No T-shirt hurling machines this year, which is a shame.
Three main themes as teasers, Netbeans, Semantic Web and SPOT.
Firstly, from the community itself, there’s now a PDF Netbeans magazine on the community website, looks good, useful articles, and the right price 
Then we had Henry Story and Tim Boudreau, on making the semantic web dog simple (there’s a dog theme here, we’ll get to it soon).
Quick Recap:
URI – Identifies a resource e.g. documents, people,concepts
REST – REpresentational State Transfer. Things to remember, a resource can return any number of representations, representation can be cached on the Internet, and REST describes the architectural style of the web.
Consider a database table, at the intersection of a row and column, there is a value with a name. In this instance the relationship is local not universal, therefore we need to turn all these relations into URI’s like relation, subject, object (aka triples).
One of the added benefits here is that because we use URI’s, we can click on them to follow the object, and what that is giving us is self describing metadata about objects.
With it so far? Well, that’s the basics, and coincidently these, subject, relation/property, objects are how RDF, the Resource Description Framework classifies things.
And these are at the heart of the Semantic Web. The semantic web, requires structured data, and people don’t like creating structure, but many of the tools we already use create structures
- blog engines like MovableType
- Social networking sites (FOAF)
- Open Source project sites
At the heart of it, is a simple scheme, based on URIs, delivered on a scalable simple mechanism (REST), using RDF which can’t have any less than a subject-relation-object, and it’s clickable.
They gave an example of a scheme for describing projects (project, homepage, license etc.) DOAP (description of a project).
Finally, Bob Beasly showing off a rich client app he’d built, and he’s a non-techie, using the visual web pack. Well, I thought I’d seen it all….No, he’s built a webapp he can use to remotely control a PC that he uses to train his dog. He clicks buttons to re-play WAV files to command the dog to sit etc. then click another button to reward the dog ‘Sadie’.All watched via webcam. Well the reward mechanism uses a SunSpot device (see http://www.sunspotworld.com), to activate a chute that delivers a doggie treat.
Good to see the most expensive dog feeder on the planet.