Special task force delivers on new technology course of study.

If anyone thinks the upcoming COMMON conference is going to be the same old stuff that they have heard in the past, they should take a look under the covers.

The course content has been completely revamped and updated with an eye toward new technologies, and only the very best ideas have been included among the more than 200 sessions. Of those, more than 60 sessions are completely new.

Part of the reason behind COMMON's revising and consolidating the course material is that the number of sessions had to be reduced out of economic necessity. However, during the process of elimination, COMMON's Strategic Education Team (SET) selected only the very best offerings, leaving duplication on the cutting room floor, so to speak.

Bill Hansen, SET manager, whose Manta Technologies focuses on IBM midrange education, says the SET team leveraged an idea by Paul Tuohy to form a special task force to develop a course of study based exclusively on new technologies. SET broke tradition and created the blue-ribbon task force that Tuohy and Hansen put into motion. The result is cutting edge. It's a broad collection of 18 sessions that cover today's leading-edge technologies in what COMMON is calling New Technology Overview. The new technology sessions begin at 11:00 a.m. Monday, May 3, and run all day every day through Thursday afternoon. The first session is an overview of IBM i 7.1 by IBM's own Steve Will. Who better than the architect of the operating system is there to discuss the new features of IBM i? Whether an hour and a quarter, which is what is allotted for that session, will be enough is another question, but there are many sessions at the conference that focus on different aspects of IBM i 7.1, and this is meant as simply an overview. Steve Will is giving the same session again on Thursday for anyone who has conference daze and misses it the first day.

An introduction to AJAX on the IBM i is the subject of the New Technology Overview session presented on Monday by Alex Roytman and Hany Elemary of Profound Logic. Users who are unfamiliar with AJAX and want to learn not only what it stands for (hint: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) but also what it is not (hint: It's not a language, but a group of interrelated Web development techniques. See the related article I wrote last month, "Don't Think About Whom You Have Been. Who Are You Now?") will get a solid grounding in this session.

Roytman and Elemary, by the way, in addition to leading the Introduction to AJAX on the IBM i session, are also leading The Power of CSS with HTML, Diving into JSON: The Alternative to XML on the IBM i, and Using JSON with AJAX on the IBM i. This stuff is gold, as far as I'm concerned, for anyone who wants to take their career to the next level and drive modernization initiatives for their employers.

Here is the rest of the lineup for the New Technology Overview course of study:

Also Monday, May 3

• Agile Software Development: A Practical Guide to Essential Practices with Brendan Kay

Tuesday, May 4

• Cloud Computing: Hot Technology or Hot Air? with Brendan Kay
• What if Programming Were Easy? That Would be Groovy with Jim Mason
• Silverlight, WPF and the .Net Frameworks: What Are They and When Can They Help You? with Brendan Kay
• 7.1: What's New with Backup Recovery - Including Virtual Tape and Encryption! with Debbie Saugen
• Overview of Wiki's Explanation of Use/Editing & Tips with Drew Dekreon

Wednesday, May 5

• Cloudify Your Application by Creating an Open Virtual Appliance with Jarek Miszczyk
• What's the Use? A Guide to Understanding Use Cases with Vanessa Grose
• Deploying Workloads into Dynamic Infrastructure Managed by IBM Systems Director VMControl with Jarek Miszczyk
• Why PHP on the IBM i with Jeff Olen
• Transform Your Batch Run Performance with SSDs and IBM i 7.1 with Sue Baker

Thursday, May 6

• IBM i 7.1 Overview with Steve Will
• Business Value of PHP on IBM i with Mike Pavlak
• Ruby On Rails on IBM i with Peter Helgren
• Software as a Service (SaaS) on IBM i -- Architecture and ISV Solution Examples with Steve Will
• What Is Web 2.0 with Tim Rowe

I have to give a nod to a couple of our friends above. First is Jarek Miszczyk of IBM since he sits on the MC Press Editorial Review Board and has been extremely helpful (along with other Board members) this past year in guiding MC Press editorial content. I also would like to give a nod to Jeff Olen since he is a driver of the iManifest movement. Olen is the co-author of the bestselling IBM i Programmers Guide to PHP from MC Press and has authored numerous technical articles as well.

Another highlight of the upcoming conference is the day of workshops on Sunday. Yes, these cost extra, but for a full day of training, it's really quite reasonable: $345 for COMMON members and $395 for non-members. Of special note is Hansen's HTML, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This hands-on lab, where users have PCs in front of them, so far has the largest attendance of any of the workshops. Sign-ups are coming in fast, so if you want to get into this workshop, do it now.