The second annual SoCal Code Camp at Cal State Fullerton last weekend was an improvement in many ways. The volunteer speakers were all well prepared, knew their stuff, and gave excellent talks. The only hitch I experienced was once when we had to swap rooms because one topic gathered more interest than expected, and it’s not like they could have done anything to prevent that. For an all-volunteer event with no admission charge, I was blown away (again).

The best part is that the talks were not all technical. Much of the conference was business oriented, putting the technical aspects into perspective. For example, Abhijit Gadkari opened up his talk about Software as a Service (SaaS) by pointing to where he believes it to be on the hype cycle (half way between the technology trigger and the peak of inflated expectations) as compared to where four technologies are that SaaS relies on: XML (plateau of productivity), web services (slope of enlightenment), SOA (just past the peak of inflated expectations and dropping), and Workflow (just recently triggered).

Jinesh Varia, the Evangelist from Amazon showed off S3 and EC2, which are the greatest things to happen to remote hosting since fibre optics.

Waleed Abdulla presented his XRules project – a clean, straightforward way to encode business rules for working with XML packets, to validate them, and to perform computations on them. The idea is that the same business rules work for local validation as well as remote. He’s written .Net implementations that run on Windows servers and in IE, but the concepts are universal. His use case is that he’s aggregating information between hundreds of different vendors — regional trucking companies if I recall correctly — each with slightly different criteria for the jobs they’ll accept and how they charge for them. This is something that’s going to come up more and more often as smaller businesses figure out how to join forces (and new startups figure out how to do that joining). I’m impressed with what Waleed has done. The Java community would do well to consider a port of XRules.