightest minds he’s known.  I believe it was pointed out that Amazon’s services are built with C.  So we’ve come full circle through C to .NET, Java, and Ruby, and perhaps ultimately back to C!  (just to be clear, I state that with sarcasm.  Although you can undoubtedly do all kinds of things with C, the value of all these newer languages and frameworks is how much easier they make it).

Thanks to all those who attended for a great discussion (completely devoid of any fist fights about which language is best), and I’m looking forward to the rest of beCamp this afternoon!

You can see a slideshow of my pics from beCamp 2008 here