Cloudforce Sydney and Chatter

I'm sitting in my hotel room with a great view over Sydney city and Darling Harbour (http://twitpic.com/1t84re) courtesy of a room stuff-up and subsequent upgrade (thanks Oaks Goldsbrough). Am down here for Cloudforce down under which is tomorrow at the Convention Centre - while most of the messages have been conveyed in web conferences over the past few months (Chatter, Summer 10), it's always good to go, just to get a 'feel' for what's going on Salesforce-wise in Australia. By the sounds of it, and by the number they're expecting, quite a lot is happening - 1 of the partners said the last 'big' event here was almost 2 years ago, and the audience was several hundred, whereas now it's 1000+. So will be good to see who's doing what down here!

Am also trying like crazy to finish off my entry for the Chatter Developer Challenge! It's due next Mon, but discovered today that Summer '10 is going live this weekend, meaning my dev org will be down at a very inconvenient time! So am trying to get as much done before the weekend as I can over a 3G connection (note to my boss: outside of work hours, I can guarantee!). Why do hotels still persist in charging an arm and a leg for Wifi access - $20 here for 24hrs!

Anywy I digress. My Chatter challenge app is coming along pretty well. Of course I don't want to say too much ;) but I have been working with 2 pretty cool technologies - jQuery for some front-end stuff, and OAuth for back-end communications. Both I think are just coming into their own (although JQuery fanatics might disagree that it's already 'in its own') but both are also in my opinion massive game-changers for web apps. Working with them is really giving me a chance to understand the in's and out's, and especially how they relate to salesforce.com, but I think pretty soon they will be as common as good ol'  A HREFs were not so long ago.

Anyway back to it, but I'll write another post with details of my Chatter challenge app once it's submitted next Monday!