The Naked Technologist

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:

• Confoo Flickr Group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/confoo
• Tweets About Confoo: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=confoo
• Slide Downloads for Sessions: http://confoo.ca/en/download

- Jonathan LeBlanc

No Comments | In: Events | tags: Caja, Conferences, OAuth, OpenID, Opensocial, Screencast, YAP, YQL, YUI. | #

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. | #

This is the second “State of the Yahoo! Developer Network” podcast with Gene Crawford of unmatchedstyle.com. In this episode we cover the recent upgrades to YQL and YUI, upcoming University hack events and the open source technologies being made available by Yahoo! such as traffic server, YUI gallery and BrowserPlus.

Podcast Links
YQL Upgrade
YUI 3 Open Source gallery on github
BrowserPlus open source on github
Traffic Server open source on Apache

- Jonathan LeBlanc

No Comments | In: Videos | tags: Interviews, Open Source, Videos, YQL, YUI. | #

First “State of Yahoo! Developer Network” podcast with Gene Crawford of unmatchedstyle.com. In this episode we cover upcoming events, new product launches and upgrades to YUI and YQL.

- Jonathan LeBlanc

No Comments | In: Videos | tags: Conferences, podcast, Videos, YQL, YUI. | #

At the end of June myself and Robyn Tippins, the community manager for YDN, were out at ConvergeSC in South Carolina. There were a lot of great talks during this time and all have just been published to http://vimeo.com/convergesc/videos. I would recommend going through the entire gambit because there were some very impressive speakers available.

My talk was an overview of YDN technologies when used in conjunction with YQL. There was a main focus on YQL within this talk.

Jonathan LeBlanc: YQL and other Yahoo Tech from Converge SC on Vimeo.

Robyn covered a very intriguing story about her career and life moving towards marketing herself in her life. She finished up the day with a strong, engaging presentation.

Marketing Socially: Robyn Tippins from Converge SC on Vimeo.

- Jonathan LeBlanc

No Comments | In: Events, Videos | tags: Conferences, Technology, Videos, Yahoo!, YQL, YUI. | #

Further to my post about the YQL podcast with the folks at Unmatched Style, here is the first video in the series where we discuss YUI 3 and the new upgrades to the library.

YUI 3.0 with Jonathan LeBlanc / Yahoo Developer Network from Unmatched Style on Vimeo.

No Comments | In: Videos | tags: Interviews, Technology, Yahoo!, YUI. | #

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. | #

One of the tasks that I have been working on lately has been to create front-end JavaScript visualizations of YQL query results. What I ended up doing was creating a generic JavaScript include that uses YUI for some of the data parsing. Using this method, I set up a system where a developer could just include this JavaScript file, set up a few configuration variables and then a nice visualization widget would be displayed.

You can see a sample of the widget by going here: http://www.liquidmediatech.com/php_widget/yql_php_widget.html

Here’s what the full configuration for the widget looks like:

<!-- widget file include -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="yql_php_widget.js"></script>

<style>
div#badgeContainer{ padding:0 5px; font:bold 14px arial,helvetica,sans-serif; color:#f0f0f0; }
div#badgeContainer img{ float:left; margin-right:8px; margin-top:3px; border:0; }
div#badgeContainer span{ font-weight:normal; font-size:12px; }
div#badgeContainer a{ text-decoration:none; color:#f0f0f0; }
div#badgeContainer a:hover{ text-decoration:underline; }
div#widgetContainer{ background-color:#474747; width:300px; padding:5px 0; }
div#widgetContainer div.iconBox{ width:17px; height:16px; float:left; }
div#widgetContainer div.widgetRow{ padding:5px; background-color:#509cd1; border:1px solid #8fc5eb; margin:5px; overflow:hidden; }
div#widgetContainer div.widgetRow, div#widgetContainer div.widgetRow a{ color:#f0f0f0; font:11px arial,helvetica,sans-serif; }
div#widgetContainer div.widgetRow a{ font-weight:bold; }
</style>

<div id="widgetContainer"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">
var config = {'badge':true, 'num_results':10, 'debug':true};
var format = '<div class="widgetRow"><a href="{link}" target="_blank"><div style="background-color:#fff;border:2px solid #8fc5eb;width:20px;height:20px;float:left;margin-right:4px;"><img src="{loc_iconURL}" width="16" height="16" style="border:0;padding:2px;" /></div></a> <a href="{link}" target="_blank">{loc_longForm}</a><br />' + '{lastUpdated}</div>';
var yqlQuery = 'select lastUpdated, link, loc_iconURL, loc_longForm, profile_nickname, profile_profileUrl, publishedTime from social.updates where guid=me | sort(field="lastUpdated") | reverse()';
var insertEl = 'widgetContainer';
yqlWidget.push(yqlQuery, config, format, insertEl);
yqlWidget.render();
</script>

I have full documentation and the code base to set up this example on my github account at http://github.com/jonleblanc/yql-utilities/tree/master.

For a more in depth explanation of what was built out with this tool take a look at my post on the YUI blog at http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/06/17/yui-and-yql/

- Jonathan LeBlanc

No Comments | In: Programming, YQL, YUI | tags: PHP, Programming, widgets, YQL, YUI. | #