This is a bit of late news, but here it goes: I gave a talk on Dojo at QCon 2007. You can find my slides here: Modern web applications with Dojo: the cutting edge. (Notes: slides 56 and 57 are swapped, on slide 57 some text is missing, I ran over time, and never used backup slides at the end.)

Sadly I couldn't attend all talks arriving in the last day of QCon right before my talk. But I caught the talk by Christophe Coenraets on Flex, the talk by Thomas Fuchs on script.aculo.us, and the keynote session with Erik Meijer, Martin Fowler, Diana Larsen, and Jeff Sutherland moderated by Dan North. The latter discussed programming at large: patterns, group dynamics (or the lack of thereof), agile techniques, and so on. Dan and participants managed to make it both educational, and entertaining.

Christophe demonstrated how Adobe tools work together covering the client and the server as well. Thomas presented script.aculo.us. His main points were (according to my notes):

• Very small team of developers
• No sponsors (by design)
• No roadmap, no plans, no deadlines for future versions
• Development is driven mostly by internal factors (developers have their own web applications to work on) then by external suggestions
• "If you want to add something, do it in your own code and maintain it yourself"
• Focus on visual effects
• Many high-profile web sites use script.aculo.us
• The idea behind script.aculo.us is to "improve" JavaScript with ideas taken mostly from Ruby — that's why they modify prototypes of standard objects.
• They compress script.aculo.us using a RegEx-based compressor.

All in all QCon 2007 was a success, and it will be repeated in 2008. For me it was quite different from US conferences because it attracted participants from many countries. It was the truly international gathering.