The first OAuth Summit hosted by Yahoo! last week was a huge success. Fifty (!) OAuth community members attended, representing 20 companies, large and small, as well as a couple dedicated individuals. The list of companies represented is extremely gratifying to see considering that OAuth remains a community-driven effort: Agree2, AOL, BroadOn, Bubble Labs, Eye-Fi, Facebook, Garmin, Google, LinkedIn, Ma.gnolia, Microsoft, MySpace, Plaxo, Pownce, SafeMashups, Salesforce, Songbird, Veodia, Vidoop,  and Yahoo!.

The summit would not have been half as good without the help of a few individuals. Stacy Milman from Yahoo! Developer Network did an outstanding job organizing the event on behalf of our host, setting the location, helping with registration, and making sure everything was just right. Cindy Li designed our super cool schwag: the OAuth T-shirt and stickers – look out for the OAuth cat on a laptop or co-worker near you.

Eric Sachs helped create the agenda for the event and organized the demo session that kicked off the rest of the day. Chris Messina set up the wiki and registration page.

The summit started with an update on the OAuth IPR (intellectual property rights) agreement, which is in its final approval stages (more news on OAuth licensing to follow); the current proposal for revising the Core specification; and the list of proposed extensions for the community to consider. The update was followed by a demo session which included:

• MySpace iGoogle gadget - Joseph Estrada (MySpace) and Dirk Balfanz (Google) demoed the new MySpace iGoogle gadget using Google’s OAuth Proxy to communicate with MySpace's recently announced Data Availability OAuth-enabled APIs.
• Google Health - Christian Sonntag (Google) showed a test application built on top of the Google Health API, which uses OAuth to protect confidential medical records.
• PortableContacts – Joseph Smarr (Plaxo) showed a working example of the new Portable Contacts API using OAuth to manage the authorization delegation part of sharing address book information.
• Pownce iPhone Application – Mike Malone (Pownce) showed how to use custom URI schemes on the iPhone to improve usability of the OAuth authorization flow.
• FireEagle Authorization Page – Seth Fitzsimmons (Yahoo! Brickhouse) showed how FireEagle implemented the OAuth authorization page and the lessoned learned from building a service with sensitive personal data and complex permissions.
• Microsoft Live Authentication – Angus Logan (Microsoft) gave a demo of Live Authentication – Microsoft’s OAuth-like protocol – showing the authorization flow as well as advanced features like the ability to authorize multiple resources with different access levels.
• CrunchBase Application for MySpace – Paul Walker (MySpace) explained how MySpace uses OAuth and demoed the minutes-old CrunchBase application built on top of MySpace Data Availability.

It was great to see real products coming out with OAuth support as well as existing players transitioning to use the protocol. After the demos, we dived into a four-hour technical roundtable session about the future of the protocol. The discussion covered a wide range of topics and included:

• Scope for the next iteration of the specification and first round of extensions.
• Token Attributes – providing a standard way to indicate the kind of access being requested and granted.
• Error Handling – adding error codes to Core to improve interoperability.
• OAuth Discovery – a mechanism to allow clients to auto-configure the OAuth endpoints.
• OpenSocial & OAuth – update on how OpenSocial is using OAuth as its official delegation protocol.
• OpenID + OAuth – a proposal for combining the two protocols for Service Providers who are also Identity Providers.
• Session Extension – support for large providers allowing easier deployment of OAuth across multiple properties and distributed environments.
• OAuth for Gadgets – discussion around the Google OAuth Proxy and related extensions such as key rotation and gadget support.
• Automatic Registration – providing a way for anonymous or automatically registered Consumers.

The day concluded with dinner and drinks and some interesting casual conversations about where the community is headed and projects people are interested in working on. The summit provided much needed energy and got the community excited about the work ahead, which is already taking shape on the OAuth list. If you are new to OAuth or just could not make it to the summit, please join us and participate.

Eran Hammer-Lahav
Open Standards Evangelist

Kai Hansen, Tony Ralph, Eric Goldsmith, and Artur Bergman during, This is Your Page with Ads, a panel moderated by Steve Souders.

It turns out I’m not the only person who thinks micro-optimization of CSS files is cool.  I learned this lesson a year ago when I joined the Exceptional Performance team at Yahoo! and had it reinforced by the quality of both the presentations and the hallway conversations at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference last week.

Attending Velocity Con was fabulous.  I was especially impressed that the sessions on web performance were packed.  There were a ton of Yahoos at the conference,  Julien Lecomte from Yahoo! Search spoke about “High-performance Ajax Applications”.

“In the past few years, Ajax has become very popular because it has enabled developers to build more complex web applications. However, in the rush to push the browser to new limits, we have created a monster. “ – Julien

Julien suggested several detailed strategies and patterns that developers can use to accelerate their applications. Stoyan Stefanov, the lead developer of YSlow, and my colleague in the Exceptional Performance team, spoke about Image Optimization, including the 7 mistakes most sites are making.  He showed non-designers how to automate image optimization and reduce image bloat by as much as 30%. After attending the talk, Douglas Crockford shared some love.

“It is good to be able to point with pride at something that Yahoo does that is extremely smart. The Exceptional Performance Team is one of the things that makes me proud to be at Yahoo.” – Doug

John Allspaw from Flickr joined a panel about Surviving Success by preparing to be TechCrunched, Dugg, Slashdotted, or even “Oprahed”.  He also presented Capacity Management.

“Your process of capacity planning should be adaptive, adjustable, and include more than just system statistics. Measurement, architecture, and economics are all equally important to having your site perform. Becoming popular doesn’t have to mean being afraid your site will fall over from too much load.” – John

Adam Bechtel, the chief architect covering network, storage and systems infrastructure at Yahoo! presented “Performance Plumbing”. He believes that scale provides unique opportunities to leverage the network to improve performance.

“As your site scales, don’t overlook the performance opportunities that the plumbing creates.” – Adam

Tony Ralph who works on ad quality and performance for Yahoo! participated in a panel, This is Your Page with Ads.  He made an important point that I hadn’t really thought of before. He indicated that the ad industry and engineers measure performance in very different ways; one via monetization, the other via impact on response time.  He emphaiszed how important it is for engineers to understand both points of view, so that we can effectively measure and convey the impact of end user experience on revenue.

Kai Hansen from Google Ireland also mentioned the need to properly advocate this point of view from within our companies so that quality metrics such as keyword relevance and performance are tied to the cost of displaying ads.

I look forward to Velocity Conference 2009.  I do hope that it will focus on the front end with more talks about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax.  These sessions were the most popular of the conference, and front-end performance is still in its infancy. Douglas Crockford expressed it very well.

“By showing the browser makers how web applications actually perform, the browser makers are now able to make effective changes to the platform. As the platform evolves, we will need new rules and new tools. There is still much to do. (Emphasis mine)” – Doug

Nicole Sullivan

Exceptional Performance Yahoo!

We were lucky to have Paul Tarjan, the Chief Technical Monkey from America along to give an overview of the inner workings of SearchMonkey. This was followed by Neil Crosby (that's me!) giving a live demo to show just how simple SearchMonkey makes enhancing your search results. Thankfully, the Internet stayed up, and the demos went without a hitch.

After the talks, the floor was opened for questions, and then people got down to the important task of eating pizza and making monkeys. Walking around the room, it was clear that people had interesting ideas about things they could make. I look forward to seeing them shared in the gallery soon.

The one recurring question I was asked during the evening was, "Are your slides available?" The good news is they're now up on Slideshare, and they walk through the process of creating a couple simple monkeys as I did for our live audience.

| View | Upload your own

All in all, a good time was had. We gave out a whole bunch of toy monkeys that make a ridiculous amount of noise as they fly through the air (sorry if they've shown up in your office), as well as a bunch of hats and stickers to remember us by. The biggest takeaway of all: Enhancing your search results is really easy with SearchMonkey.

We're planning more of these developer evenings in London over the coming months, so keep an eye on the YDN blog and come along to the next one!

Neil Crosby
Engineer, Yahoo London

http://www.neilcrosby.com

High Performance MySQL, by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko, Jeremy Zawodny, Arjen Lentz, and Derek J. Balling, is a high-level introduction to the most powerful aspects of MySQL that's still accessible to anyone who's worked with a database before. Although this book focuses on MySQL, many of the concepts like transactions, locking, and query optimization are important to an understanding of any database system. You can get through the book on just a basic literacy of SQL, but it might be helpful to have a companion reference lying around in case something comes up.

The book starts out with a detailed overview of the MySQL architecture, with careful attention to MySQL's selection of storage engines, which offers a lot of flexibility in how you can optimize performance. As a way to explain the differences between each of these storage engines and when it might make sense to use InnoDB rather than MyISAM, for instance, the book provides a thorough explanation of how they implement locking and transactions.

Chapters 3 & 4 are also fairly specific to MySQL, as they explain the finer details of how it processes queries. MySQL does a fair amount of heuristics-based optimization on incoming queries depending on the nature of your data, and understanding what's going on under the hood can not only help you fix queries, but start writing better SQL. If you've ever added column indices because it seemed like the cool thing to do, or couldn't quite figure out how that simple query could be taking a few seconds, these two chapters especially will set you straight.

The rest of the book covers general best practices for optimizing server performance. These chapters provide a good reference for how MySQL best implements practices like benchmarking, load balancing, backups, and hardware scaling. Since most of these optimizations are external to MySQL itself, much of the information is important for any production environment.

Without a doubt, High Performance MySQL belongs on any serious developer's bookshelf. Like the original, it's an enjoyable, engaging read that provides battled-tested solutions to real-world problems that engineers face in scaling their applications. The second edition covers the new features of MySQL 5, including stored procedures, cursors, triggers and views, as well as a deeper comparative look into the various storage engines. Perhaps more importantly, the second edition brings with it a reminder of how important database design is to web development.

Mattt Thompson
Technology Evangelist Intern

Yahoo! was well represented, with a number of current community managers and alumni. Heather Champ, Community Manager of Flickr and Derek Powazek from Fray spoke about the bad times all communities cycle through. Their topic, "Worst Case Scenarios: What To Do When Things Go Terribly Wrong", was a great reminder. When you think of community management, especially in the beginning, it seems all beer and roses (I hate wine). I don't think many of us think of the bad until it happens. Things can and often do go wrong in this sector, and getting blindsided is never fun.

Tilly, the new CM (community manager) from MyBlogLog, and I made the rounds and were able to hit quite a few sessions, but most interesting to me were the ones on metrics/ROI. I don't think anyone has figured out the metrics of success for online communities yet, but I did gain a great deal of insight from several clueful people in the off-time after lunch.


Photo credit Duzins

I couldn't help but notice how many available jobs there were on the shout-out board. Community is hot!

Photo credit Duzins

Noted online community pioneer Randy Farmer did a session and he also gave props to the reputation patterns from the Design Patterns Library, found on YDN. Thanks Randy!

Photo credit Duzins

All in all, a great day. Sadly, the tchotchke I purchased at the Computer Science Museum died yesterday. I can't complain I guess, as it was only $3. Nonetheless, I remain despondent.

Robyn Tippins
Community Manager, YDN

Day 1: The keynote delivered by Fredrick Marckini was excellent, with many useful learnings. I also attended a great session called "Universal and Blended Search" session. Key takeaway here for me: Because users spend more time viewing images and video nowadays, SEO involves more than just text and links on the page.

The "Getting Found in Maps & Local Search" session offered useful information. The materials were not new to me, but that's probably because I'm a local search engineer. The session on "Twitter: Ultimate Time Waster, or Great Tool" was quite interesting. I didn't expect much from this session because I hadn't twittered before. After the session I started twittering.

The SES party sponsored by Yahoo! was great. Unfortunately, I couldn't party all night long because I needed to tweak my presentation and tune it for the SES audience. That's the advantage of presenting on Day 2 of a conference. Let's face it, as a speaker, you can't please everyone, but at least you can try to keep the audience awake. If you can't do that -- go take a Toastmasters course!

Day 2: I hid myself in a conference room to rehearse my presentation, which focused on Web 2.0, and how Yahoo! leverages microformats and semantic markup to enable SearchMonkey. With SearchMonkey and the semantic web, site owners can differentiate themselves from their competitors by creating their own blended search experience and unique presentation. Site owners can (theoretically) redefine the search result page heatmap. The customized search result and informative presentation will attract the users' focus to the publisher's listing. So the conventional wisdom of heatmap and golden triangle are outdated. SearchMonkey creates new opportunities for search marketers. SEO is not longer just about links, metadata, h1s, keywords, and text. It's about creating efficient access to information by recognizing the context of the data. Content alone is NOT King. Content without context is like a life without purpose.

My message to the audience was: Give meaning to your data with SearchMonkey's semantic markup --then you'll be ahead of the curve. Happy SEOing!

Ambles Kwok
Technical Yahoo!
Yahoo! Canada

Now it is one day later, two hours after my presentation, and I am sitting in the Ankara Airport to catch my flight to Istanbul from where I'll go back home after another three hour stop-over. Somehow this feels surreal.

The conference revolved all around Open source solutions and what they can do for developers and to drive the IT market in Turkey. Speakers involved people sent by JBOSS, IBM, OpenOffice and Novell and I faced a massive lecture hall filled with around 80 people eager to hear about what Yahoo can bring to the table.

My presentation revolved both around the free offers Yahoo has for developers and introducing Volkan as the first point of call for anything Yahoo/Developer related in Turkey. Judging the first reactions from the audience I gathered that I showed them a lot of useful things new to them and that they are very eager to read more - hence the immediate posting here.

Sadly enough the T-Shirts we got for the students are still held in customs in Istanbul, which means that I had to improvise and created a prize-draw with free copies of my book for the winners. If you are to travel to Istanbul soon and you see customs officers with Yahoo hack T-Shirts, please take photos and upload them on Flickr. Talking of which, Volkan did a great job taking lots of photos of the event and my talk soon available on my Flickr stream.

All in all I had a great time and seeing Volkan immersed in talks with students and professors asking us about the Uni Hack Day program gives me a good feeling about this and we're sure to return sooner or later for a longer period.

I hope the rest of the conference will be as successful and I'll badger Volkan to give details later on. For now, we are very happy with the outcome and that "nobody left the saloon" (as Volkan put it - salon(u) is Turkish for "hall") during our presentation. I tip my hat, mount my winged horse and ride back into the wild wild west of North East London. Maybe I'll get a Borek when I get there.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Photo credit goosemurf

Yahoo!7 hosted a Girl Geek dinner in their Sydney, Australia office last week. The audience was a rich mix of people, from tech writers and marketers to developers, sys admins, and researchers. We saw girl geeks from companies like Atlassian, Thoughtworks, and Google, and from groups like Linuxchix. We were genuinely thrilled to have a chance to hobnob with other female geeks.

Sara Falamaki
Photo credit claudpix

Sara Falamaki spoke about happy code for happy programmers. Everyone seemed uber appreciative of Sara’s insight. Pratibha and I spoke on YUI, Open ID, Yahoo APIs, and all that Yahoo! has to offer to the developer community.

Pratibha Gannavarapu and Claudia Jayne Mikaelian
Photo credit Damana via claudpix

The dinner was a complete success and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. We hope to see other Yahoo! offices sponsoring Geek Girl dinners in the future.

Claudia Jayne Mikaelian
Desktop Support Engineer

What's new in this version:

• Firefox 3 and Firebug 1.2 beta support
• improved and simplified check for javascript minification
• different coloring for inline vs. external CSS and JS ("All CSS" and "All JS" features)
• clickable list of resources as a Table of Contents ("All CSS" and "All JS" features)
• improved colors and presentation in the "legend" of component pies under Stats
• fixed a bug where the same hostname with different port number was counted as a separate DNS lookup
• misc bugfixes and style tweaks

In this version, as with the previous one, we aimed at supporting all possible combinations of the different Firefox and Firebug development branches, namely the latest Firefox 2 and 3 and the latest Firebug releases: 1.05 (stable), 1.1 (beta) and 1.2 (beta).

Many thanks to everybody who sent kind words of encouragement and questions about the availability of this new release, sorry we didn't reply to all of you, but now your wait is over.

As always, your feedback is welcome and appreciated, feel free to use the contact form or join the exceptional-performance mailing list.

Happy download day!

Stoyan Stefanov
Exceptional Performance

Everyone is talking about Open these days, and it is a very exciting kind of Open. It is the Open that allows developers to utilize the best resources available online and combine them into new and innovative products and experiences. The internet has always maintained a healthy balance allowing users to pick and choose the individual services that suit their needs. What this new Open adds, is the ability to allow new providers to build on top of the existing layer and improve it, rather than have to start from scratch. It also enables users to get more out of their existing online presence, making their digital assets do more for them.

OAuth, an community-driven open standard was designed to address sharing of resources between services while maintaining full user ownership and privacy. We are all too accustomed by now to being asked for our username and password when joining a new service in order to import our existing data. The obvious problem is that the credentials we are asked to share control more than just our address book, photos, or bookmarks – they often control our electronic wallet, confidential correspondence, financial and medical records, and other sensitive data. To make things worse, sharing our email username and password means granting full access to almost everything we do online on other sites since email is the most common way to change and recover passwords.

After many one-off attempts at solving this problem, the community came together last year and created OAuth, an open standard for delegated authority. The specification has been gaining support from small and large providers and is becoming an important building block for new and existing web services. Yahoo! Recently announced its upcoming support for it as an important building block of the Yahoo! Open Strategy.

With more companies implement OAuth and more developers get to interact with resources secured by it, we are starting to see new patterns and needs for moving OAuth forward. With that in mind Yahoo! is excited to host the first OAuth Summit. The event will take place June 26th at Yahoo!’s Santa Clara, CA campus and will include many of the OAuth community leaders – both individuals and companies. The event will focus on moving the specification forward and is expected to be highly technical. Participants are expected to have a solid understanding of the protocol in order to maximize our time together.

To learn more about OAuth, please visit the OAuth Community site. For information about the Summit and to register please visit the event wiki page. If you blog about the event, please use the ‘oauthsummit2008’ tag.

Hope to see you there!

Eran Hammer-Lahav
Open Standards Evangelist

As several people asked how I did the Flickr interface, I wrote up some step-by-step instructions, analyzing the issues and then taking the API to work around them.

Check out How to create an alternative Flickr interface - step by step.

This is one example where providing a good API can empower developers to remove barriers you might not be aware of for you. I hope to be able to show you more of those in the future - if there is interest.

The code examples are available and are licensed with BSD, so feel free to re-use them.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Three locations in parallel will be monkeyed up:

• London, my dear fellow, will have a meeting at Wallace Space in Covent Garden
• In München ist der Affe los bei Yahoo an der Theresienhöhe
• Et les développeurs français sont invités à nous rejoindre dans nos bureaux de Paris

So what are you waiting for? Go sign up and we'll see each other there next Wednesday!

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Something like:

Javascript is a language of alchemy, turning inconsistent behavior and design flaws into Web 2.0 gold.

Or maybe:

JavaScript is nothing short of quantum physics with its spooky action at a distance.

Before I decided to go all self-referential with my introduction, I had tentatively settled on something I think we can all agree with:

JavaScript is really, really weird.

As weird as it is, there are a lot of good reasons to actually learn JavaScript, and not just pretend it's some other language with C syntax. It takes a great deal of insight into this language to understand its true potential, and Douglas Crockford offers just this in his new book, "Javascript: The Good Parts." This offering from O'Reilly and Yahoo! sets itself apart from other JavaScript books in a lot of ways.

The first thing you'll notice is how thin this book is. Weighing in at around 100 pages and another 50 with appendices, it's a concise and remarkably pleasant read that you'll probably finish in a single sitting. Nonetheless, there is enough packed into this book to have you reading it through a few more times. Another rarity among programming books is its remarkable clarity and pleasant, patient tone. That said, this book is not for beginners (JavaScript probably isn't a great language to learn programming with anyway). By tailoring the book to people already familiar with programming fundamentals, Crockford is able to tease out the quirks that make JavaScript so confusing, and expose some of its hidden elegance.

The best parts of "The Good Parts" are definitely Chapters 4 and 5, which take a look at some of JavaScript's more unique aspect--functions as objects and prototypes. In Chapter 4, Crockford explains and implements an impressive set of language features like modules, function currying, and memoization, which make JavaScript start to feel closer to languages like Python, Haskell, or Lisp. Chapter 5 does a great job explaining the difference between classical and prototypical inheritance, and how to take advantage of prototypes in JavaScript.

If you're a developer looking to finally make sense of JavaScript, you'll find this book to be right up your alley. It's an enjoyable read that presents core programming concepts and won't waste your time on the marketing buzzwords that usually come with the territory. Do yourself a favor and check out Douglas Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts, and forget everything you ever thought about this poor, misunderstood language.

Mattt Thompson
Yahoo! Developer Network

In his own words:

Over the last three or four years the role of Frontend Engineering has become more important, more respected, more challenging, and more in-demand than ever before, and so I wanted to put a stake in the ground clarifying what we do, how we do it, and why it’s so important to raise it to a professional level.

Nate and I are planning to continue to advocate this school of thinking - it is time the frontend developer job becomes more obvious as a specialist skill. One of the ways you can support the cause is to vote for his panel proposal on professional frontend engineering for SXSW next year.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network