OSCON 2010 Mobilizes

OSCON 2010 Mobilizes:

O’Reilly Media’s Open Source Developers Conference is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week with hundreds of speakers and lots to see and do.

Here is the OSCON Blog, the OSCON 2010 Schedule, Keynotes, Events, Health Information Technology, BOF Sessions, and a Cloud Summit. Some OSCON tutorials will be live-streamed, although they require a registration fee.

OSCON’s Mobile sessions explain how to target all major mobile platforms with open source.

• Android for Java Developers: A hands-on presentation that takes you through the anatomy of an Android application
  


• Building Native Mobile Apps Using Open Source: By using the open source Titanium platform, web developers can create apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry using a single code base.
  


• Mobile App Development with PhoneGap: Learn how to use PhoneGap, an open source mobile development framework, to create platform-neutral mobile applications with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
  


• Android: The Whats and Wherefores: Android Open-Source Lead Dan Morrill presents an overview of the Android open-source project.
  


• Building Mobile Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: The pros and cons of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript vs native development. Learn how to use open source web technologies to design and build apps for today’s most popular mobile devices.
  


• Writing Zippy Android Apps: Tools and techniques to find performance problems and future developments.
  


• Face Detection on the iPhone: The OpenCV library is a collection of routines intended for real-time computer vision, released under the BSD License, free for both private and commercial use.
  


• Your Smartphone May Not Be as Open as You Think: Most open smartphones contain proprietary software and are subject to user restrictions.
  


• Open Source Telecommunications: Details of designing application interfaces that need to be used in a “listen only” mode.
  


• PhoneGap 101: PhoneGap has been widely recognized as a game-changer for mobile app development. The open source code has been downloaded more than 100,000 times and hundreds of apps built using PhoneGap are available in mobile app stores and directories.
  


• Cross-Compiling Android Applications to the iPhone: While similar in capabilities, smart phones differ greatly in the way native applications have to be written for them. Google’s Android is based on Java with an Android-specific set of widgets, while Apple’s iPhone only supports Objective-C as the programming language
  


• Building an Open Source Eco-System: Value of open source tools for mobile developers
  


• K-9 Mail: Forking Android for Fun and Profit (mostly Fun): K-9 Mail is an open source email client for Android.
  


• MeeGo – The Mobile Linux Platform: Understand some of the technical choices underlying the platform, and see their result.
  


• BlackBerry development for Web Application Developers: Follow along as a Perl developer shows you how.
  


• NPR: APIs, Mobile and Open Source: In its short two-year life, the NPR API has grown tremendously, from only a few hundred thousand requests per month to more than 40M.
  


• Instant Mobile Communities: Simple services can be deployed using very low bandwidth techniques like text over XMPP or text based browsing.
  


• Using SMS in the Developing World: RapidSMS is an open source project for messaging, data collection and co-ordination over SMS.
  

CloudCamp is an unconference held at OSCON, where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies can exchange ideas. This CloudCamp will be focussed on all-things Open Source and Open Cloud. CloudCamp was instigated by Reuven Cohen.

In a significant advance for open source cloud computing, Rackspace has announced OpenStack Computer. Robert Scoble explains it all. It means the end of lock-in for cloud customers. You can take your cloud-based apps somewhere else. Competitors who are using OpenStack can run their own (compatible) cloud infrastructure.

The Apache-licensed project will feature several cloud infrastructure components, including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files, the company’s highly scalable storage engine. OpenStack forms a foundation of technologies including, a scalable compute provisioning engine – OpenStack Compute – and a fully distributed storage engine – OpenStack Object Storage.

Despite the immense popularity of Amazon EC2 and private clouds built on VMware vSphere, true industry-wide standards and interoperability have yet to emerge, says Cloud.com, which developed CloudStack.

Community sponsors of the OpenStack Cloud include 25 companies like Dell and Intel.

For Amazon-style cloud computing under an Apache licence, NASA contributed technology that powers its Nebula Cloud Platform. Nebula is used for Mars images seen in Microsoft’s WorldWide telescope project. Last week Microsoft unveiled the largest and clearest image of the night sky ever assembled. The “TeraPixel” sky map was generated with the help of some of Microsoft’s latest HPC and parallel software assets.