Bill Walker of Mozilla (News – Alert) kicked off day two of DevCon5 earlier this week with a discussion of the tools available to developers with Firefox and the community that has formed around the Telefonica (News – Alert) FireWeb phones.  Amongst the demonstrations of real-time development was also a demo of WebRTC.

Ted Harrington then talked to attendees about the changing landscape of development and the problems we face with security and maintaining its priority.  Discussing the typical desire of marketing departments wanting to spend money and finance trying to contain costs, it was notes that the issue of security isn’t always a primary part of the discussion for either party – so it’s no wonder security is often an afterthought.

At lunch, Bill Appleton, from Dream Factory, showed the value to be gained by bringing an open source cloud solution to manage the cloud.  Dream Factory is middleware 2.0 in a sense, enabling the reuse of services from the web with internal resources, while maintaining security.  All of the aspects of the solution he discussed had a nice frontend that minimized the hardwire connection between systems that may not be part of the standard development strategy. 

In the sessions that took place at DevCon5, Hattan Shoboski demonstrated how Angular works and told the story of its history as a library that tremendously reduced the lines of code that had to be generated.  AngularJS as a library can be considered complementary to many of the toolkits available in frameworks like JQuery Mobile. 

Mike Strange of Mitek and Christopher Pezza of Scandit also spoke to the issues of using your phone’s camera as an input device.  Bank checks and insurance claims are now using the camera and it’s clear we are augmenting our own realities with documentation.  Now the goal is to get the information in a single copy and secure mode for more business to take advantage of the apps and their opportunity.

Mike Stevens and Alex Heid also pointed out that currency was changing as a result of smartphones and Spindle even discussed their use of Amazon Web Services (News – Alert) to manage mobile payments.  This lead to further discussions around the good and bad of security – including the common misunderstandings associated with using HTTPS to secure information while often leaving elements behind in storage. 

As Alex Heid of Hack Miami pointed out, we are at a point of rapid innovation on the web, and if you are not monitoring the impact on security, you are leaving yourself incredibly vulnerable.  To this point, Andy Zmolek of Divide pointed out that enterprise IT was actually going through ‘phases of death’ as they tried to manage security.  In all, the reality is that Facebook and Google (News – Alert) are probably the largest identity companies on the planet and using their identity was probably safer than having users leave files on their machines with a list of their passwords (Alex Heid informed us that there was an ability called “Google Dorking” that searched for these files).

When it comes to big data, Brandon Black of MongoDb brought home the fact that data was becoming more distributed and the opportunity to utilize information from various resources was driving a lot of innovation.

The continuing changing nature of the web was the topic of focus from Jonathan Baker of SAP (News – Alert), Terry Ribb from Relevans and Matt McClure of Brightcove.  They discussed video, personalization and the need to make information actionable. After all, information should not be like the weather.  Knowing about information means we should be able to do something about it.