April 20th, 2010
I just received confirmation that one of my proposals (the YQL talk) was accepted for Open Source Bridge in Portand, Oregon from June 1-4. If you’re heading out to the conference let me know on twitter so that we can meet up at the conference.
I’m hoping to provide some live demos of YQL and build out some real use cases around using open data to build out applications. We have some great data that the community would be interested in within YQL including government data, geo targeting tables, as well as many others. Below is the presentation I will be delivering at the conference:
Title: SELECT * FROM Internet Using YQL
Link: http://opensourcebridge.org/proposals/379
Excerpt:
Treating the internet and all its sources as a database, YQL seeks to allow developers to explore government, social, api and all other external data in a standardized way. Further allowing developers to manipulate this data and mash different sources together, YQL works to open up the web and all its sources.
Description:
The Yahoo! Query Language provides a rich and dynamic method for obtaining and manipulating data from any source or API on the internet – with YQL the internet becomes your database. Using the simplified SQL syntax that YQL is based in, YQL seeks to open all data on the web into a standardized format. Manipulating and mashing up sources as if they were tables, YQL becomes a repository for exploring government, event, social and API data on the web.
This talk will cover the core techniques within YQL, including server-side JavaScript with native E4X support for manipulating data, key / value pair data storage and the process of creating your own YQL tables for accessing web based content. Going further with the integration of the open authentication standards defined by OAuth, we’ll delve into advanced authentication techniques using this standard within YQL.
- Jonathan LeBlanc
No Comments | In: Events | tags: Conferences, Events, YQL. | #
April 7th, 2010
The Open Source Bridge conference will be going on from June 1-4, 2010 in Portland, Oregon. This conference would be a great opportunity to explore open source development and techniques in the industry. Open Source conferences like this are very important for the promotion of open development products and pushing web standards. If you have an opportunity to make it out to this conference I would definitely suggest heading out their way.
I’ve submitted two proposals to the conference for this year:
- Jonathan LeBlanc
No Comments | In: Events | tags: Conferences, Events, Opensocial, YQL. | #
March 24th, 2010
A few weeks ago I was out in Montreal, Quebec for the Confoo.ca Conference. This conference tied in many technology groups under one roof – PHP Québec, Montréal-Python, Montréal on Rails, W3Qc and OWASP Montréal – all congregating at the Hilton Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Montreal. From what they told us, the conference had: 500 session proposals, 100 speakers, 130 sessions, and 250 visitors over a three-day period.
While I was out there I gave a few presentations on some of the great technology coming out of Yahoo. On Friday I ran through a talk on “Browser MVC with YQL and YUI,” highlighting the highly extensible nature of YQL to accept design patterns such as MVC and visualization and controller capabilities built into technologies such as YUI. This is a screencast with the presentation as the audio overlay – if you missed the talk then you can catch it below.
The other talk I gave (on Wednesday afternoon) “Foundations of a Social Application Platform”, had to do with some of the core technologies behind social platforms like YAP, MySpace and Facebook. This is a look in from the perspective of a developer and is taken from the years of work we’ve invested in developing applications on many social networks. Below is the screencast from the presentation:
During the conference I had a chance to meet up with Asher Snyder (EVP of Technology) and Philip Ross (VP of Engineering) who work on a very interesting PHP Framework called NOLOH (Not One Line Of HTML). Asher ran me through the foundations and functionality behind the makeup of the framework. I can definitely see the potential of NOLOH for server-side engineers who don’t want to deal with the front-end code and functionality of a site or web application. NOLOH integrates a rich set of widgets to rival many of the JavaScript libraries out there . When I asked about the performance of the framework Asher assured me that includes are added in as they are needed, speeding up initial page load. I unfortunately had to miss his talk because it overlapped one of my own but Asher sent by a screencast. One of the other nice pieces of the framework that I saw were the listeners that allow you to tie in a data request for the transport layer. At the end of the screencast Asher ties in flickr photos into his listener but I was thinking of the potential of integrating that with the dynamic data fetching capabilities of YQL. Take a look at “NOLOH PHP Framework – Unified Server Side Development“, and see for yourself.
Diving into the innards of SQL and the uses of EXPLAIN we had an expert presentation from Sheeri Cabral of Pythian on “Bending Queries to Your Will with EXPLAIN” (A.K.A Optimizing Queries with EXPLAIN). These are some great slides for all you database administrators out there.
I can’t dive into all of the talks that were given but if more information is what you’re looking for then take a look at these links:
- Jonathan LeBlanc
No Comments | In: Events | tags: Caja, Conferences, OAuth, OpenID, Opensocial, Screencast, YAP, YQL, YUI. | #
February 4th, 2010
From March 10th to 12th, 2010 I will be in Montreal, Quebec (Canada) for Confoo at the Hilton Montreal Bonaventure Hotel. I’ll be presenting a few topics while I’m there:
Browser MVC with YQL and YUI
The Yahoo! Query Language provides a rich and dynamic method for obtaining and manipulating data from any source or API on the internet – with YQL the internet becomes your database. Coupling the data backend of YQL with the extensive visualization and flow techniques of JavaScript through libraries such as YUI, a developer can build powerful widget and data systems using the simplified SQL syntax that YQL is based in. The marriage of YQL and JavaScript brings a robust MVC interface to the browser.
This talk will cover the core techniques within YQL, including server-side JavaScript with native E4X support for manipulating data, key / value pair data storage and the process of creating your own YQL tables for accessing web based content. Building upon this core, design concepts such as those of a Model View Controller pattern will be introduced to display methods for taking the base data and merging that with front-end libraries to build out production level applications.
The Foundations of an Application Platform
Application platforms, such as the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), Facebook, or Myspace, have become a core foundation of social web infrastructures. When constructing a platform to run applications, numerous layers of security and technology need to work off of each other in order to generate a secure, versatile system.
This talk will cover the core technologies behind the creation of a platform to host 3rd party applications. We will explore open technologies such as OpenID and OAuth for user verification, OpenSocial for architecture implementations, and the use of front-end security implementations such as Caja. This will explore the benefits and exploits from each of the implementations and the importance of open source technologies.
If you’re coming out to Confoo or are in the area and want to meet you send me a message. You can reach me on twitter @jcleblanc
- Jonathan LeBlanc
No Comments | In: Events | tags: Conferences, Events, Social, YQL, YUI. | #
August 11th, 2009
In July of 2009 I gave a talk at a JavaScript meetup called Bayjax. This talk covered the topic of Browser MVC using YQL and YUI as the technology backbone and went into an overview of YQL.
URL’s for the tabs can be found at http://speakerrate.com/talks/1281-coupling-yql-and-yui-to-build-dynamic-visualization-widgets
A slide breakdown of the content discussed in this talk may be found at http://www.slideshare.net/jcleblanc/bayjax-july-2009-browser-mvc-with-yql-yui
No Comments | In: Events, PHP, Videos, YQL, YUI | tags: Conferences, JavaScript, YQL, YUI. | #
April 15th, 2009
The proposal submission for OpenSource Bridge is over and it’s time to send notes to the organizers for the topics that you would like to see presented at the conference. Please take a moment to look over the proposals and send messages for your favorites. If you are in the area, please contact me and we can meet for some tech talks.
I’ve submitted a proposal to discuss “Securing Social with OpenSocial and Caja“, so please take a look at my proposal and vote it up! Here’s an overview of the subject material:
In an attempt to integrate standards into the social web, the OpenSocial standards seek to give developers a “build once – deploy everywhere” methodology for engineering applications. With the push to the merging of your real and web world personalities and personal information, the concerns of insecure social habits become very clear.
While trying to create easy to develop application environments in a hurry, many OpenSocial containers have gone the route of using insecure iframes as their security models, many times leading to the hijacking of personal information.
Caja enters as an open security solution. Providing multiple levels of JavaScript security in an open-source package, Caja delivers what was lacking in the social world – security.
This presentation will provide an overview of the Caja security model with OpenSocial standards and explore why security considerations need to be integrated when creating open standards for the social web.
– Jonathan LeBlanc
2 Comments | In: Events | tags: Caja, Conferences, Event, Opensocial. | #
January 16th, 2009
From December 14th to the 21st I was in Taipei, Taiwan for Yahoo!’s Open Asia Week. This was really a two part event week with a lot going on. I was there as a representative evangelist for YDN to speak about the Yahoo! Open Strategy as well as to do some in-depth code dives and meet some of the other properties. When I first arrived at the Yahoo! offices I was loving the decoration that they had set up on the walls…and who doesn’t love some really great wall art?
First, during the week we had a Yahoo! internal application development event. This tied in offices from Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and Australia, which was quite amazing to see. We were running video conferences between all of the offices during the numerous presentations on Y!OS, YAP, YQL, Blueprint, Open Mail, etc. as well as during the award ceremony and judging.
..and, in traditional Yahoo! fashion, everything gets branded with the Y bang:
On that Saturday, I had a chance to meet many external developers who had hacked on the different platforms, and gave a few back to back presentations while I was at it (slide deck attached below). There were some great presentations focusing on the Yahoo! Application Platform, and we also had one of the Wretch (yes I know – the name is lost in translation) girls there – I believe she was miss July.
View the event photos on flickr at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcleblanc/sets/72157611588610596/
View the slides from the presentation:
– Jonathan LeBlanc
No Comments | In: Events | tags: Events, Open, Yahoo!, YAP, YOS, YQL. | #
