Well, after posting about one of the many great things I learned at
The Ajax Experience (in San Francisco), I decided I needed to spend a
few minutes to attempt at a summary of the event.
I attended with a colleague, and we both felt that the show was very
well done and extremely insightful, beneficial for both of us. The
keynotes were well done and informative, and provided by: Edwin Aoki
of AOL, Brendan Eich of Mozilla, Chris Wilson of Microsoft, Kevin
Lynch of Adobe. AOL also provided a cocktail reception on Wednesday
evening including drinks and a fajita bar.
This show is a great show for the developer attempting to get more
into the Ajax movement as well as the seasoned developer wishing to
stay up with current trends, or seeking more details. We were able to
attend an overview of the frameworks or specialized sessions for each
framework (including Prototype, Script.aculo.us, Dojo, jMaki, jQuery,
Ext, qooxdoo, etc). These sessions allowed us to understand better
their focus as well as what they did well. It provided concrete
examples in the slides/demos of how this library works and how
typical code might look.
There were excellent sessions by Douglas Crockford on JSON, Ajax
Security, and Javascript in general. And an overview of Microsoft
Silverlight, Adobe AIR, sIFR technologies, allowed us to learn more
about how to use these offerings.
Finally, the sessions on the user experience and ways to improve it
were very helpful when you consider the size of many Ajax
applications today. User experience is having a much bigger impact on
which products make it and it was great to see topics like
“Anti-Patterns”, or “Ruining the User Experience” to help bring a
focus to this area.
One additional area of focus was performance and tools to help with
that including the recently released Yslow (a plug-in for Firebug)
developed at Yahoo! (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/). Another
benefit of shows like this, is to see what tools others are using to
develop/debug/tune these Ajax applications. Some of these gems were
found in the JSView plug-in for Firefox, JSLint for keeping your
javascript clean, Selenium, Aptana (awesome web development IDE based
on Eclipse!).
