Let me start by stating that Ralph Hauwert is one of the "real" ones. He is a nerd that has turned pro !
Ralph Hauwert is quite a lucky man, because his product (PaperVision 3D) sells itself - so even if he had not been the talented speaker he is and had he not been the jovial guy residing on top of what appears to be pure high-level competence, he would have made anyone in the place today go home with a shitload of inspiration and a lot of "so-ein-ding-muss-ich-auch-hapen" feeling regarding the many demos shown during the day in their respective pockets (S.E.D.M.I.A.H.: please check the image of a real BABELFISH translation later in this post).
The day today has been spend by mostly establishing a common vocabulary and getting everything setup for the "big" day tomorrow. The audience, being split apr. 50/50 between coders and visual-designers (ref.: informal hands-up poll conducted by Ralph Hauwert himself during the inception of today's session) and what I suppose was an equivalent split in regards to Flash and Flex, was necessary to be groomed in order to establish a common starting point from where to start the open part of the course (2nd day). However, just by walking through all the basic stuff relating to PaperVision on the course of establishing a common foothold I have already learned a lot already that I can use in my business, however eventually the complete lack of proper documentation of the PaperVision SDK and API also became obvious and kinda scared me a little but, however...
After having asked Ralph Hauwert (during the post-session informal QA that always happen when the speaker acts a roadie and packs down his/her gear) about an explanation for the lack of documentational focus from the PV3D team, the answer proved to be quite a bit more clever than the question.
It appears that PV3D have more than 400 1st-line developers using the API who are not only using the API, but also putting great effort into reporting bugs and issues to the PV3D team. The reports harvested from this impressive group of early-adopters are of a reportedly high quality and naturally: its a very relevant fear from the PV3D team that if a "normal" Java-doc like documentation and versioning paradigm was implemented, it would spawn of a plethora of "not-so-diligent" masses of developers with no particular interest in bringing PV3d to the next level that would start bombarding the bug-reporting-system with mere incident-reports and not actual bug-reports. The PV3D team would, if the API was published publically, hence probably end up being tied down into a never ending trench of bug-reports made by people from all corners of the web-development industry with no particular interest in the PV3D platform and that would effectively be the end of PaperVision (This particular course of events have been seen before, remember? ). I personally believe its a quite clever move by the PV3D team to steer clear of painting themselves into a corner by the act of exposing themselves to the vast community of (lets face it, this group to which I belong in this context are an obnoxious and ignorant group of non-forgiving and intolerant "revengees") early-adopters and first-movers on a hyped-up-technology which in many people's eyes may contain unlimited possibility of both profit and fame , which we all know is a very efficient recipe for problems when attempting to release a new API which is challenging in its nature.
About the concrete contents of the session, I will post from my notes when day number 2 has passed and I again will be sitting alone in a hotel-room with nothing better to do than to post to my blog.
Anyways, sofar... its SO great and VERY VERY inspiring in regards to get cracking on the code... to ALL of you out there who didn't make it this time: be sure to attend the next time... I for one will probably be to find among the geeks in the back-rows :-)
Check out my translation from the classic public web-app over all classic public web-apps: BABELFISH...
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