I'm here at Mashup Camp. This is my first unconference, and I'm really liking the format. Unlike most conferences, where I end up spending all my time networking and not attending any sessions, I've actually attended some here and had an interesting time.
The session on REST vs SOAP, presented by a guy from Eventful, had some interesting discussion. Most of the API providers in attendence are offering relatively simple APIs, and for them going with a REST-only strategy is probably a good approach. I pointed out in the session that offering a SOAP interface helps your developers when you have an API so large that the code generation capabilities you get with SOAP toolkits can be a real time saver. But for startups where providing an API is often way down on the list of what they can spend time on, it remains much easier to throw something quick and dirty together and and exposing it using a REST style interface.
The session on Widgets and Containers was also interesting, but the large group made effective discussion difficult. I did learn some things that I didn't know before about different composition models that are used by the online widget containers, and how this affects widget architecture. The session was led by Adam Sah of Google, who I am pretty sure was responsible for the personalized Google homepage that they have rolled out.
I gave a session on the eBay Web Services, which gave me a chance to meet some cool developers, including one from Parking Carma, which manage the sale of parking spaces at BART stations, and have some cool stuff coming out in the near future.
There was a very relavent session for me on Day 2 led by Mashup Camp organizer David Berlind on documentation in mashup APIs. There was interest in creating an "un-standards" organization in the space, and I offered up eBay's proposal for standardized web services documentation and the associated open source apireferencedocs tool that we've contributed, and there was interest from Microsoft, Intel and EVDB as well as others on collaborating in this space. I'm hopeful that something will come out of this.
Day 2 was mostly about the mashup competition. Adam entered his mashup, Dude, Where's my Used Car, which was a runner up. I spend most of the day doing demos of the mashup, which gave me a chance to pitch eBay Web Services to lots and lots of developers. Second place went to chicagocrime.org, which is one of the first mashups developed, and the winner was podbop, a music venues mashup that makes it easy to find concerts near you.
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