Yesterday evening, the 21st Web Montag Cologne took place. The list of participants had already been growing constantly during the last days before the event, but when @fbz, @scompt and me arrived at ~19:30, I was surprised anyway how many people where already there and engaged in lively discussions. Starting from 8 o’clock, three talks were given.

Jörn Zaefferer (@bassistance) presented the newly released jQuery 1.4. It offers new features and also an improved performance. If you use jQuery, it might be worth upgrading, despite some backwards-imcompatibilities. A lot of work has also been done on the website and the documentation.

Christoph Beckmann (@cbek) talked about his experiences surviving a traffic peak caused by TV appearance with the help of Amazon Web Services. The solution involved migrating the Loo2Go server to a big EC2 instance and using several caching servers. While the costs were marginal, the approach seems very labour intense to me.

Michael presented a new MVC framework written in PHP which was heavily influenced by his experiences working with Ruby on Rails.

After the talks, the discussions continued. All in all, it was once again a very interesting evening, thanks everybody for participating.

The next Web Montag in Cologne will probably be on the first or second Monday in March, so mark these dates in your calendar.