This weekend is barcamplondon, so another chance for me to ramble incoherently about a technical topic of my choice. 🙂
My presentation started as a bit of a cop-out. I was ill last week and weekend when I was planning to prepare a new presentation, so I decided to give the same talk I did at Over The Air last month and hope that I didn’t get any of the same attendees.
But then I started tweaking it to suit the different audience. Over The Air is an event for mobile developers, so my presentation was pretty much aimed at mobile devs, which wasn’t quite right for a general event like barcamplondon.
Then I started updating it to reflect the feedback I got, both on the day at Over The Air, and through comments and tweets since.
My talk at OTA was a technical “Introduction to MQTT” session.
My presentation for barcamplondon became a broader look at mobile apps that rely on data from the Internet, and the challenges and choices facing mobile app developers who write them.
And I think it’s better for it. I hope it didn’t come across as pimping MQTT. I still talked about MQTT, but this time it was to use it as an example of one of a broader set of choices:
- polling
- network-supported built-in push support
- e.g. iPhone, BlackBerry
- network provided SMS or WAP Push API
- intercepting incoming SMS messages using mobile OS API
- making an IP connection and leaving it open
- e.g. MQTT
The aim of the talk was to discuss the pros and cons of each approach.