Kevin Survance, CTO of MapQuest, gave a keynote speech at the last Ajax Experience show. Kevin came to the company and basically transformed the entire team to create the new MapQuest beta.
MapQuest uses Ajax on a massive scale and also provides commercial Ajax APIs. In this keynote, Kevin shares lessons learned from recent MapQuest development projects and offers insight into opportunities for developers to profit from current industry and social trends.
He got to tell us about the fun implementation issues behind the rewrite. It turns out that the new system is mostly written in Java itself, and there is a very thin bridge to the browser. The JVM also runs in its own OS process, so if the JVM crashes it doesn’t affect the browser.
There were also other tidbits, such as having JNLP working natively in the browser, and how this could be used to allow other scripting engines such as JRuby to run in the browser. One JNLP extension, and everyone can share JRuby.
Googlers Joe Walnes and Adam Connors gave a presentation on testable Ajax back in September (we didn’t cover it at the time) … “Does my button look big in this? Building testable AJAX applications.” at the Google London Test Automation Conference. The theme is how to automate website testing with all the complexity Ajax adds. They talk mostly about testing strategies and technologies (like JUnit), but also mention the importance of architecting for testability.
The latest Java Posse podcast is a 70-minute roundtable on GWT, featuring the GWT tech lead, the GWT widget library keeper, and the developer of GPokr, join Posse hosts Dick Wall, Carl Quinn, and Joe Nuxoll.
Topics include: Why GWT was created, Benefits of GWT, Comparison with other Ajax libraries/frameworks (e.g. Dojo-style On-Demand Javascript), code compression (getting around problem with IE not caching gzipped JS files), support for application versioning (avoiding mismatched client-server versions), possibility of WYSIWYG widget toolkit, flexible RPC mechanism to communicate with server apps running any languages, upcoming books, performance (JS fast, DOM slow :-), the future of GWT.
eBusiness Applications’ Dave Johnson will be presenting a live webinar tomorrow on Implementing Ajax with Java. June 14, 2006 - 2:00pm EDT, 11:00am PDT. Register here. Topics covered:
What is AJAX and what are the basic technologies
The basics of the Java DWR AJAX Framework
What are the critical application architecture decisions
How should developers approach testing and debugging in a Web browser
The EBA guys are certainly ramping up the multimedia Ajax content out there…they’ve also begun a weekly podcast. Here’s the podcast feed (via Andre “Captain Ajax” Charland’s blog :-).
Two Interviews about AJAX. The First is with Brett Taylor of Google
about the just-announced red-pill project (also known as the Google Web
Toolkit) and the second with Greg Murray of Sun …
Greg also mentions JMaki - https://ajax.dev.java.net/ - and the petstore - https://blueprints.dev.java.net/petstore/. [Trivia: We now have at least 3 Ajax petstores :-).]
, Recording
