Building Liquid Websites with PHP

Okay because Apple upped my iDisk quotas, I’m putting up my OSCON talk there temporarily. Caitlin finished producing this talk last month, but I haven’t seen it because I can’t stand the sound of my own voice.

production Silver Keys Studio
video source HD and Keynote
size 104.8MB
run time 50 minutes, 32 seconds
format H.264 (Quicktime 7 required to play movie— free download)

You should: Right click-download this link or click on the image below.

Plea for help

I have a DVD of the entire talk I’d like to give away. This allows those of you without a Mac or Windows PC (you know who you are). If you know of some way to distribute 4GB data that will work, contact me.

Everyone please thank Chris Shiflet of BrainBulb consulting for hosting the bandwidth of the Quicktime 7 video.

The video is released under the following Creative Commons License. (Caitlin will add it to the video when she gets a chance.) Hopefully this will allow you to be free to transcode this to any other format you like/need. In the attribution, please also give credit, where possible to Silver Keys Studio for filming and editing and to O’Reilly and Associates for the conference. If it is a straight transcode, please also credit your contribution.

If you need to use this video for anything beyond what is covered under the Creative Commons License, please e-mail Caitlin.

The Contents

Here is the abstract:

Remote Scripting has been with us for five years now, but Google Gmail and Google Maps have brought it to the forefront. The XMLHTTPRequest object is the most common implementation of the Remote Scripting Pattern, which empowers the web developer to turn their websites into rich client-side applications; all it takes is a little bit of server-side programming and a whole lot of Javascript.

This talk hopes to answer: What do we gain by Remote Scripting? What do we lose? How does one implement it? What is the XMLHTTPRequest object? What are the pitfalls of Remote Scripting? Why do I hate all browsers?

In this talk, Chay shows how Plaxo has used Remote Scripting for the last year in its web client to create a dynamic web-based PIM. Through some toy demonstrations, Chay also shows how one can do this on the server-side using PHP and on the client-side using Javascript and a whole lot of patience.

Of course, all that was actually pulled out of my ass months before I actually made the talk. I finished it the day of the talk so the final talk is nothing like it.

The talk covers building Remote Scripted websites to dynamically change content on the page. Today, this is known as Ajax which is a major component in what O’Reilly calls Web 2.0. Because of this, there were many Ajax related talks, but I like to believe mine was the best.

I called it “Liquid” because I like the idea of the fluidity of modern web applications. But really it was an excuse to finally use one of my Keynote Themes.

Production Notes

If you are interested in the production equipment. I believe Caitlin used the following: Sony HDR-FX1 HDV videocamera, Sennheiser ME66 microphone with LightWave windscreen, Manfrotto MDeVe 755B tripod and 503 head.

She interspersed it with a quicktime movie export that that Keynote did of the actual slides (which was a lot of work because I exported it incorrectly). The live demos are a quicktime export for my Powerbook using Snaps Pro X timed to the audio clips of my talk she put on my iPod for me.

She edited it with Final Cut Studio on her Powermac G5/2×2Ghz. She also had a little fun with Livetype.

(Hire her.)

The following themes were used: Oceans and Reflections from Keynote Theme Park. The author writes drop-dead gorgeous themes when used correctly.