DrupalCon DC 2009
DrupalCon DC Wrap-Up
Blog
created on Tue, 2009-03-10 12:58
Today is my first day back at Raincity after DrupalCon DC and I think so far I haven't done a great job of verbally communicating to my colleagues who didn't attend what the conference was like, what I personally enjoyed most about it, what new stuff I learned, etc. so here's a more organised version of my thoughts about the conference.
- The session by Chapter Three's Josh Koenig on handling asynchronous data in Drupal. It began with a basic demonstration of how ajax is done in Drupal, the use of Drupal.behaviors, making sure your ajax degrades gracefully without JavaScript, etc., after which he asked the question "Who thinks this is totally remedial and boring?" and a handful of people put their hands up. Now, the room was pretty packed, so I think less than 10% found it remedial or boring. For me, though I didn't put my hand up (because I'm never bored when someone's talking about ajax), I was glad that Josh nonetheless moved on to talk about some more advanced aspects of the use of ajax that I had little experience with yet, in particular the challenge of building truly scalable ajax applications. He talked us through the problems they had come up against when building a live chat system and some of the solutions they looked at before deciding on using Memcached, the distributed memory caching system. He also discussed security considerations with ajax such as the ability of someone who knows the path to an ajax callback to access that path directly and e.g. make an unsuspecting visitor to their site cause a vote count to be incremented (as was subsequently demonstrated in one of the security talks).
Tags:
