First Annual Water Users Conference Kicked off With Success;
IT Professionals Gather in Cambridge, Mass. to Discuss Water Language
by Merrick Stemen

Attendees and students from the music industry, hospitality, information technology, government, and education gathered for the First Annual Water Language Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts this month. Traveling from Tennessee, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Florida, the group shared their Water experiences and learned the latest language enhancements directly from the language architects, Mike Plusch and Christopher Fry, founders of Clear Methods, Inc.

Attendees were treated to presentations by Plusch and Fry outlining the development of the Water language and the vision they share for the future of the language. "Right now water covers about 75% of the earth; our goal is to see Water cover 100% of the World Wide Web," quipped Plusch. Christopher Fry opened the conference with a fiery keynote address emphasizing the need for a language that can integrate the myriad technologies needed to build web services and to enable the rapid prototyping of complex Web services. He pointed out that the disparate languages and standards existing today--HTML, XML, SQL, programming logic, and more--are all brought together in one language that dramatically accelerates application prototyping: Water.

Fry and attendee Arthur Pinkerton

Conference sessions introduced features of the latest Water language release and showed the newer participants how easily Water can be applied to difficult Web services challenges to solve real business problems quickly.

Andrew Roach, teacher at Pensacola Christian College and graduate student at the University of West Florida, demonstrated Waterpad and Watercalc, two Water applications he had written with Water's newly introduced "Rich-UI" instructions. In just a few minutes and a few lines of HTML-like code, he produced a working text editor and calculator for the participants.

Plusch and Fry took time out to award an autographed copy of the original Water book to Merrick Stemen, who has created numerous Water applications and contributed much to the Water community. Roach won the dinner for presenting the "coolest" Water program during the conference. All attendees were upbeat and excited about this concentrated learning experience with the new language. Arthur Pinkerton, Senior Engineer at

The conference venue offered panoramic views of Boston

Bob Nilsson, Vice President for Marketing of Clear Methods, said that thanks to the dedicated support of the conference attendees in particular, he expects interest in Water to accelerate and next year's conference will be even bigger and better.

Overall, the organizers were quite pleased with the success of this inaugural conference. Plusch summed up his feelings in a comment to one of the participants, "Languages live or die based on the effort and commitment of the early adopters and supporters. We really appreciate your ideas and commitment to spreading the Water language."

The Water Language Conference 2004 was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 20, 2004.

Photographs courtesy of Andrew Roach