2008/6/26 Thursday

Ext JS / Ext GWT study session @ Tokyo 　　

Last night was our first study session on Ext JS / Ext GWT in Tokyo.

Although we posted about the session just a week ago, we had nearly 30 attendees and 3 guest speakers (the room was packed!)

At the beginning, we announced the launch of Ext Japan, LLC, a local partner of Ext, LLC. We presented what Ext Japan is all about and what it is planning to do, and I think it was warmly welcomed by the attendees :)

After the announcement of Ext Japan, we had presentations from three developers who have been using Ext JS on their real life projects, and kind enough to share their experience and knowhows on Ext JS.

Kazuhiro Kotsutsumi

CEO of Xenophy as well as the founder of ExtJapan.org (an independent project on translting API documents and gathering knowhows about ExtJS) presented his works on ExtJapan.org and experience he had faced when developing Ext application.

Unfortunately, his work is still under construction so he could not show it in front of us last night, but hopefully, at next session, he will be able to give a demo!

Ext Japan, LLC are joining forces with ExtJapan.org to accelerate the translation work. Any help on this work is welcomed.

Shinichi Tomita

CEO of MashMatrix presented his award winning Afrous, a client-side mashup tool. Afrous is a really cool application. You only need to select the web service(s) you like to mashup from the tree menu, drag & drop them on the panel, configure the parameters, and you have the output! Really simple.

What’s amazing is that Afrous has no server-side components, i.e. it only needs a browser to function.

He is now working on finalizing other modules of Afrous for its release in this summer/fall.

Tetsuji Kuroda

CEO of Fairyware presented his award winning CRESCAT, a prototype work for his “virtual secretary service”. CRESCAT aggregates a number of web services like weather forecast, dictionary, tv program, etc, and presented them in a way that a user does not need to know how to retrieve those data. CRESCAT, your secretary, kindly asks you a series of questions in 5W1H style (e.g. For “weather”, it will ask you “where” and “when”. By answering thoese questions, CRESCAT will give you back the weather forecast for the specified place and time)

Obviously, CRESCAT is not targeted for the skilled internet users. Its target users are the rest of the population who consider the web is too complicated to find the right information. ExtJS was a great tool for Tetsuji to visualize his concept in a very short time and limited resources.

…

After the presentations, we had a quite active Q&A session. People wanted to know about techniques on compressing, changing themes, handling cross browser issues, as well as license issues, and many more. For me, as a Ext JS application dveloper, it was very interesting and fun (because I never had a chance to share those questions with others face to face before last night :)

I also need to mention that one of the attendees, Yoichiro, an official guru of OpenSocial, demonstarted a sample program built with Ext JS and runs on OpenSocial platform. It was impressive! Hopefully, he will come back on next session and give a presentation about it.

So, the first step was made, and hopefully Ext JS (and Ext GWT) community in Japan will start growing large from here. Go Ext!

(We are planning to have sessions every month, so, if you are interested in Ext JS or Ext GWT and are living in Tokyo, please check our site for the latest schedule. Although all the sessions will be in Japanese,  it’s always good to meet with other developers, and have beers afterwards ;) )

2008/6/3 Tuesday

Mashup Award by Sun Microsystems & Recruit 　　

Now, it’s back.

It’s 4th Mashup Award co-hosted by Sun Microsystems and Recruit.

The first prize is 1,000,000 yen (or $10,000).

Although the prize is not as big as those by Amazon or Google, over 30 companies/organizations (including Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft) are sponsoring this event by providing their Web-APIs to be mashed-up.

The contest is open to anyone (although their web site is all in Japanese), so, if you’re interested (and can read Japanese or have a Japanese friend), give it a shot! The entry deadline is September 16th.