Take Mozilla, Microsoft, Tony Stark, add a motivated team of volunteers, and you have the recipe to gather more than 130 people during a W3Café in Microsoft Conference Center in Paris, along the Seine. The W3C Café appealing program was made of great plenary presentations and workshops –  for the generous price of 5 euros ticket. Paris traffic jam made me missed the general presentation and when I joined the conference room, David Rousset @davrous was on stage, demonstrating with expertise and great sense of show the Internet Explorer 10 features [0]. David wrote in 5 minutes a simple webapp delivering RSS flow, with a look & feel compatible with the Windows 8 Metro style  Windows 8-style UI Windows 8 Modern UI and spirit. On the basis of free developers tools, with a mixing of standard HTM5, CSS and javascript and specific WinRT APIs (some people said in the room, well Microsoft as usual…) he optimized a bit the application look. In addition, David suggested that the seamless and efficient integration of developers tools and designers tools would in the end support peace the conflictual world of developers and designers, becoming best friends of the world. Demonstration of a very simple application made by an expert like David, playing the role of the schizophrenic nice developer and the bad designer was convincing… Real developers and real projects will have a chance to experience on Windows 8 and IE10 in October 2012, David said.

The workshops were held in parallel and covered the following technologies

–          SVG – the thing that allows to display 2D drawings – by Jérémie Patonnier @jeremiepat [1]

–          CSS – the language for describing the presentation of Web pages, including colors, layout, and font information – by Vincent de Oliveira @iamvdo [2]

–          HTLM5 and the mobile web app development by Dominique Hazael Massieux @dontcallmedom [3]

–          Javascript by Christophe Porteneuve @porteneuve [4]

Being a javascript zero knowledge I choose the Christophe Porteneuve show ‘Tony Stark prefers JavaScript’ which was a well dosed one man show with incredible source of rich information. The delighted audience had an overview of tools available to structure, test, improve their javascript projects, with a reminder about the most recent API developed by W3C.

The day ended with a general session, starring Tristan Nitot @nitot principal Mozilla evangelist [5]. Tristan reminded the Mozilla’s most important values, such as Internet for all and with no censorship, which helped to understand their orthogonal positioning compared to Apple – keeping an eye and a hand on every publication on their iTune store. Tristan highlighted for the audience the major effort driven by Mozilla with Boot2Gecko, an open source web platform project supported by Qualcom and Telefonica, which aims to make the developers porting any HTML5/CSS/JS application on the desktop of any Boot2Gecko device. Demonstration was made on Samsung galaxy II phone, a taste of what would be the first product development scheduled for next year In South America.

Some information related to Mozilla MarketPlace was only exchanged, reminding what would *not* be the Mozilla initiative : an advertising platform, a censored application stored, a place to make money on the back of developers. But instead would be a mean for developers to deploy their free or paid application (with a choice between front end payment or in-app payment), available to any firefox and non-firefox platform. The business model was not disclosed, but more information should come soon.

This event was a great appetizer for the October meeting for French web developers – Paris Web, for which I might issue few blogs, having a chance to speak there. Book your seat here !

[0] david’s blog , [1] jeremie’s presentation about SVG , [2] vincent’s presentation about CSS   and his corresponding post , [3] dom’s presentation about mobile HTML5 development , [4] christophe presentation about javascrit  and his corresponding post  , [5] tristan’s presentation about mozilla and his blog