Montreal Tech Watch

I’ve bumped into SeeYourHotel a while ago, when they listed the url on the 1st startupcamp montreal wiki. At that time, it only looked like a very simple Google Mashup, with pins for hotels. They had data for a few Canadian cities, as well as Paris, with video guides of selected hotels. Overall though, it looked more like a experimentation, so I didn’t mention it on MTW.

Fast forward, and it now looks like a solid and useful website. Other sites like TripAdvisor or Expedia err on providing exhaustive information to travellers, such as key places, activities, user-reviewed places, flights, etc. etc. SeeYourHotel on the other hand does only one thing: let you see through the list of hotels, select a few & compare them, with pictures and videos of the hotels.

Compared to the initial debut of the website, they don’t produce videos anymore but get videos and pictures from other websites such as youtube or flickr. Of course, the mapping technology also relies heavily on Google Maps, which makes SeeYourHotel the quintessential web2.0 / mashup site.

When you finally choose a hotel, reservations are handled by hotels.com which gives them referral fees for successful reservations. The business scheme is so simple and one of the most elegant one could hope for.

YourSeeHotel is made by Jean-Francois Noel and Vincent Desjardins, from a joint venture named 3rd Crust, a company based in Quebec city.

Last week, RailsRumble ’08 was held, with programmers invited to team up and launch an application within a weekend. As the name suggests, it’s targeted to Ruby On Rails programmers, the framework known for its rapid development. The organizers had an array of servers provided to the teams, which could be used to deploy and host the applications. 

You can see the list of applications on the event’s page, and what suprised me is that this year, many teams did manage to actually have a running website at the end of the end. A few of them (looking at the entries from intridea for instance) even looked like your standard web2.0 startup. For me, this does prove that technologies like Ruby On Rails has reached their maturity point (also read: mainstream)

In Montreal, a team named GiraffeSoft, with James Golick, Daniel Haran, webmat, and François Beausoeil created the application What Does This Error Mean, which allows Ruby On Rails programmers to get insight from other programmers about application errors. I see it as mix between GetExceptional, FiveRun’s TuneUp, and Marc-André’s refactormycode

The second team from Montreal, named the Webeppis, with Benjamin Jørgensen and Gordon B. Isnor, did Comical, a website for comic artists and their fans.

Both applications obviously need a little bit of finishing touches, but it’s still impressive to know that all work were done in just one weekend. Incidentally, a service provider named HashedRocket took the concept to reality last year, promising their clients to build a web application in under 3 days. Working under these conditions require a very solid methodology (XP and agile development); and good if not great developers.

One of my most memorable experience was studying two years here. No, it wasn’t due to the lush environment, nor the crazy melting pot of international students, but because of the never-ending hard work and competition. And by hard, I mean solving impossible problems everyday. I never broke any sweat before, as things always appeared so easy; but there, everyone was as smart and as capable, if not more.

The concentration of talent, and the mix of work, projects, and deadlines did push me to the limits. Everyone thought the same way, and at the end, we all longed for it to finish. 

I also recalled this back at Blitzweekend. We gave a deadline to teams, we had the most motivated entrepreneurs, designers and developers in the Montreal area, and we also had a great setup which favored communication, and of course hard work, which resulted into applications, software, and in a few cases, businesses at the end of the weekend.

Now, the point about this article is now to tell about my experiences, but to tell how environments can work for you, or against you.

In both stories told above, the environment did push us to our limits, by seeing peers coming up with innovative new ideas, by watching people working relentlessly on projects, all in a friendly but intense competition. You’d walk in at those moments, and you’d start doing something, even if you had doubts.

In our case, much has been written about places like Silicon Valley or the Boston area, the Meccas of technology entrepreneurship with all the necessary universities, the money and the energy etc.

Now, I can’t really do anything about money or universities, although we do get a fair share in Montreal, but I believe we can do something with the last part, energy. 

Currently, there are all the ingredients one could imagine in the city, from events, supporting experts, VC and angel funds, places, technology groups, conferences and hackfests, plus star technology companies. But as far as I can tell, there are still a few things which are very hard to do, such as finding co-founders for a new technology company, or asking questions to the community, or as mentionned previously, an environment capable of showing the energy and giving support for engineers, entrepreneurs, developers alike, everyday. 

At one point, MTW did the job. I had back then the time, and could spend a few hours here and there to connect people, ask and encourage a few guys to continue their open source projects or would-be startups, hold startupdrinks, and even contribute to a team, whenever possible. The model was not scalable though, as one can guess. 

So here comes TechEntreprise

The network is meant to create the same sort of energetic environment that would push you to excel, connect, work, and innovate in technology. If you want to meet people and publicize an event, go there. If you want to see what’s up with marketing experts or python developers in Montreal, it’s going to be there. If you want to find help and post jobs, then it’s also going to be there. If you want to talk about your new shining software, then yes, it should be there too. 

The promise is to create a strong, dynamic technology community in Montreal, and possibly in other places too. Quote from the website:

We bet that Montreal can become a technology centre, and believe that TechEntreprise can be a key resource and platform for this to happen.

Here is also a few Q&A for the unavoidable comments:

- Does this impact news and blog posts in Montreal Tech Watch?
No, not at all, MTW is going to be about the results, such as new products or covering events, whereas what you’d see in TechEntreprise is more about the process of building these products. So MTW is going to operate the same way. 

- Is this serious?
it’s not complete and there are lots to be done, but yes, as serious as it can be, and much more serious than any other “feature” or announcement done previously here. the word “beta” would be suited here, although I can’t use since it’s overused. 

Back at the last CodeFest, Marc Laporte, project admin for the TikiWiki project, held a meetup to get feedback on TikiWiki.

TikiWiki is at its core a Wiki engine, but now has many features, perhaps one of the most feature-rich wiki and CMS avalaible. Marc Laporte said they have been adding features for the past years, welcoming contributors, with new innovative features ahead. One of the issue he mentionned though was that the lack of visibility of TikiWiki by developers & users alike. One recent report stated that the most popular CMS are Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal, 3 other open source content management systems, with fantastic growth and expanding developer community. All other CMS software like TikiWiki were all part of the “2nd tier”, with much less visibility and momentum.

One of my immediate reaction was that the success of these software is mainly due to their plugin architecture and also their themes extensibility. I said to Marc and other TikiWiki developers (LP) that it allowed third-party developers to develop extra-functionality that the core team wouldn’t judge essential to the project. This point-of-view isn’t new or necessarily mine of course, I must have seen it written thousands of times on the Web, and experienced it myself when doing Joomla / Wordpress websites.

It took me well over 30 minutes to realize that the TikiWiki developers didn’t see the “core + 3rd party plugin extensibility” model as immediately obvious in terms of getting better software. Marc Laporte said he preferred to give new contributors commit rights, add features to the TikiWiki codebase, with making everyone agreeing on the developed features. If a service provider has a client request for a new feature, then the community’s policy was always to ask the service provider to develop it him/herself and add it to TikiWiki.

This collaboration method is bound to create a huge monolithic software after a while, and that’s exactly where TikiWiki is right now. They’ve got pretty much everything you would be looking for in a CMS/groupware/web application, with hundreds of configuration pages possible, with forums, blogs, groups, maps, calendars, end-user programming, etc., covering pretty much any situation

Interestingly, Marc calls it “Software Development, the Wiki way”. Regardless of skill, experience, anyone is welcomed to contribute and add code together, in the same way that every Wikipedia page is authored by hundreds, possibly thousands of contributors.

You can’t dismiss this approach — after all who would have predicted that Wikipedia’s collaboration model would have worked? I wouldn’t, and many others would have bet on having domain experts authoring articles instead, in the same way that we expect today having a lead developer for every plugin, module or piece of software. In that light, the only thing TikiWiki has to do to get significant traction is perhaps just better marketing. And of course, getting an architecture that would allow anyone to ship code in the wiki way, without breaking the whole system.

SoftImage announced this week that they were acquired by Autodesk for $35 million.

Autodesk is a leading 3D software company, makers of acclaimed 3D modeling packages such as AutoCAD (industrial design, architecture, engineering), 3DS Max (video games, video CG effects), Maya (open architecture, used in video CG).

On the other hand, SoftImage’s leading product is XSI, a popular 3D graphics software mainly used in special effects (for the special effects in Star Wars, Jurrasic Park or more recently creating the environment and lighting in the movie 300). They also have a strong foothold in education.

Autodesk is based in San Rafael, CA, while SoftImage is a Montreal company.

One troubling thing in this acquisition is the price paid by SoftImage. The same company was bought by Microsoft in 1994 for $130 million, then was bought by Avid from Microsoft for $285 million in 1998. The difference makes it look like a firesale price, as if Avid did destroy SoftImage’s value 8 fold in a timelapse of 10 years.

Admittedly, SoftImage had back then a star product, DS, the first and only non-linear video-editing suite. DS and the other video editing software has been Avid’s cash cow for the past 10 years, but they didn’t bring any further innovation. Video professionals know now the rest of the story, with the breakthrough of Apple’s Final Cut. Avid announced DS was not part of the deal, and the sale of SoftImage is a strategic move, with the goal on refocusing on their core business (movie editing). Of course, it also brings them cash in hard times.

One can’t help to imagine what would happen if DS was still in the hands of SoftImage and if they had kept working on it and bringing new innovations. Who knows, maybe it could have been a multi-billion dollar company now.

Company: Purecobalt

Responsibilities and tasks | Responsabilités et tâches:
We are a Montreal web shop seeking a contract PHP developer with Joomla experience to integrate and configure dynamic modules and other social components for a site in development.

Nous sommes une agence web montréalaise à la recherche d’un développeur PHP connaissant bien le gestionnaire de contenu Joomla pour intégrer, configurer et gérer des composantes dynamiques de type social (blog, message board) impliquant de la gestion d’utilisateurs.

Required knowledge | Exigences:
PHP, CSS, template integration, and ability to start work immediately. You’ll be needed to attend occasional project meetings at our offices.

PHP, CSS, gestion de « templates », et ayant la disponibilité à commencer immédiatement sur un projet actuellement en développement. Additionellement, vous devrez vous déplacer occasionnellement à nos locaux pour des rencontres et pour assurer un bon suivi du projet.

Compensation | Rémunération:
Negotiable based on qualifications and experience. This is a contract position.

À négocier selon les qualifications et l’experience. Cette offre est contractuelle.

Send your CV to | Faites parvenir votre C.V. à: andrew@purecobalt.com

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Here’s the 2nd part of the interview with Philippe Gamache (Part 1 here). As stated previously, Philippe Gamache is opening Sensio Canada offices with a new training session due soon.

The web frameworks mentioned above were all released to the public and owned by its “developer community”. Symfony, in the other hand, seems to be tightly associated with the Sensio Labs Company. Do you see it as a threat since Sensio can orient the framework’s roadmap towards
their own private interests?

Sensio Labs is the primary sponsor of symfony, but its no way completely ties to us. There is programmer in the core team that comes from different companies, like Yahoo. In fact, many of their newer sites are made with symfony. Hundreds of plug-ins are made from people all around
the world.

Like I said before, open source projects work on the principle: I take and I give back. But sometime giving back is difficult. Let me explain. There are three generals trend is open source software: developer community, foundation base and company’s base. For some companies, the only way to give back is paying for the service.

Community base development usually lack some focus and programmers usually are doing this in there spare times and have a day job, or are already paid by a companies to give back.

Foundation base development, have more focus and you can pay them. But, because they don’t have any others means of funding, only a small part is actually give to full time development.

Companies base projects, usually have focus, bases on there clients. Sensio Labs had hundred of clients over the last ten years, those experiences drive symfony development. So when you what to give back with money, you give it by helping yourself again, at the same time:
training and professional consulting.

Sensio Labs are opening Sensio Canada this fall, the first office in North America. What are Sensio Canada’s plans? Are we going to see you in local dev events such as codefests or barcamps? Or it’s more about Enterprise support & consultancy work?

To be fare, the US office did open at the same time. Sensio Labs what to offer different services in Canada, that is usually divided in main areas of expertise. Audit and Consulting: benchmark, audit (technical, methodological), Open-Source expertise, and symfony certification. Integration and development: Customized solution providing (Internet, Intranet, e-commerce…) with Open-Source technology. Training: inter and in-company, symfony seminar (elementary, intermediate, expert,
hosting/operating). Technical assistance: expertise mission, training, technical assistance / development.

We will add a new area of expertise: security. I’m now working on some PHP security training and it should be available soon. There will do security audit at the same time.

Remember, symfony is an open source project, so we do participate to many camps. We actually already have a symfonycamp. But, I’ll be at the PHP Codefests, barcamps, etc. I’ll encourage any new employees to do the same. In fact, I’m working to revive the local OWASP chapters (Open Web
Application Security Project).

Do you have any examples of websites that used the symfony framework?

http://www.mobivox.com
http://delicious.com/
http://answers.yahoo.com/
http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/
http://www.Francesoir.fr
http://go.edgehill.ac.uk
http://www.housetohome.co.uk
http://www.marieclaire.co.uk
http://symfonians.net/

I met Philippe Gamache for the first time at a codefest (a phpquebec event); where he discussed web vulnerabilities and potential security problems. The discussions were focused on php, however I found his comments extremely insightful. He was then at MOBIVOX, a Montreal voip startup.

Things have changed since then, my rails application are much more secure :-) , and for Philippe, the big news is that he’s opening Sensio Canada Labs, here in Montreal. Sensio does a php web framework called symfony, very similar in nature to Ruby on Rails or Django. The framework started out in France, and due to its popularity, especially in enterprise environments, they have now plans for international expansion. I took then the opportunity to ask questions to Philippe, who is to manage the Canada offices and also launch training sessions.

This “interview” was done via the web, although we did catch up and discussed in detail about the symfony project at last week’s codefest.

Can you present yourself, your background, and also what has been your experience and involvement with the symfony project?

Wow, you begin by a tough one. My name is Philippe Gamache. I’m the office manager of Sensio Labs Canada. I’m a security consultant specialize in PHP security. I wrote a security book “Sécurité PHP 5 et MySQL” with Damien Seguy a PHP specialist.

Virtual communities were my first passion. I began playing with BBS in 1988. In 1989, someone introduce me to the Internet. At the same time, I discover (real) programming. I did some modification on my own BBS, and a pirate did try to attack us. So I did discover the importance of good security. With the introduction of BBS network like FIDONet, more and more attack came into play. So to understand how attacker where working, I did “infiltrated” some groups, working as an ANSI artist.

In 1992, I began bridging my BBS with Internet service like email and Usenet (news groups). BBS was losing traction, so in 1994, I did my first personal and professional website. It’s only in 1996 that I did my first virtual community. Now, I’m managing three such communities. Unfortunately, none of them are in symfony for the moment, but there is a test version for all of them, with symfony.

Over the years, I did work on many projects (mostly in PHP): web games, forums, cryptography, authentication systems, and more.

The move to symfony was a professional one for me. I was doing MOBIVOX website at the time. The web team was growing, and we needed to have a better working process. There where an others problem: website translation. We did have a translation process, but it was only good for Latin language, like English or French. We wanted to have Chinese. So, we look to find a new framework. We look different frameworks: Zend Framework, eZ components, Seagull, CakePHP, Solar and symfony. We looks at different points for each framework: technical qualities, easy of use, support and the community around it. Symfony did come first on each count (some where even with some others framework).

Open source projects work on the principle, I take and I give back. Because, I did like so much symfony, I work on moving my personal projects to it. So, how could I give back? Yes, there where some plug-ins that I’ll give back to the community, but I wanted something more concrete. So I imagine a project I call SecureSymfony. It’s basically a set of plug-in for different security concerns, like multi-factor authentication, cryptography and auditing.

Can you present quickly symfony and what it does? What would it bring to a company that didn’t use previously a tool similar to symfony?

Symfony is a full-stack framework written in PHP5. It provides architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. The very small number of prerequisites make symfony easy to install on many configuration; you just need *nix or Windows with a web server and PHP installed. In addition, it has a very small overhead, so the benefits of the framework don’t come at the cost of an increase of hosting costs.

Using symfony is so natural and easy for people used to PHP and the design patterns of Internet applications that the learning curve is reduced to less than a day. The clean design and code readability will keep your delays short. Developers can apply agile development principles (such as DRY, KISS or the XP philosophy) and focus on applicative logic without losing time to write endless XML configuration files.

Symfony is aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context. This means that you have full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to the foreign libraries, almost everything can be customized. Based on the premise of convention over configuration - the developer needs to configure only the unconventional. To match your enterprise’s development guidelines, symfony is bundled with additional tools helping you to test, debug and document your project.

It is database engine-independent, using states of the art ORM (Object-relational mapping) like Propel and Doctrine. The code is very readable using phpDocumentor comments, for easy maintenance. It is easy to extend, allowing for integration with other vendor libraries

New users join the community every day, and that makes of symfony the most popular PHP5 framework around. A large community means easy-to-find support, user-contributed documentation, plug-ins, and free applications. The documentation is available in more that 15 languages,
and there is more that 200 plug-ins.

Why would anyone pick the Symfony web framework over other web frameworks such as CakePHP, Django or Ruby On Rails?

First it’s the programming language. PHP is available almost everywhere and it’s very easy to install. Symfony is using the PEAR platform, so installing it is easy as writhing two command lines.

Symfony is based on experience. It does not reinvent the wheel: it uses most of the best practices of web development and integrates some great third-party libraries.

Then it’s scale better that the others frameworks, and because it’s lightweight, don’t need to scale as soon as others frameworks. Because we do co-operate with many of them, I’ll keep away from doing direct comparisons.

Then there is the community. It’s a great community that helps out, does new documentation every day, translates existing documentation, and produces news plugs-in almost every day. Like I said at the beginning, we didn’t choose some frameworks because of the community. Some of them are in constant war.

And, last but not least, commercial support. It’s very important for some companies, and there is hundred of companies doing it, in almost every countries.

The part 2 of the interview will come up soon, with details about Sensio, symfony and plans for Canada.

Guy Vigneault écrit:

Célébration CMS 2008

Guide CMS est fier de vous inviter à Célébration CMS 2008 le samedi 8 novembre prochain
Endroit : Auditorium Mailloux de l’hôpital Notre-Dame situé au 1560, rue Sherbrooke Est, Montréal.

Sur le même principe que l’événement de l’année dernière, Célébration CMS 2008 se veut un petit “get together” sans prétention qui regroupe des utilisateurs, des développeurs et des professionnels du merveilleux monde des Gestionnaires de contenus libres (Open Source Content Management Systems) au Québec.

Le nombre de place est limité, il serais bon de réserver en inscrivant votre nom sur cette page ou en m’envoyant un email a cette adresse guyvigneault@guidecms.org

Au plaisir de vous y voir !

Merci

Guy Vigneault

Company: Kovasys

Position: .NET / Java Developers and Unix / Windows Administrators

Responsibilities and tasks:

Kovasys is currently recruiting for .NET / Java Developers and Unix /
Windows Administrators for Montréal, and Ottawa and elsewhere across
Canada.

We work with many hiring managers at small to large size organizations
in Quebec, Ontario and Alberta!

If you have 2+ years of development experience and looking for new
opportunities – please do not hesitate to contact us to help!

KOVASYS is a business-technology IT recruitment agency and consulting
firm, specializing in the entertainment, high tech, financial, and
government industries. Headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Kovasys
provides staffing, consulting and IT services across Canada to help
our clients conceptualize and realize technology-driven business
transformation initiatives.

How to apply:

Alex Kovalenko
Senior Recruiter
http://jobs.kovasys.com
alex@kovasys.com

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