DemoCamp 5 : More Geek Show and Tell in Toronto

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Last months was a big succuess and the momentum continued this month with , this time at a UoT location. Good write up’s by Chris Nolan (who did a Demo himself) and (he of the accordion) did his usual bang up job, describing the demo’s. And Pirate Radio shares 4 things I learned at DemoCamp 5.

Some UoT Students presented their work project to build a better buildent board system for , based on Java. It looks like they got some real world experiance in building an application, wheather that is is a good thing or not is another question.

As mentioned, Chris did a demo of the new feature in RubyOnRails 1.1 of RJS Templates : Rails JavaScript, a way to have your Ruby generate Javascript, particular all those fine Ajax’y things. (see . He also had a big shout out for the firefox extension for your javascript debugging needs.

David Janes of BlogMatrix showed of some cool use of micro formats, small peices of xml that do just one thing, like dates, places and can be built up. He also showed of a new site for a one time client.

Update : BlogMatrix is Python based, with should warm the cockles of

A team from Unspace showed a slick demo of live datagrid editing, and even slicker website built on Rails (the care lease website is now live at http://www.ReLeaseMe.ca/), and building on Chris’s own demo (to the annoyance of several java-heads in the crowd). “This app cried out to be built in Rails”!

is a web based spreadsheet, database (the best of both) built with sqeak (a variation of smalltak). Wow.

Adam Goucher’ did a presentation of a web front end for ldap (an HP product called Select Access. It was a tough sell to a group that has never given much thought to the problems of managing tens of thousand of resources (like web pages, directories and files ) for thousands of people (or at least authenticated identifies). He also has guts to do a demo with only 3 hours to pull it together.

Then we all went off to (another irish) pub (via Thomas).

It’s also worth noting that there is a lot of geek events going on in the next month it T.O. And the buzz hasn’t felt this good for 10 years.