Linux Journal: About Fosdem

“Fosdem isn’t merely about trying to put as much technical data
as possible into your head in one weekend. Above all, the meeting
is a social event, in which developers and free software
enthusiasts from around the world meet and chat. John ‘maddog’ Hall
was among the first to show up at the Roy d’Espagne bar at the
Grand Place Friday evening; by the end of the night we could have
filled the entire second floor. Apparently maddog has a thing for
Duvel beer.

“I had a nice conversation with (among others) Brian King, a
good guy who ran a session about how to program applications that
use the Mozilla framework and component model. For most people,
Mozilla is simply a browser or an HTML-rendering engine. But there
is much more to Mozilla. The extensibility of the Mozilla package
is simply amazing. You can use it to create user interfaces for
your application using a markup language, or you can use it to
write full applications in, for example, JavaScript. Mozilla uses
its Gecko rendering engine to draw the widgets for Mozilla and
Mozilla applications. This is called the XUL interface. Mozilla
even features a full built-in component model called XPCOM. Brian
recently co-authored a book on the subject, titled Creating
Applications with Mozilla. A good example of this kind of
application is the full-fledged CSS editor Cascades, which fits
neatly into the Mozilla composer.

“The event itself typically is developer-centric. People speak
about the innerworkings of their software, offer presentations on
how to use it in other products or sit behind a table all day
answering thousands of questions from the crowd. For this reason, I
wouldn’t recommend complete newbies come to Fosdem, as the
technical level is quite high. Most of the sessions, though, are
fairly comprehensible even by non-developers. Personally, I am
currently trying to understand the writings of Steve Oualline in
Practical C Programming, and I found Fosdem most
interesting…”

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