Facebook Developer Garage – Vancouver

Facebook Development Garage - Vancouver

I’ll be there this afternoon. I believe there are at least 180 people showing up but there are only 100 seats available, so I better get there early. I bet I get to meet really interesting people there.

Building facebook apps has been one of my recent fields of interests. We usually build a web application and then think about populating it with users, on facebook we already get a large database of more than 40 million users, so now how can we say no to that!

It is possible to build FB applications using all the existing frameworks such as Joomla, Drupal, or Ruby on Rails and such. There are some differences of course, for example instead of HTML the output is going to be Facebook Markup Language ( FBML ). If you are curious, just get a FB developer account and attend few of these events. You’d be surprised what independent developers are cooking up these days.

I am already receiving ideas and inquiries from my Marketer friends. Although I must admit I still haven’t seen any real useful FB application yet. Most of them do not go beyond silly online group games. Even Facebook staff are still experimenting with the API and refining the concept using constant community feedback.

In case you wanted to make the event even more populated, here is the address:

Vancouver Film School (VFS) Theatre 1

420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings

Vancouver, BC

5:30 – 9:00 PM – Tuesday October 23rd 2007

and here is the Facebook group for this event.

Makeup of a Good Open Source Solution

In consulting sessions companies often ask me about the quality of open source software in general. There are, of course, both good and bad open source solutions, and it is one of the reasons companies hire commercial open source consultants to assess different kinds technologies for them. Open Source technologies are the result of user community collaboration and participation, and that’s what brings simplicity, modularity, quality, and security to these solutions.

Simplicity

The route that many Open Source projects such as Joomla, Drupal, or phpBB3 are taking these days is to build a vanilla framework with a basic set of functionalities and then rely on the community feedback to develop additional set of functionalities over time. This approach is very efficient because most of the implemented features will actually be used by most users. This way, the application architecture stays lean and simple, yet there’ll be room for further scalability and customization.

This approach goes against the traditional business and product development methods where a limited group of “experts” within a corporation conduct surveys and marketing research, then build a product based on a list of assumptions and features that experts think users may find interesting. In reality, only a portion of those assumptions are right and every miss is considered a business loss that is going to be compensated using cunning Sales and Marketing schemes.

Continue reading Makeup of a Good Open Source Solution

Tips on developing Joomla Extensions and promoting them

Steve Reichgut provides great advice on developing Joomla extensions, ways to promote them on the Joomla forge and Joomla community, and tips on making this process more successful.

I also like how he makes comparisons between the corporate world software development process and Open Source model.

These are the folks behind the AxtaWeb extension you can download it here.

[tags]rastin mehr, joomla, open source, extensions, web application development[/tags]