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News
Created: 23.03.2013 20:15 Last Modified: 23.03.2013 20:16
Views: 6695
Keywords: Brussels, C++11, Firefox, FOSDEM, HipHop, Jolla, Mozilla, opensource, Qt, Sailfish |
FOSDEM 2013 |
I had the pleasure to visit FOSDEM 2013 in a group with four friends. We stayed at cozy Hotel Bedford. The hotel is located at Brussels city center and it is to a lot of tourist attractions, including Manneken Pis.
Our first impression from FOSDEM was the Friday Beer event. It took place at the Delirium Caf? which offered an impressive variety of excellent beers. FOSDEM started on the next day at ULB (Universit? Libre de Bruxelles) Campus Solbosh. For two days more than 5000 people visited 250+ presentations in 4 buildings. The event was organized brilliantly and all of my friends and I made small donations to support it. The only minor disadvantage of FOSDEM 2013 was the public transport in Brussels during Sunday.
The schedule of FOSDEM 2013 offered 7 main tracks and 30 developer rooms. The website of the event has a video archive where all presentation will be uploaded. I focused my attention primary on the several topics: embedded and mobile, Mozilla, cross desktop and cross distro. In my opinion there were three major technologies that impressed during this edition of FOSDEM: Jolla Sailfish OS, Firefox OS and Qt. I would also like to praise Alexandra Leisse for sharing tips how to understand user’s needs at her talk about "Better software through user research".
Qt
As a Qt Ambassador and a regular member of qt-project.org I was delighted to visit Qt’s booth and several Qt related presentations:
More details about everything related to Qt during FOSDEM are available at Qt Blog.
Firefox OS
Mozilla is working hard on their operating system Firefox OS. Several talks at Mozilla devroom were dedicated to the new OS. Thanks to the presenters of the Mozilla community form Greece the audience learned how to flash Firefox OS on a device as well as how to develop and debug applications.
Jolla Sailfish OS
Several of Jolla's sailors visited FOSDEM and shared their experience with Sailfish OS. The new OS comes with Mer core and inherits MeeGo legacy but it is unlike any OS on the market. The SDK will run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS and the framework for development of native apps is Qt.
On Sunday I visited a presentation about scaling PHP with HipHop. HipHop for PHP is an open source project driven by Facebook. The basic idea is to speed up PHP source code by translating it in either C or C++. I had a lot of expectations but I am slightly disappointed after the presentation. Unfortunately in my opinion so far HipHop is not very well documented. It appears that there is delay of merging contributions of individual programmers. It also seems that Facebook does not publish the latest releases as open source immediately at the GitHub repository of the project. PHP with HipHop is useful only for large web projects and I am afraid that at the moment all these issues make the technology unreliable.
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