Drupalcon:
Well Drupalcon was absolutely amazing. This being my first Drupalcon I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but getting together with "digital friends" is something I've done before so it wasn't entirely foreign. We learned about some amazing new technologies, not the least of which is RDF, but more on that later.
The Worx Company Presence:
First I'd like to talk about The Worx Company's presence at Drupalcon, and what it could mean both for our customers and our business partnerships. At Drupalcon we actually held an Open Laszlo presentation for all the "Drupalers" who were interested. I don't have an exact count as to how many people actually attended but I think those rooms held around 300 people a piece and our room looked to be about half full... maybe less. Initially I thought that it was around 80 people, but the more I've gone over the math the more sure I am that it was quite a bit more than that. So that's a great thing because we really got to expose the Drupal Community and some of its most active community members to Open Laszlo, and what it could potentially do for them. I spent the rest of the week answering questions about Open Laszlo and how it and Drupal play together. It was encouraging to see the some members of the community were playing with it withing hours of my presentation. I had a couple of different reports of people playing with it to see what they could do, and how they could leverage this fantastic technology in their own Drupal shops.
What's Hot:
The Drupal Community at large is pretty committed to keeping Drupal on the cutting edge of web technologies. It looks like the next big push for us is a technology known as RDF. For those of you who are unfamiliar with RDF it's essentially a self-describing XML language that allows those who browse it to pair different RDF feeds together to compound the contained data in new and different ways. Drupal already has a query engine for RDF built for it in the SparQL module, but Drupal would like to output RDF as well. Current talk is cautiously optimistic as we have MANY other things we'd like to contribute to as a community, but RDF is a very interesting technology, and even if we don't do anything actively with it today, RDF output is a crucial next step to the whole idea of "Semantic Web".
Of Additional Interest:
The Worx Company has created the Imagefield Gallery module and is striving to get it more support from the Drupal community, and to get new and better options integrated in it for both our customers to use and for the Drupal community at large. Drupalcon was a GREAT place to field some of this new technology and during the convention a number of really positive strides were made toward integrating new technologies and styles into this module for everyone's benefit. This has the happy effect of not only involving the community more but giving everyone involved a better tool for their toolbox, and that really is the magic of open source.
