Invitation: Kamaelia Open Space, Brussels, Sept 22 2006

[Michael Sparks]

Hello,


I'd like to invite you to our first Kamaelia Open Space event.

Our theme is "Making Software like Lego through intuitive useful
concurrency".

Perhaps you want to learn to use Kamaelia, or you're already using it,
or you're simply interested in code reuse or concurrency being actually
useful in everyday code rather than theory. If these match your interests,
please come along.

WHEN

The day after Euro OSCON, and just before Bar Camp Brussels:
   * Friday 22nd September 2006 - 11am - 5pm

WHERE
   * FOAM Offices, Brussels, Belgium
   * Koolmijnenkaai 30-34, 1080 Brussels, Belgium
   * http://fo.am/contact.html
   * http://tinyurl.com/hsarl (link showing location on multimap)

WHAT

http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Home

Kamaelia started as an applied research project, at BBC Research, and
has an underlying goal of making software systems easier to maintain
and create through the use of intuitive and safe concurrency, in the
form of components, whilst maintaining performance. It's being fleshed
out by creating systems useful in the real world.

This approach turns software into systems similar to a number of
systems people may be familiar with : Unix pipes (except non-linear
is practical), CSP, hardware (especially HDL's), Occam, K'nex and Lego.
Components send messages out via outboxes, receive messages on inbox,
have zero copy delivery and messages may be any python object including
a component.

Practical systems using Kamaelia developed to-date include time-shifting
digital TV and a variety of network systems, however components exist
simplifying the use of audio, video, pygame & Open GL.

PURPOSE

The purpose of the event is similar to a python sprint. Our aims for this
event are to spread what we've learnt with the wider community - for the
simple reason we're finding it works for us, and hope it does for you too.
This includes - but not exclusively:

   * To assist people to get started using Kamaelia :-)

   * Help you copy or tailor our approach to your systems.
     (eg making our system or approach usable in twisted).

   * To investigate areas where we can flesh Kamaelia out 
     (eg we have a webserver than can run in a similar manner to
     seaside, how would you like that fleshed out)

   * We'd like to assist others using other languages take the lessons
     we've learnt and apply them in their preferred language.
     (especially Ruby and C++)

   * Help attendees integrate their projects with Kamaelia encouraging
     reuse between projects, bosting the system for everyone
     (eg integrate pygtk, wxwidgets, pyqt, or other projects you may
     use or contribute to, building on experience from integrating tk,
     pygame and open gl)

   * To share the work done by students during Google's Summer of Code

   * How to apply this to teaching children to create these systems
     effectively. (We've noticed that pre-university users of Kamaelia tend
     to achieve the most using it)

   * Use of Kamaelia for art and entertainment 

At the other extreme, we could also like to use the time to share
information (if people are interested) on how some of the practical
systems we use work since they are likely to be useful to others.
Two interesting areas:

   * Distributed whiteboarding including audio. This is served in an
     effectively peer to peer manner - extending this to include grid
     setup (and/or DHT search) would be useful. This is potentially
     interesting beyond simple whiteboarding since this really forms a
     simple distributed events backplane

   * Practical flexible timeshifting either entire channels, and
     multiplexes or based on programme names

Nascent areas perhaps of interest which are include in Kamaelia include
a handwriting recogniser (currently at stroke/letter recognition level),
graphical systems creation, and a basic open GL toolkit.

FORMAT

The above list of suggestions for discussion is just that, suggestions.
The specific agenda for the event will be decided on the day by those
who attend.

Since much of what's to be discussed will be new, this will be a cross
between a python sprint and open space in format.

THANKS TO

Finally, many thanks to the very kind people at FOAM - http://fo.am/ for
hosting this event, it is very much appreciated.

WHAT NEXT

If you're interested in coming, please email your interest either to me at:
    michaelsparks at cerenity.org

Or to the kamaelia mailing list:
    kamaelia-list at lists.sourceforge.net

If you know someone who you think is interested in the theme, could
benefit from coming - for example someone interested in making practical
concurrency safer and easier to use in future - please don't hesitate
to forward this invitation to them.

Hope to see you there!


Michael
--
Michael Sparks, Senior Research Engineer, BBC Research, Technology Group
michael.sparks at bbc.co.uk, Kamaelia Project Lead, http://kamaelia.sf.net/

This message may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC