Michael Yuan

If you are among the 6000+ technologists / entrepreneurs / designers attending this year’s SXSW conference (or are just interested in following what’s going on in the conference), check this out: The SXSW 2008 Mobile Companion (http://webclip2go.com/sxsw08) is a free mobile web application that lets you access everything about the South by Southwest conference right there on your mobile phone. Try it in a web-based iphone simulator (Safari and Firefox only). It works on iphone, Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile, Nokia, and just about any smartphone out there. The way it works is that it takes live content about the conferences from all over the web, and make the content suitable for display on small mobile phone browsers. Through the companion, you can check:

* Panel / presentation schedules by day
* Session abstracts
* Film / music performance schedules by day
* Official and unofficial conference news, blogs and wikis
* Blogs of conference speakers (full posts w/ comments)
* SXSW parties!
* Austin local news
* Music and film listings by venue in the Austin area
* and much more …

All you need is to load the following URL in your mobile phone browser. Or, if you do not want to type the URL, simply text the word sxsw08 to phone number 41411 to get a link returned in an SMS message (the SMS works in the US only!).

http://webclip2go.com/sxsw08 (Try web-based iphone simulator in your Safari or Firefox browser)

Why did I create it? Well, as a veteran technology conference speaker / attendee, I can tell you that conference WIFI is flaky at best in most big conferences. In fact, WIFI was the #1 problem in SXSW 2007. It is quite frustrating to take out your 8 lbs laptop just to find out that the WIFI is down or has no coverage in the Hall. Well, with the mobile companion, you can check out just about anything about the conference / speakers in real time on your phone. I personally would use it a lot. And I encourage you to try it out if you have an iphone / blackberry or other connected device. I plan to do the same for most other conferences I attend this year as well.

The technology behind the SXSW Mobile Companion is WebClip2Go. The goal was to let people clip live content from any existing web site / blog, so that those content can be viewed from mobile phones. It has become a hit among my friends — especially those with iphones, since the web content loads much faster and requires simpler navigation in WebClip2Go, compared with directly loading the original web site in iphone. Much still needs to be done to make WebClip2Go ready for the general Internet audience (e.g., we need a Firefox plugin that lets people “clip” web content via drag and drop). In any case, I will blog about WebClip2Go in a separate blog entry later this week. Stay tuned!

BTW, for my Seam readers, it might be comforting to know that the application is built on top of JBoss Seam technology.

One of the most interesting concepts in Seam is “conversation” — it allows your web application to have separate internal states for each browser tab, or for each logical multi-page web operation. Conversations can even be nested to manage multi-level wizards. Conversations let you break away from the monolithic session-based web application state management. However, while the concept is easy to grasp, conversations are not as widely understood as sessions. Many web developers are intimidated by the powerful conversation management APIs in Seam.

Well, no more! Jacob Orshalick just released three draft chapters from our 2nd edition of the JBoss Seam book. Those chapters provide very good explanations on conversations should be used in Seam applications. Thanks Jacob! Go check them out!

Cool! Out of 4 sessions I submitted to JavaOne 2008, 2.5 are accepted! Given that JavaOne accepts less than 5% of all session proposals, this sounds like pretty good success rate. So, what exactly will I talk about in JavaOne?

First off, I will be giving a technical session on Building Interactive Mobile Messaging Applications. I will discuss how to build a SMS service like the Google SMS on a Java EE server. I think the information presented in the session will be useful for a large number of developers — for instance, for web application developers, it is often nice to have a “send to phone” button on your pages to send small pieces of information (e.g., alerts / reminders / links) to the user’s mobile phone. In the session, you will also learn how to make your application respond to requests from SMS (e.g., the user sends in a SMS to reschedule an appointment etc.). The session covers technologies used in such a solution, common design patterns / pitfalls, and third party players involved.

I will also run a BoF session on JBoss Seam: The Deep Integration Framework for Web Applications. I will try to dispel the notion that Seam is somehow a mere “web framework”. Yes, Seam is used in many web applications, but you can just use PHP or Ruby for a simple web site. The real value of Seam is to bring real Java enterprise infrastructure (e.g., business process engine, rules engine, asynchronous messaging infrastructure, advanced transaction services, scheduling service etc.) to the web application. That saves you from hard coding business workflow or rolling your own middleware frameworks in the web application. Come to the session and join the discussion!

Finally, they accepted my proposal on Developing Compelling Mobile Web Applications as a backup session — that is the 0.5 session here. This session covers mobile browser detection, multi-template based web site design, and special UI tricks for the iphone. From what I was told, there is a pretty good chance for backup sessions to be presented in the conference since some session presenters drop out at last minute for various reasons. We will see.

Hope to see y’all in JavaOne again this year!