TulsaTechFest was today and it was a great time. I talked with several folks doing various aspects of web development and ran into a few old friends as well. There were a ton of people there, too many to keep up with considering how many tracks there were. The schedule was tight and it always seemed like one hour was not nearly enough to cover some topics.

I gave two presentations. The first was on the underlying code in the Atlas.js framework, particularly how the JavaScript model has been extended with additional functionality (class, inheritance, behaviours, etc.). I think a lot of people there got a good look at what you can really do if you leverage Atlas beyond the ASP.NET integration. It’s an interesting opportunity from a software development with the browser paradigm.

The second presentation was a bit deeper and slightly reaching. I got a general sense from the audience that I didn’t spent enough time describing the problem space before diving into the code. The talk was on how to bring server-push back to the browser framework using AJAX. I covered how to handle asynchrous event handling behind a web service and leverage that to provide instant notification back to the browser of events in a community site (member sign-on, buddy list notifications, instant messages, topic and forum posts, etc. This was a real stretch and offers some really cool possibilities with web-based applications. It’s not a difficult paradigm, it’s just very hard to describe such that people recognize the context of the problem.

I went to a few other topics and had a good time listening to other speakers. I hope I get the chance to refine some content and perhaps speak again. I enjoyed talking to people interested in Atlas, but I wish I had more time to prepare (I agreed to build these presentations from scratch two weeks ago at the Tulsa DNUG meeting, so I had no foundation other than what development we’re doing at work).

If you are reading this and attended one of my sessions, I hope you enjoyed it. Please feel free to comment on what you saw and post any questions you might have. I may be available to discuss the use of Atlas if you’re in the Tulsa area and offer to buy me lunch. :)

Again, a great time at TechFest and I can’t wait for next year!