Quick summary of Summer XML Conference

I attended the Summer XML Conference in Raleigh on Monday and Tuesday. I presented on what is new in XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 and how similar technologies are being used in Java based middleware.

I was a little worried, given the crowd, about how well the "what's new" presentation would go as a) I'm knowledgeable with the new standards, but don't use the standards in very large programs every day (some of the crowd were deeply knowledged XSLT 1.0 users) and b) it was the first time I've given the presentation. I did get two points of good feedback from the attendees, so I guess it better than I had hoped. I'm going to look to post the slides as they were information packed and other conference attendees said they would be useful for other members of their companies.

I, along with two of my team members, attended sessions on XSLT patterns, XML Schema 1.1, Schematron, HTML 5, XForms, SVG/Canvas, Testing XML Documents, and many presentations related to XML based document publishing for books and electronic help. The conference seemed to be 1/3 focused on XML technologies, 1/2 on document publishing with the rest being focused on data/application programming. Hopefully my talk on how these technologies are being used in middleware helps the group keep focus on XML scenarios outside of the document publishing space.

On the document publishing front, I learned even more than I ever imagined about what our documentation teams deal with on a daily basis. I also got great insight to the challenges of companies or parts of companies that deal entirely in products centered about content management and document re-use.

Summary: Great conference. Thanks to Kay and all the other conference presenters and attendees.