Alan Z. recaps the Software Developer Conference and talks about important new EDN 2.0 features.

These days, when people talk about 2.0, they refer to the next generation of services. Whether talking about Enterprise, Information, Web or Developer, the 2.0 moniker is applicable to looking forward to better ways of sharing and discovering information, and getting work done.

It seems like only yesterday that I was doing a presentation about the EDN 2.0 at the 2006 Software Developer Conference (SDC) in San Francisco. During my talk, I outlined several upcoming EDN features (including CodeSearch and EDN Forums) designed to make the EDN more interactive, our members more productive, and add some ways to reward your community involvement. I’m pleased to announce that we have delivered on those features (with more to come). Now it’s up to you to take advantage of them.

It’s been a very busy time around the EDN… so just what have we been up to?

SDC at EMC World

One could easily say that this was the first SDC 2.0 generation conference, quite a bit different from past events, and the shape of things to come.

I and approximately 8,000 other people attended EMC World 2007 in the massive Orange County Convention Center in Orlando Florida, by far the largest event to date.

For the first time, the SDC and Momentum were co-hosted at EMC World. This was a ‘conference of conferences’ and all the developer targeted sessions were held under the SDC banner.

Our goal was to leverage the SDC to bring developers together as a community at EMC World. In addition to the SDC sessions, attendees were able to go to EMC Technology Summit (ETS) and Momentum presentations. There was a lot of cross-pollination… many people are interested in both software and hardware offerings, so this was a great venue. More people attended SDC sessions than during any previous conference, and we were able to cover a wider range of products and technologies.

For those of you who have not yet attended an SDC, some of the highlights were:

• SDC Keynote - Mark Lewis, EMC Chief Development Officer, talked about the 2.0 world, how it impacts developers and the infrastructure needed to support it. You can see all of the EMC World keynote videos by clicking here.
• Lectures - presentations about developing with products and technologies including Captiva, Celerra, Centera, CLARiiON, ControlCenter, Documentum, Smarts, and Symmetrix. Not surprisingly, the business process management, Documentum Foundation Services, and developer tools sessions were particularly well attended.
• Hands-On Labs - attendees guided through new interfaces, two developers per machine
• Panel discussions – product roadmaps, questions and answers
• Meet the Experts - food, drink, and conversations with engineers and product managers
• SDC Lounge - outside the session rooms, a place to relax, mingle and network with others during session breaks

The EDN had a booth at the Solutions Pavillion, and sponsored a couple of special events:

• EDN luncheon – where we introduced several new EDN 2.0 features
• SDC Developer Challenge – more food (see a recurring theme here?) and a fast paced quiz format with people competing for great prizes.

To make the most of the event, time management and agenda planning was key. There was so much to see and do, that it took some planning to be in the right place at the right time. It also took comfortable shoes… because the convention center was so massive there was a lot of walking. On the last day, I became envious of some of the facilities people who were zipping around on Segways.

As with last year’s SDC, I spent much of my time photographing the event. The photos gallery is available here.

This is also the second time I’ve co-hosted the SDC Developer Challenge with Joshua Toub of the Blue Fish Development Group. We presented questions and gave the audience a chance to answer.

Everyone who answered correctly got a very cool limited edition EDN polo shirt and was entered into a drawing for prizes that included a Garmin nüvi GPS, an iPod Video, a Marriott hotel stay, an Xbox console, and eight iPod Shuffles (one for each square in the EDN logo!) The questions, answers and audience interaction are often very funny. Let's face it, along with some easy questions, there were some pretty obscure triva points represented. Many of the questions are multiple choice, and it’s amazing to see how many frantic waving hands go up in the audience as incorrect choices are eliminated. Surprisingly, there were two occasions where there was only one choice left, and still some people didn’t raise their hands… shy, I guess.

Next year we’ll expand the SDC Developer Challenge to include award presentations to those who participated in the new EMC Developer Challenges that I’ll describe in a moment. We'll also use the event as an opportunity to publically acknowledge those members who make valuable contributions to the EDN community.

SDC at Momentum Monaco 2007

Because the SDC sessions were so well attended, there will be a developer track at the upcoming European conference: Momentum Monaco 2007 (November 5-8) where the most popular Content Management sessions from SDC at EMC World will be repeated for the benefit of those who could not join us in Orlando.

So if you want to learn how to build applications on EMC Content Management software platforms, leverage new platform services, understand architectural direction, or tweak system performance, Momentum Monaco 2007 is the place to be in November.

So What’s New at the EDN?

The short answer, is “quite a lot”. In addition to the Developer Centers and CodeSearch functionality introduced a couple of months back, our EDN 2.0 initiative adds or expands:

• EDN Discussion Forums
• CAS Centera Lighthouse Developer Center
• EMC Developer Challenge
• EDN Points
• Developer Audio
• What's New page and RSS Feeds

EDN Forums

For the past several years, the EDN has been pretty much a one way communication channel. We publish, you read. However the amount of knowledge and talent that our members have is incredible, and largely untapped because there has been no easy way to share the experiences.

It’s time to give EDN members a voice. We’re pleased to announce the new EDN Forums, designed to help get you connected to and talking with other developers.

Typical discussions focus on developer centric topics such as best practices, getting started, finding resources, solution architecture, open source and collaborative projects, EMC Developer Programs, and conferences.

For example, there’s a section devoted to EDN content… a place where you can comment on featured articles, columns, and interviews and let us know who’s blogging about EMC software.

The Developer Centers' forums take a little different approach than some other forums you may be used to. Instead of being product centric, it’s all about what developers need to produce solutions. For example the Content Management Developer Center has categories where you can discuss how to ramp up new developers, dowloaded sample code, the certification process, best practices, the development process, performance tuning, administration, project management and quality assurance.

Conversations already underway include where to find resources, Agile development practices, wikis, Eclipse integrations, and the upcoming WDK Automated Test Framework.

Please note that the EDN forums are not intended for product support. People who post messages requiring product support will be redirected to the appropriate support forum/organization.

The EDN Forums is designed as a collegial environment where developers are encoruaged to talk to each other about the best ways to provide solutions. Leveraging the experience of developers across the globe should make for some very enlightening conversations! Come join the discussions, and let's hear what you have to say.

CAS - Centera Developer Center

As part of our quest to cover all the EMC developer platforms, we have added the CAS Centera Developer Center (affectionately called Lighthouse) to the EDN community. Here you'll find tools, downloads, peer support forums and other timely developer resources for Centera Content Addressed Storage (CAS) products.

What’s CAS? The developer center gives an introduction:

“Content Addressed Storage is a category of automated networked storage established to store large volumes of fixed content. Each data object gets a unique identifier, or Content Address (CA), derived from its digital content. CAS eliminates the need for applications to understand and manage the physical location of information on storage media. Referencing data based on its actual content presents an additional storage benefit. If multiple clients store the same data object on a cluster, the system needs to store only one copy; each client, however, will receive a unique identifier to retrieve it. In addition, CAS ensures that stored data cannot be changed or tampered with because the identifier is calculated from the binary content of the data. If the content of the data changes, the identifier changes also.”

It’s easy to see how CAS can be an important component of solution design, particularly in organizations and industries that regulate the way content is stored and archived. Take a look at what the CAS Centera Developer Center has to offer.

Throwing down the gauntlet

The EMC Developer Challenge is a new and unique program designed to engage the worldwide developer community. Prepare to have your problem solving and development skills challenged in ways that will stretch, amuse and stump even the best developers. Earn recognition by sharing and showcasing your outstanding skills, insight, and vision with the global community. Compete, collaborate and profit from your work. Everyone is encouraged to participate, so take a look here for more details.

EDN Points

We’re in the process of implementing a system whereby you can be rewarded for your involvement in the developer community. EDN will award points for activities directly affecting the site or indirectly affecting EDN community development. You’ll earn points for submitting content, participating in developer challenges, speaking up in discussion forums, attending conferences, and working on collaborative projects. Earning points is easy and everyone is encouraged to participate. The program details are outlined here.

What's New With What's New?

How do you find out what’s new and updated at the EDN? In a 1.0 world, you would rely on a newsletter sent to your email. However, this approach wasn't great for a site where new content is uploaded on an ongoing basis. In the 2.0 world, we want to make it easy for you to see what's been added or updated.

For a quick listing, we’ve created a What’s New page that shows recent content. However, the better (and very 2.0'ish) approach is to look for our RSS feeds icons. The RSS feeds let you quickly see the most recent content, or if you subscribe to a feed, content that has been published since you last checked. So you're just a click away from seeing what's new.

We'll still be publish EDN newsletters periodically as a way of summarizing featured content. However, if you want to stay on top of EDN happenings, checking the RSS feeds is the way to go.

You can subscribe, or just point your late model browser (IE7, FireFox, etc.) to the following RSS feeds:
What’s new at EDN
What’s new for Content Management
What’s new for Resource Management
Recent threads at the EDN forums. Note that there are also feeds for each forum subcategory, so you can really fine tune the kind of information you want to keep up on.

EDN 2.0, and the World of Multi-Media

Who says that developer content has to be limited to code samples, articles and white papers? Wouldn’t it be nice to listen to interviews while you’re driving to the office, or working out in the gym? Perhaps you want to sit in a cafe with a WiFi connection, sipping an espresso, and watch a narrated SDC slide presentation. Want to download the EMC World keynotes to your video player? We’re committed to bringing you more audio, video and mixed media content, so you can do all these things and more.

We took advantage of the convergence of people from all over the planet at EMC World by sitting in the SDC Lounge and recording interviews with session presenters and attendees. We’ll be posting these to EDN’s Audio section and are working on linking the audio to RSS feeds so that the recordings can be discoverable and downloadable by Podcasting software. Select narrated SDC sessions will be posted soon.

There's even a place where you can talk about the interviews and make future topic suggestions on the EDN Forums.

Let's get talking

The EDN 2.0 world really revolves around your participation in the community. We're providing the facilities to get developers connected. Don’t be shy, take advantage of it... everyone comes out ahead.

Alan Z.

Click here for an index of all "From The Editor" columns.

You can discuss "From the Editor" articles on the EDN Forums by clicking here.