My last post outlined plans for the next StixCamp… unfortunately, due to a number of reasons, we’ve had to postpone this event – to give us time to plan, find sponsors and generally bring together an awesome BarCamp. Stay tuned for more information!

The inaugural StixCamp was held at Newstead, central Victoria in March 2009. Based on the success of this event, it will be run again over the ANZAC day long weekend, 24-26th April, with thanks to our hosts Ron and Julia from Welshmens Reef Vineyard. The feedback from the last event suggested that we needed to get the word out about the event a lot earlier – so we’re trying to spread the word! In case you’re in doubt about how awesome StixCamp was, you can check out some of these great photos

If we can better promote StixCamp Newstead 2010 then we’d love to hear from you! Just let us know at

organisers at barcampmelbourne dot org

(In case you didn’t know, StixCamp is run in BarCamp style and was started by the crew who’ve helped put together BarCampMelbourne)

In particular, we’d love to know;

• Where would you expect to hear about this event?
• What mailing lists are you already on?
• What user groups are you a member of?
• Where did you hear about your first BarCamp Melbourne or StixCamp?
• If you work for an IT organisation or study at a university, what’ s the best way for us to spread the word?

We’d warmly welcome any other ideas you might have, and if you’d like to get involved, just send a blank email to;

organisers-join@barcampmelbourne.org

You can also follow us @StixCampVicAu on Twitter/Identi.ca or @BarCampMelb for more information.

Zach Miller is based in Chicago and works as a developer. His presentation was on the separation of model, view and controller layers in application design – otherwise known as MVC architecture. He introduced the topic by explaining that programmers and designers have different skillbases – which often conflict. MVC architecture is a method of separating the control logic of an application from the presentation layer so that the developer can be coding and the graphics guru designing the interface without their work conflicting.

Zach provided an overview of MVC architecture and then articulated a little known technology that can be used with MVC – Template Attribute Language or TAL for short. This was originally written for the Zope Content Management System in Python, but is now being more widely applied. A document type definition has not yet been written for TAL, but this is on the development roadmap.

Using TAL means that you can easily prototype the interface of an application to get design approval, before doing the bulk of the work in writing the functionality.

Zach provided examples of TAL.

Personally, I’ve seen MVC work very well in PHP using Smarty.