The Future of Web Apps

Like most of the UK’s web development community I was at the Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps summit a couple of weeks ago. A couple of highlights for me were Tom Coates’ wonderfully lucid and entertaining synthesis of all things Web 2.0 (see also Jeremy Zawodny’s annotations of Tom’s slides) and David Heinemeier Hansson’s Ruby on Rails ‘sermon’. Although I’ve been working with Rails intermittently for at least eighteen months I’ve never seen David speak and it had never really occurred to me before just how Scandinavian Rails is: minimal, beautifully designed and good for the soul.

DHH’s Devil
Originally uploaded by Damien Tanner.

Anyway, by now, the talks (sorry, ‘podcasts’) are all available for download, there are numerous write-ups (best of which are Simon Willison’s notes), hundreds of Flickr images and Lars Plougmann’s mindmaps.