I actually managed to register for Google IO early enough to snag a boot camp slot. Figured I'd go just to see what its about.
After snagging my little plastic 'droid I was off to the buzz talk. They had some cool stuff about protocols for comment and like syndication. It was also cool to see how they represent their activity streams versus what we do. They touched on Salmon and PubSubHubBub for ways to get comments and likes to flow in all directions from the different places a piece of content is available from.
Next on the list was a presentation on the new programming language
Go. I've always been a sucker for looking into the mechanics of languages and it has been a while since I've had the time to look into something new.
Their goals are to do the same things all other programming languages try to do, get the developer more productive.. They are also very mindful of compile time. To some the compile time might be a trivial issue as a few extra seconds on their build doesn't really matter much.
When your build starts taking an hour, well then you start to look at stuff like this.
It had a bunch of cool features. It looks perfect for putting together a fast parallel http rpc service. Haven't checked to see if there's protobuf support in there yet though.
I also hit the android lab time. I think this was the only disappointment of boot camp. It was a very 101 level intro to android. It was probably good for someone that's never written an android app and that seemed to be the majority of the people there. I was hoping to fill in a few API/best practices holes in my knowledge so I definitely picked the wrong session.
The last one of the day was something on GWT. I've been using this a bit for my 'ExpoRescue' application (more on that later). This helped fill in a few holes and introduced my to their Model/View/Presenter pattern for front end development.
It seems the main motivation between Having a Presenter (which has the traditional controller logic with the addition of the page rendering logic). This allows them to keep more code in the java side instead of the javascript/html side that is generated. This again is mainly due to compile time. For reference, it seems a full build of Adwords still takes about 57 minutes.
Other notes:
The wifi in the Moscone center SUCKED yesterday with just a handful of people there. If you're going and want to be online you'd better bring a 3g phone with you. If you need work done, I hope you've got your droid hacked and tethered :).
That's all for the first day. Wasn't bad, but I'm not sure I'd snag another day off of work to go next year.
