01.29.2008 01:09:10 PM
Erik started day 2 with a talk entitled "Democratizing the Cloud With Volta". Volta is an experimental web development toolkit - its intent is to simply the environment to develop web applications ("division by 0 is the goal, not an error"). He compared better ideas that don't "win" with ideas that aren't as good but they "win" - why is that? He mentions a book called "The Change Function", which he stated has changed his view on succeeding technologies. He said that geeks have a much different view of success than what users have - users have no patience to learn new stuff. He then dived into a demo showed Volta using VB. Using VB idioms (e.g. handling key events) he was able to write an auto-complete client-side web app - the VB was translated into Javascript. The Volta compiler does IL-to-IL rewrite to compile to any target environment. Even though he said he's not fond of AOP, he admits that Volta is weaving aspects in during compilation. He said that threads can be simulated by trapolining style (I believe he meant something like
this). Asynchronous programming is also mapped in Volta. He showed that Volta has end-to-end profiling, which was really impressive.