It had been more than a month since the last TechCamp and so we were all eagerly looking forward to the fourth episode, scheduled for 11th October, in Mumbai. It promised to be a good one for the geeks and techies, with interesting sessions on User Experience and Web 2.0 Security, both being conducted by experts in their respective domains.

The first session was An Introduction to User Experience, by Mr. Aniruddha Joshi, a faculty member in the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay, who teaches and does research in the field of human-computer interaction design, user studies and usability evaluation. He started off by explaining the different elements of User Experience. Those of us who had attended Jesse James Garrett’s master class on the same subject at GIDS were familiar with the concepts involved, but Mr. Joshi covered them well and raised quite a few thought provoking questions and discussions with the audience. We then participated in an exercise that involved identifying user experience issues at different levels, and another one which demonstrated a possible approach to setting user experience goals for a product and evaluating their relative importance in the product design process.

Next in the agenda was a session on Web 2.0 Security - Defending Next Generation Applications, by Mr. Shreeraj Shah, Founder and Director at Blueinfy Solutions. Mr. Shah first talked about the differences that have been brought about in the underlying technology beneath the new breed of Web 2.0 applications with respect to application architecture, frameworks, components, protocols, data exchange formats etc. He then briefly explained various application attack vectors, including SQL injection, AJAX based Cross Site Scripting (XSS), Cross Site Request Forgery (XSRF), RSS injections and many more. He also demonstrated methodologies, tools and techniques to scan applications for vulnerabilities against these vectors. Most of the developers in the audience were eager to see live demonstrations of every possible hacking technique, but it was not possible to cover each and every one in detail, given the limited amount of time we had. While this was a bit of a disappointment, all in all it was a very interesting and informative session.