Øredev 2011 in the rear-view mirror – Part 2

Dec 1, 2011 · Follow on Twitter and Mastodon conferences

This is the second part of my sum-up of Øredev 2011, which took place in Malmö, Sweden.

Phil Haack – Building Mobile applications with ASP.NET MVC4, HTML5 and jQuery Mobile

This talk was quite interesting, since Phil discussed a lot of aspects of mobile browsing and how ASP.NET MVC4 can help you out.

Adaptive rendering will be added to the default web application template. This will cause the page to automatically render differently based on the screen size. To see it in action, visit Zurb Foundation.

Another new feature is that you can create device-specific variations of the same view. For instance, Index.cshtml is the default view and Index.iphone.cshtml is the variation that you’ll see when viewing the page on an iPhone. Custom modes can be registered in global.asax, which means that you are free to tailor your own set of custom views.

Phil also demonstrated using iBBDemo2 for simulating an iPhone when browsing the web. Quite handy if you want to easily be able to try out your custom views.

All in all, a quite interesting talk, although Phil didn’t seem too enthusiastic about it. Also, the wifi was a disaster, and caused a lot of problems. I really hope they improve this next year.

Nathan Totten – Facebook Development

Nathan was hard by the wi-fi problems, as he demonstrated how to develop apps for Facebook.

Nathan talked about various types of Facebook applications like iFrame apps, web sites with Facebook Connect, mobile applications, desktop apps (like Spotify) etc. and how they use OAuth 2.0, REST services, the FB Graph API and FQL to integrate with Facebook. He also discussed the JavaScript and C# Facebook SDK:s. His advice was to use the JavaScript SDK whenever possible and a server-side SDK when the integration should be more invisible.

Finally, Nathan demonstrated how he works with local and live applications, e.g. if you are developing an application locally (running on localhost) and have it live as well. He then creates two separate FB apps: one that is bound to the live site and one that is bound to localhost. He also told us that FBML is dead.

Fredrik Mörk – API – the hidden UI

The first Swedish speaker I got around to listen to was Fredrik Mörk, who talked about how we have to give our api:s the same tender loving care that we give our UI:s. Users shun bad ui:s while developers shun bad api:s, so we should put some effort into our api designs.

An api must be discoverable, so always assume that the user knows nothing. Adapt conventions from other api:s, so that devs recognize your api instead of having to remember it. This also involves making it possible to navigate through the api, adapting naming conventions (delete or remove, store or save etc.) and to put an equal amount of attention to all parts of the api and take care of the api like you do with other parts of your systems.

Fredrik advised us to always expose as primitive data types as possible, to make the api accessible to as many as possible. Always choose abstract before concrete and choose your abstraction according to the purpose. For instance, if you expose an IList instead of an IEnumerable, you are communicating that you expect people to insert stuff into it. This however doesn’t make sense for REST api:s.

Once an api is out there, it’s no longer yours to change. A GUI can change. An api cannot. Be careful with adding features and data to an API just because a user wants it. It will ultimately bloat the API. Be intentional. Don’t let chance determine where a feature ends up and what it’s called.

All in all a great session!

Discussions

Please share any ideas, feedback or comments you may have in the Disqus section below, or by replying on Twitter or Mastodon..

Follow for more

If you found this interesting, follow the Twitter and Mastodon accounts for more content like this, and to be notified when new content is published.