SXSW `08 Report
We managed to survive this years SXSW with all our fingers and toes intact. The trade show was a great improvement on previous years, though the tendency of everyone to put a Rock Band or Guitar Hero display was a little odd. The panel I spoke on went well enough, though I didn’t have much to add to the other experts.
I had a gold badge which got me into film panels, so I got to see Neil Patrick Harris and the Harold and Kumar guys, as well as Moby. The Moby interview was probably the highlight of SXSW for me. He’s a really down to earth guy and genuinely cares about his craft. Hit that one up on the podcast link if you have a chance. The Mark Cuban and Michael Eisner interview was really interesting as well, especially if you’re interested in where independent content distribution is going.
The panel content was pretty light, as usual. SXSW Interactive isn’t really a technical conference, I was sitting in a Secrets of Javascript Libraries panel (which was packed) and the speaker said ’so let SXSW know you’d like more technical panels’ and the room erupted. Perhaps a Web 2.0 tech track next year would be a good idea.
MapQuest unveiled their new developer offerings a few days ago, and were promoting those in the trade show. I think they did a really good job, their new offerings are free, they setup a site where people can grab the code and dissect it. The people were friendly and helpful and they seem genuinely excited about getting back into the game. True, double true!
One company that I thought was a little odd was AxiomStack. They were giving away an iPod Touch if you wore their shirt, and I’m easy to buy off, but I’m not sure if I really understand their market positioning. They’re a java-based application server/development platform where the apps are written in Javascript. I guess that’s cool, but the last time I heard of writing server side Javascript was in like, 1998 from the Netscape Server guys. That was 10 years ago.
So it’s built on Lucene, which is great for searchability, but I can plug into Lucene for free in my rails apps, so that’s not a huge win. The community doesn’t seem very large, which is a huge thing from my perspective. Granted there are a ton of Java developers out there, but how many people do you know who are experienced writing server side Javascript? The top end license cost is $90k, which is pretty much a full time developer. If I had to weigh a $90k license versus having a developer for a year and using open source tools and a vibrant developer community, that’s a pretty obvious choice.
The kicker for me, and something I overheard from someone else in the hallway between panels is that apparently it doesn’t work on MacOS X. They had a contest where they were giving away an iPod Touch if you built an app on their stack, this guy tried, but couldn’t get the tutorial to work since he was on a Mac. Apparently only one person managed to get through their tutorial (since he had a pc) so he won the iPod.
March 25th, 2008 at 8:30 am
I’m the product manager for Axiom Stack. The top end license for the Axiom Stack in FAST Search, which we OEM for a reasonable price. The license most users will need for commercial use is $999.00. There is plenty of buzz about server-side Javascript and most developers know Javascript. It’s gotten a bad rap. When most people think of Javascript, they think Netscape and client-side. This is the same language, but used on the server-side. We’ve been using it commercially for a few years with great success. It works great on MacOS. There is no Java upgrade from 1.5 to 1.6 for Tiger. We are currently producing a version of the Axiom Stack which will use Java 1.5, to help these users. We’ve seen no other problems. And, actually there were several people who had downloaded and used the Axiom Stack during the show. The winner, Robert, was on a Mac, not a PC.