Thanks to everyone who made it along to last Monday’s LRUG talk.
For those who didn’t, I’ve attached my slides [pdf]
Archive for November, 2007
Widget slides
Monday, November 19th, 2007Meet us at LRUG
Thursday, November 8th, 2007This monday I shall be giving a talk at the London Ruby Users Group. I’ll be giving a tour through our experiences building a modular composable Widget UI framework ontop of Ruby on Rails. Some of the steps we took along the way, problems we encountered, and a tour of the results.
There’s also a juicy debate to be had comparing the REST-driven web application architecture pushed by the Rails project, with our more modular widget-based approach, and in deciding what’s appropriate for your application. For those in the know, comparisons abound with the approach taken by Avi Bryant’s Seaside framework, and the Apotomo plugin already in development for Rails.
The framework comes with a client-side component too, and means of serializing Widgets to constructors for corresponding client-side javascript classes – so the talk may also interest those attempting to do Javascript in an unobtrusive, object-oriented way with Rails.
After that I believe (sincerely hope 
) there are drinks.
The talk is open to all but the venue ask that you Register here; see LRUG for more details.
Two Comments from the ISP World
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007At Telco 2.0 I met Keith McMahon who writes the insightful TeleBusillis Blog – I have linked to his comments about Playlouder MSP. The Telco 2.0 organisers have now posted about us on their blog under the title, MSP: ISP plus Content.
Many thanks to each.
The debate we are part of in the ISP world makes the music industry paroxysms look puerile. A quick summary of the latter. Major record companies have turned a very simple question – how to charge digital music companies for their use of the sound recordings – into an extraordinarily complex and fraught conflict. In return the world is giving their revenues a pasting, and the artists are finding ways to do without them.
ISP future business models are an altogether bigger and more complicated story. Ed Richards of Ofcom suggested at the annual lecture recently that broadband should start to be considered a utility, as so much of life depends on being connected. That introduces ideas about universal service which give a different slant to the European version of ‘net neutrality’, the ‘mere conduit’ status which protects the ISP from liability for the acts of its subscribers.
For sure there is a big difference between the two, but the essential principle that makes them both work is that the carrier should not interfere with the content on its network. ‘Mere conduit’ seems to me to be an acknowledgement that some behaviour will be undesirable – and certainly in the copyright industries we have seen that more bandwidth means more undesirable behaviour.
For Governments though, the great threat is that investment in new broadband capacity will lag behind other more adventurous nations, and broadband scarcity will bleed innovation out of services delivered over broadband networks. Now is not the time to be introducing greater risk to that investment, by opening service providers to new liabilities, or new responsibilities.
Our own view is that the content and services that broadband bring into people’s homes and lives are being undervalued by the very mechanisms that were designed to protect the carriers, and that until we all find a way to unlock that value both the broadband and content industries will remain blighted.