The Tools for Web 2.0 Success - Django, Ruby on Rails, Ajax and the Firefox Platform

July 4, 2007; 05:32 AM
On September 12th- 13th the international „Media in Transition Conference 2007“ opens its doors. The focus of the conference is the structural transition in the media industry. Innovative media companies, researchers and strategists from UK, USA and Europe are discussing the present and future of Internet media at the Goethe Forum in Munich.

The Media in Transition Conference features several of the top Web tools and their lead developers and founders: the Web Application Framework Django <http://djangoproject.com/> , a Web 2.0 framework quoted as the big Ruby on Rails <http://rubyonrails.org/> competitor in the open source world and used mostly in professional news organizations – Washington Post, Toronto Life, World Online, Scripps Media Group; the Ajax browser technology, a RIA (Rich Internet Application) technique, used prominently by Google Mail, Maps and represented at the Media in Transition Conference through Pageflakes Inc.; and the Mozilla Firefox Platform, a promising RIA technique, which allows for desktop-like applications that work off-line as well, and pioneered at Joost, Songbird and AllPeers.

Similar to the well-known Ruby on Rails framework, the Django Framework came to existence by an extraction from a real-world application. Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison, both speakers at the Media in Transition Conference, started developing a professional news site for the Lawrence World Newspaper in 2004. Soon it became evident that they were on to something. The framework that ran a community news site in little Lawrence, Kansas, had it all. Top engineers and bloggers around the world, such as Tim Bray, Jon Udell, Guido van Rossum, Mark Pilgrim started singing the praise of Django, Ruby on Rails' main competitor. It allows for Model-View-Controller Separation, abstracting the access to relational databases by an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) and giving page content creators, as well as designers, their own shielded development environment. Guido van Rossum, founder of the Python programming language and Engineer at Google, calls Django his favourite Web 2.0 framework. In this day and age, where social network sites are popping up like mushrooms and speed of development is key, organizations that use a rapid application framework gain competitive advantage.

Pageflakes was founded in Germany in 2006, funded by Benchmark Capital and operates out of San Francisco, California. The Pageflakes founder team includes Christoph Janz and one of the original Alando and Jamba founders from Germany. Pageflakes is revolutionizing how we use the Internet using the RIA technology Ajax. Through Ajax techniques it is possible to customize the Internet within your browser using so-called "flakes" - small, movable versions of Web favorites, which can be arranged on a personal homepage. Flakes are available for thousands of uses and interests, including news, sports, e-mail, local events, search, photos, music, videos, calendars and to-do lists. Hari Gottipati of O'Reilly and Barbara Krasnoff of Information Week picked Pageflakes as the Ajax king in the "webtop" category - ahead of Google and Microsoft. Pageflakes is considered to be the market leader, next to Netvibes, in the personalized homepage market.

Everybody is talking about Rich Internet Applications (RIA) beyond browser interfaces (Ajax) these days – Microsoft Silverlight, Sun JavaFX, Adobe Flex and Apollo Platform and finally Mozilla Firefox (XUL Runner). The team that built Firefox is pioneering the next generation user interface, called XUL Runner, allowing for desktop-like user experience within the browser. Joost, the coming Web TV innovation by the team from Skype and Kazaa, is betting their future on this new Mozilla platform. AllPeers, a file-sharing application started by Matthew Gertner, is years ahead of the game, already shipping a product since 2006 on Firefox XUL Runner. Matthew will present at the Media in Transition on how Web Applications will soon enter the desktop world and showcase AllPeers.

The Media in Transition Conference has invited speakers from diverse backgrounds, providing insight on how the social media revolution is being built:

* Martin Stiksel, founder of “Last.fm”, Online Social Network around Music – the power of recommendations and data mining with user preferences
* Lorenz Bogaert, founder and CEO of Netlog – Online Social Networks in Europe
* Jeremy Geelan, founder and publisher of the Social Computing Magazine - Web 2.0 and Social Media trends for business and society
* Christoph Janz, founder of Pageflakes - aggregating user information
* John Buckman, Creative Commons - digital rights in the era of user-generated content
* Adrian Holovaty, creator of Django – making data fit for the web
* Simon Willison, co-creator of Django – OpenID, single sign-on for all Internet services
* Matthew Gertner, founder of AllPeers, - P2P filesharing on the Firefox Platform
* Les Ottolenghi, founder of Intent Media - how to capitalize on P2P traffic

The Media in Transition Conference 2007 offers a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art social media innovations, communication and business models, as well as distribution methods used on the Internet today. Under the slogan “from experts for experts“, the conference has a very compact format and further introduces extensive networking possibilities for contacting and partnering. Munich, as Germany's media, technology and financial center, offers all the amenities of a global business meeting place and is experienced at providing for international guests.

Find out more about “Media in Transition 2007” at www.mediaintransition.com

The conference cost for both days is 890, - Euro. Daily tickets are sold for under 490, - Euro.
Early bird registration (15% discount) is available until July 16th, 2007.