After another good breakfast, I started the day by attending Designing Client Server Applications by Charles Yeomans, which was very informative. Since I mostly do database work, I haven’t had much experience with designing client-server solutions, but I have done some work with XML-RPC and other web services, so it wasn’t totally foreign. I’m just not used to designing the server. 
From there I sat in on Understanding REAL SQL Server, taught by none other than Marco Bambini himself, the primary developer of REAL SQL Server. And really, who better to teach the session? It was the first of three REAL SQL Server sessions that I attended, along with Packaging REAL SQL Server in Your Application and What’s New in the Upcoming REAL SQL Server 2008r2. So you could say that the bulk of my day was spent hearing and thinking about REAL SQL Server. It’s an amazing piece of technology. It’s built on SQLite, the most widely deployed database in the world. SQLite is also public domain, which is rather amazing in and of itself when you think about it. Anyway, I was pretty excited to hear about some of the upcoming features, some of which I’d heard during yesterday’s keynote. The big news was that REAL SQL Server 2008r2 will be able to handle over 10,000 simultaneous connections (Marco said he got 12,000 on his iMac). I can’t wait to get back to the office to test that out. That would open up a lot of possibilities for me.
During the third session slot of the day, I actually played hookey and stood around chatting with Christian Miller, Dave Wooldridge, Bob Keeney, Marc Zeedar, and Joe Strout.
In the afternoon, I taught my third and last session, All About Toolbars. After that, I was really tired, and so was David, so we headed up to the hotel room and just hung out until dinner time.
Dinner was a hoot. Aside from some great food and conversation (we lucked into sitting with several members of the REAL Software staff), there was a trivia contest, which was a lot of fun. REAL Software’s Nathan Regener was the emcee, and he did a great job keeping us entertained (and giving us lots of prizes – I even won a book!).
Tomorrow morning there’s a meeting to discuss the formation of the Association of REALbasic Professionals, spearheaded by Bob Keeney and some co-conspirators. I’ll definitely be there.