Web Professional Minute

Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals Everywhere.  

Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. 

As many of you know, 2007 represented WOW?’s 10th year of operations as a web professional organization.  

Looking back at our history, I am proud of our accomplishments and I am especially pleased with the level of support that we?’ve received from WOW members, practicing professionals and those that teach them.  

Simply put, we?’ve matured as an industry, as a profession and as an association and I truly think the future looks bright for aspiring and practicing Web professionals.  

As many of you also know, sustaining any kind of a business model for a decade or more is an accomplishment of itself. As you might suspect, this particularly applies to non-profit organizations and I am forever grateful for the calls, the e-mails, the shout outs of any kind and the membership support. I?’d like to thank the supporters of this organization for making this effort possible and most meaningful.  

WOW?’s mission is to promote community, education and certification standards and here?’s a recap of what we?’ve been able to accomplish together for 2007: 

•WOW conducted and participated in a series of community building events to promote the profession and to promote education (check out the WOW blog at http://www.webprominute.org for some of the highlights)  

•We’ve strengthened our relationship with education by improving upon instructional design and delivery strategies within the high school, college, university and training company environments worldwide. 

•We’ve continued our efforts to outline education and career pathway resources that define in depth the student learning outcomes so career counselors, parents, students and those that teach and hire Web pros can clearly understand what the Web profession is all about and what is expected of them.  

•We’ve established an online training site (check out the http://webprotraining.org website) so aspiring and practicing professional alike can get access to short course and the in depth training that they need to stay competitive 

•WOW celebrated our fourth year at conducting a national Web design contest in Kansas City, Mo that promotes best practices and web professional standards of the highest quality 

• WOW continues to deliver certification exams for both aspiring and practicing professionals from around the globe   

• In 2007 WOW announced an International Web design competition (check out http://www.webprochallenge.org ) in collaboration with the Adobe corporation that promotes best practices and standards of excellence that provides a vehicle for supporting non-profit efforts by creating a fully functional site for a worthy cause 

All of that said, we recognize that we?’ve got a lot of work to do and I want you to know that your association is committed to a higher standard of excellence and membership benefits. If you have any thoughts on how we can improve upon that or if you would like to get involved please let us know.  

In 2008 you can expect more community building events, rich content including a series of online Webinars covering a variety of topics including Best Practices in Web Design, Development and Administration.  Happy Holidays everyone! I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Greetings WOW members and Web Professionals Everywhere!  Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.  

If you followed this blog last week then you know that last weeks coverage focused on the Google Web Tool Kit (GWT) Conference in San Francisco.  Today?’s coverage includes a wrap up of last week?’s event with a shout out to some great people, a video interview with Juliette Melton, Audience Manger with Safari Books Online with a couple of GWT books to announce and a number of links to some great resources graciously provided by Chris Fong at www.gwtsite.com      

Special thanks to: 

• Final Q&A
• Best Practices for Building Libraries
• Joel Webber on Architecture Best Practices
• Creating Widgets (or really, why GWT won?’t leak memory)
• David Geary?’s Cool and Useful Stuff
• Deferred Binding with Ray Cromwell
• Coming in GWT 1.5: Selenium testing support
• Chat with Bruce Johnson
• GWT Performance Talk
• GWT Security Talk
• Bruce Johnson/Dan Peterson Presentation on Productivity
• Josh Bloch Intro Q&A

There were a lot of things going on in the GWT world this past week, highlighted by the Google Web Toolkit conference in San Francisco. Here are some of the more interesting GWT related links.

• Building a GWT RPC Service
• Google?’s next web toolkit thinks it?’s better than you
• Cloud Computing and GWT
• ed4g – Eclipse Databinding for GWT-Widgets 0.0.1
• GWT is cool, but not complete
• The Google Widget Toolkit?’s AJAX Recipe: Less JavaScript, More Speed
• Anatomy of a GWT project

Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. 

I?’m here at the Google Web Tool Kit Conference the Voices that Matter series of conferences in San Francisco, CA. 

I’m here with Ryan Dewsbury, Developer of GPokr and KDice and author of the book Google Web Toolkit Application. The book is a great how to guide for GWT covering a range of topics from building AJAX applications, Blog Editors, Desktop Applications a Meta Search appllication, Widgets with GWT building elegant and responsive user interfaces with Cascading Style Sheets and GWT?’s Widgets and Panels and much more.

Additionaly his website is full of great resources for those interested in GWT. For example, Ryan’s created an Ajax “Texas Hold Em” Application.

Here’s a couple of links for more info:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A37PFBIWXNVEGP

 http://www.gwtapps.com/

Thank you Ryan for the interview!

Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. 

I?’m here at the Google Web Tool Kit Conference the Voices that Matter series of conferences in San Francisco, CA. 

I have the pleasure to be interviewing Shanjian Li,  Software Engineer at Google specializing in Internationalization.  Shanjian explains the benefits of Internationalization. If you need any convincing that Internationalization considerations should be incorporated in the development and business process than you won?’t want to miss this interview.

 Shanjian Li is soft spoken and the audio on his response is a little weak and I should have known better and will improve the audio in the future. As a result, you may want to consider closing your door and turing up the volume. Shanjian Li makes it a point to share that research reflects that the countries outside of the U.S. comprise of 60% of the activity on the Web. The net result is that developing with Internationalization in mind makes great business sense. Shanjian Li also points out that you can find resources aboutInternationlization and GWT by searching “GWT Internationlization ” on Google.

Thank you Shanjian for a very insightful interview!

Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. 

I?’m here at the Google Web Tool Kit Conference the Voices that Matter series of conferences in San Francisco, CA.  I have the truly great pleasure to be interviewing Joel Webber, Co Creator of GWT and an author of a book on GWT and Sofware Engineer at Google.

In addition to being a really smart guy, Joel?’s a down to earth and a gracious individual who took the time to explain to me the history of GWT, the problems that it intended to address, what the creators and developers have learned along the way and his vision for the future.

 As luck would have it, there was a fair amount of background noise so it you may want to close the door and turn up the volume.

 Enjoy and thank you Joel!

Bill Cullifer with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. 

I?’m here at the Google Web Tool Kit Conference the Voices that Matter series of conferences in San Francisco, CA.  I have the pleasure to be interviewing David Geary, a prominent author, speaker, and consultant, David holds a unique qualification as a Java expert:

He wrote the best-selling books on both Java component frameworks: Swing and JavaServer Faces (JSF). David’s Graphic Java Swing was one of the best-selling Java books of all time and Core JSF.

David provides a clear definition of the benefits and the value proposition of GWT.  

Bill Cullifer with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. 

I?’m here at the Google Web Tool Kit Conference the Voices that Matter series of conferences in San Francisco, CA.  I have the pleasure to be interviewing Jorge Medina, QA Engineer with Shasta QA here in California regarding his experience as an attendee.

Jorge explained in some great detail the benefits of GWT and the Google Web Tool Kit conference with a solid understanding of the topic and the value from a developer as well as a QA engineer point of view.

Thank you Jorge!

Bill Cullifer with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. 

I’m here at the Google Web Tool Kit Conference the Voices that Matter series of conferences in San Francisco, CA.  I have the pleasure to be interviewing Bruce Johnson, Software Engineer and the Co-Creator of the Google Web Tool Kit or GWT.

Bruce was gracious in offering to talk to me about the benefits of GWT that includes enhancing users experiences and easing the effort for Developers.h

 Look for additional interviews this week.

 Thanks for listening and watching the WOW Technology Minute.

Bill Cullifer with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. 

I’m here at the Google Web Tool Kit Conference the Voices that Matter series of conferences in San Francisco, CA.  I have the pleasure to be interviewing Andrew Kovacs. Recruiter at Zappos.com about Web Application and Sotware develeopment jobs.

 If your looking for work and would consider working in Las Vegas take a look at the zappos.com site and search the key word “tech jobs”. 

Bill Cullifer with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. 

I am here at the Google Web Tool Kit Conference the Voices that Matter series of conferences in San Francisco, CA.  I have the pleasure to be interviewing Billy Hoffman regarding his session and his new book on Ajax Security.

His work has been featured in Wired and Make magazines, and on Slashdot and G4TechTV, among others. Billy is also a reviewer of white papers for the Web Application Security Consortium (WASC), and is a creator of Stripe Snoop, a suite of research tools that captures, modifies, validates, generates, analyzes, and shares data from magnetic stripes. Billy is the author of Ajax Security (Addison-Wesley), and just published this month.

According to Billy, “One of the things about using any programming technology to build out a web site is the requirement to ensure that good coding practices are followed. When I wrote the article about AJAX training goes wrong, the intent was to show that the training material brought into the classroom was not satisfactory because it did not follow good programming standards by any sense of the meaning “secure coding”. The initial database string was in VB Script, and demonstrated the idea that bad coding practices in training will carry over into bad coding practices in real life.”

Check out his new book at: http://www.amazon.com/Ajax-Security-Billy-Hoffman/dp/0321491939