User:Dhhodgin/FSOSS 09

Free Software & Open Source Symposium

Introduction

This year's FSOSS featured talks by more than 20 different individuals on a broad range of open source topics. The talks are spaced out in 4 different rooms with one per hour. This means that I was only able to attend 6 talks which made it a bit hard to choose which ones would be most beneficial to me. In the end I went with the following lineup:

• 9AM - Creating a Twitter Widget using Processing.js (Alistair MacDonald, Hyper-Metrix.com)
• 10AM - Ranking the Bugs: Predicting Which Will Get Fixed (Diederik van Liere, Rotman School of Management)
• 11AM - A View from the Gallery: JVM Alt, Languages (Newman (Scott) Hunter, Fuel Industries)
• 1PM - Coping at the scale of Mozilla: Open Tools (Taras Glek, Mozilla & David Humphrey, Seneca College)
• 2PM - Open Source for Fun and Profit: Making a Career (Khalid Baheyeldin, 2bits.com, Inc.)
• 3PM - 3D in the Browser... More than just Doom (Catherine Leung, Seneca College)

I'm going to discuss the two talks which are the most closely related to my project in this course which were the Twitter widget in processing.js and the 3D in the browser with canvas and whats being done with these technologies.

Creating a Twitter Widget using Processing.js

Having just recently switched my major project to work on processing.js I decided this was one presentation I could not miss out on. This talk was given by Al MacDonald who is a freelance web consultant. His website is Hyper-Metrix.com. Al began his talk with an introduction into what processing.js is. He explained that processing is a language for creating 2D and 3D graphics, animations, and interactive applications.

Processing is a language that was built to be run and parsed on a native JAVA client. So processing 'sketches' would be created and then run on the JAVA client which would process them and create the graphics, animations, text, etc in a window. Then a man by the name of John Resig came into the picture and started work on creating a port of processing for JAVA to processing for JavaScript. The idea was to be able to allow those sketches of animations, graphics, and interactive apps to be able to be drawn in a web browser without any plugins or extensions to install. Simply put a way to animate and 'interactify' the web and allow processing creations to 'just work' in modern browsers for users.

After a brief intro into what PJS was and how it got started Al got into some code samples and showed some real time examples of making some simple demos. He showed how easy it is to get started and do some really neat things and basic animations with just a few lines of code. Following some code samples and demos he showed how some of the different parts of processing.js work and some examples of contributions that some of the students in our course have made.

Al moved on to talk about the community and how it is contributing to the project and helping to implement some of the remaining code that still needs to be ported. A group of about nine Seneca students are working together to help port and test some of the remaining functions.
Next came the demo I had been waiting to see. Al had created a widget for a web page that could grab twitter info and then aggregate it into the widget. The purpose of this demo was to show that with about 100 lines of code this technology could create a really professional looking animated feature for a personal website that could run on any modern browser using the canvas element for HTML5. Al has a very supportive view on open source and allowing processing.js to leverage the full power of the web through a hopeful explosion of this technology in the near future. He mentioned some of the work the community has been doing and how to get involved in the community through the Google group or IRC. Al talked briefly about some of the contributions Seneca students have made already towards the project and how it is growing fast and being implemented at an increasing pace now.

After showing the Twitter widget demo Al proceeded to show a couple of interesting demos of how processing.js is being used on the web. One of the most interesting ones was a visual search engine called Ask Ken. It allows you to search for a topic and then presents you with a circular disc of results which you can then pick one and it will create an offshoot disc with a sub search of that choice and so on. It shows how even our most basic tasks like searching for information on the internet can be redefined as to how we do it using processing.

A significant part of Al's presentation was a section titled 'Community and Mission' in which he talked about how the community is outward facing and open to anyone who wants to make contributions. He showed examples of how people can make contributions even if its not through writing code for the port itself. One of these examples was a website called HasCanvas where you can go and paste a block of processing code into a window and it will run the code for you in the browser and show you the output result much like the web based IDE only with a little more functionality and the ability to share a link to your creation with others. He also talked about the feature list and bug list the processing team has going on the Mozilla wiki that shows who is working on what areas and what bugs are currently known. Al rounded out his conversations on community by showing some of the contributions that Seneca students have made to date.

For anyone interested in getting started with processing, there is a simple web IDE on the processing.js website that allows you to just enter in some sample processing code and see how it works without the need to download the source and install it locally or on a web host and no need to configure the canvas etc etc. Al gave a brief demonstration of the processing web IDE during the presentation and showed a simple example and modified it a few times and re-ran it to show how easy it was to get started.

3D in the Browser... More than just Doom

This presentation was given by Catherine Leung who is a professor at Seneca College in the School of Computer Studies, where she teaches in the game development and programming areas. Cathy's talk was about a project she has been working on called c3DL. C3DL is a JavaScript library that will provide a set of classes for rendering 3D objects in the browser. Currently it requires an up to date browser such as Firefox 3.5 in order to run. Cathy demonstrated an application called Motionview which allows previewing of raw motion capture data in the browser. The purpose of Motionview is to reduce the expensive cost of 'clean up' in motion capture animation scenes when sometimes certain points in the animation are wrong.

Requirements

Your report must be 2,500 words and include:

• Summaries of two talks.
  • What was each talk about?
  • What was the speaker's main point?
  • What was the speaker's background and point of view?
• Analysis of each speaker's views on open source. He/she may not mention it explicitly. You must listen and try to understand based on what they are saying, and perhaps not saying.
• Comparison of the points made by the presenters.
  • What can you say about open source in the light of the points they made?
  • Do the speakers have similar views of open source or do they disagree?
  • How so?
• Conclusion about your views on open source
  • Does the picture of open source you've seen presented in these talks challenge or confirm your own views about what open source is and how it functions?