Friday, June 20th, 2008
Category: The Ajax Experience
We’re pleased to announce that registration for The Ajax Experience is now open! The event is being held in Boston this year, from September 29 to October 1.
Mini-Events
In addition to the usual agenda full of interesting sessions and compelling content, we’re pleased to announce that concurrent with the Ajax Experience, several of the most popular Ajax frameworks will be holding “mini-events” that are both open to attendees and the general public. We’re giving space to representatives from Dojo, jQuery, and Prototype to hold half-day events focusing on their own frameworks. These events run at the same time as a special “introductory” track of content geared towards attendees who are new to Ajax.
We couldn’t be happier about how this has worked out and we hope both attendees and others who are able to attend enjoy these mini-events. More details coming soon.
Cross-Browser Keynote
Another interesting new feature of the show this year is a unique keynote we’re putting together with Peter-Paul Koch (ppk) of Quirksmode.org and folks from Dojo, jQuery, and Prototype. ppk is preparing a presentation detailing the top cross-browser compatibility issues facing Web developers today, and following his remarks, attendees will get briefings on how these popular Ajax frameworks help Web developers address the issues raised by ppk.
Every time we survey attendees and members of the community about what issues they care about most, cross-browser compatibility is either in the top slot or close to it. This should be a pretty cool dissemination of the best information on the topic.
Early Bird Registration Ends August 22…
…so stop on by and get yourself a seat at the show!
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
Category: The Ajax Experience
It’s time to plan ahead. Today we’re announcing and opening the Call for Papers for the next Ajax Experience event–in September 2008.
For the past two years, we’ve put on two Ajax Experience events, the so-called West and East shows. For 2008, we think it’s time to consolidate them into one. After doing quite a bit of research with past attendees (and no small amount of internal debating) we’ve decided to hold our single event for 2008 in… Boston!
We’ve been extraordinarily pleased with the quality of the submissions of all of our past shows, so all we can say is, keep it up! The show will take place at Renaissance Waterfront Hotel in Boston, MA from September 29 - October 1, 2008. The Call for Papers closes on January 31, 2008. Approved speakers get a free pass to show and a stipend towards airfare and hotel. See our Call for Papers page for more details on how to submit a talk.
See you there!
Monday, December 31st, 2007
Category: Presentation, Recording, The Ajax Experience
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.
Watch video of the keynote.
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
Category: Presentation, The Ajax Experience
Isomorphic Software, the company behind SmartClient, gave a talk at the recent TAE Boston, and we just published the video for all to see:
Abstract
This talk helps developers better articulate the business advantages of Ajax to management, and help management grill developers on whether their technical choices are the right ones. In addition, a starry-eyed vision of the future of application development will be presented, including a demo this time.
Bio: Alex Shvedof, COO and co-founder, Isomorphic Software is also one of the architects of the SmartClient Ajax platform. He has played various roles at hi-tech companies ranging from enterprise software architecture to system and network security. Alex co-founded Isomorphic in 2000 to make zero-install rich web applications a reality.
Watch the presentation.
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
Category: Conferences, The Ajax Experience
Today is the official start of the Ajax Experience East, but we did something a bit different this time around. Some people asked us to level set a little, so we put out some tutorial sessions a day before.
Marc Grabanski was at the tutorial sessions and he wrote up a nice synopsis of the talks given by Ben Galbraith, John Resig, and David Verba.
Marc finishes up posting the sessions that he think will be going too:
We have kicked into gear on day one, and I am having a great time mingling with the community as usual!
Thursday, October 11th, 2007
Category: The Ajax Experience
With the Ajax Experience East in Boston coming up just around the corner (Oct. 24 - 26, just about two weeks away), we thought we’d provide a few updates:
- Aptana founder Paul Colton will present best practices and pitfalls on developing with the iPhone and iPod Touch. And while we’re talking about talks from dev tool groups, we should mention that Michael Kaply will present on Eclipse’s Ajax Toolkit Framework.
- We’ve added a few new performance-related talks: Bob Buffone from Nexaweb will present on performance tuning large-scale Ajax apps, and Michael Carter will present a case study on using Comet for highly scalable apps.
- Flex and AIR keep right on evolving, and we’ve got Adobe’s Kevin Hoyt presenting on the very latest in AIR development.
- Google’s Nathan Naze, who’s currently working on the Google Book Search project, will discuss “Hybrid JavaScript”–his way of summarizing in two words an emerging set of techniques to extend browser capabilities in various creative ways using JavaScript itself, Flash, and even, yes… Java.
- We’ve added a new keynote: Kevin Survance, CTO of Mapquest, who will be sharing many Ajax lessons learned from experience running this massive web property. And, we should mention that the details of the previously announced Aza Raskin keynote are now on-line.
For more details on the other sessions this year, see the complete agenda.
Oh yes, and, the marketing hook: We’ve added tutorials this year; they’re included in the conference fee, but because we’re running these the day before the conference, we are limited in space. If you’re thinking about attending, register now to save yourself a seat! Supplies are limited! Chairs may run out! The developer hoards may beat you to it! Don’t be the only one left home!
;-)
Friday, September 21st, 2007
Category: The Ajax Experience
Here are the latest updates on the upcoming Ajax Experience East show in Boston Oct. 24-26:
- Next Friday, hotel rates go up and the iPhone Giveaway ends; register today! ;-)
- Speaking to Ajax audiences can be tricky; half of the group usually has a lot of Ajax experience, while the other half has little to none. To try and “level-set” a bit, we’ve introduced free, pre-show tutorials to the show this time around. Joining us to give ‘em are John Resig of jQuery and Mozilla fame and David Verba of Adaptive Path. However, space is running out fast (only 30 seats left), so you’ve got to reserve your seat quick!
- Aza Raskin, son of UI pioneer Jef Raskin, spoke at last year’s Boston show and did such a bang-up job that we’ve asked him to keynote at this year’s show. We’re really looking forward to his talk.
- Alex Russell of Dojo fame will be speaking on the upcoming Dojo 1.0 release and the importance of the open web.
- jQuery founder and Mozilla evangelist John Resig has added a “Future of JavaScript” to his talk line-up at the show.
- And more!
Monday, September 10th, 2007
Category: Conferences, The Ajax Experience
Time is flying by. This Friday (9/14) is the Early Bird deadline for The Ajax Experience East coast conference, taking place on October 24-26th in Boston.
There are a few changes taking place at this conference that I want to fill you in on:
- Tutorials: We had people asking for a set of tutorials, so we created a day of them which are included with your conference fee. These are perfect for beginners, or those in need of a quick brush-up. These 90 minute sessions are offered pre-conference, to eliminate any concerns you might have about pre-requisites, and get you ready for the full 3 days of technical sessions where you can jump into more advanced content. You can see the list of tutorials which includes Ben and I getting you up to speed on Ajax, David Verba of Adaptive Path discussing the design challenges of Ajax applications, and John Resig giving a rich overview of JavaScript libraries.
- There are a bunch of new speakers, including Paul Baukaus, Becky Gibson, Ted Husted, Carla Mott, Adam Peller, Stuart Halloway, Alex Russell, Chris Schalk, Tenni Theurer, David Verba.
- There are some exciting new sessions, including The Future of JavaScript (John Resig), Accessibility & Internationalization w/ Dojo, Refactotum: JavaScript (Stuart Halloway), Ensuring a Quality Web Experience (Patrick Lightbody - no abstract yet), Ajax on Struts, Retrofitting Struts with Ajax Taglibs (both with Ted Husted), Advanced JSON (Kris Zyp).
- We had our best panels every in San Francisco, so we hope that continues with an Ask The Experts, and Ajax Futures panel at this event. Got questions? Come along.
As always, the highlight of the show for me is getting you all together. In San Francisco we saw a crew discussing what became the end of browser possesion. The hallways are always buzzing, and I learn a lot about what the community is thinking, and where it is going.
Come join us again, and if you register by Sept 28th you will be eligible for an iPhone giveaway. Also, books and a few iPod Touch devices will also be featured giveaways for all attendees on-site.
Friday, July 27th, 2007
Category: Browsers, The Ajax Experience
Another Ajax Experience is over. We had a blast and it was a tons of fun to see so many of our friends in the community and to have so much top-notch content. Many thanks to all those who came out, especially the speakers, many of whom came to present at great personal sacrifice. And, a tip of the hat to those who held some announcements for the show, such as:
As the last sessions were wrapping up, a group including Brad Neuberg, Glen Lipka, Alex Russell were seen huddled together in an animated discussion. Glen kindly pointed us to a summary of their chat, which includes what he’s calling “browser possession”:
The most exciting idea, which several people seemed to be noodling on at the same time was what I am loosely calling Browser Possession. It goes like this:
1. You make a web page using HTML, CSS and JS.
2. You test it in ONE browser. Probably Webkit.
3. You include a single JS at the top of your page, a spinoff off of SWFObject.js
4. The JS would instantiate a SWF file which would fill the 100% of the height and width of your browser window.
5. The JS would then suck in the HTML of the page, and feed it to the Flash Movie.
6. Then the Flash movie would instantiate Webkit inside it and render the page.
Glen goes on to simplify the proposal as:
1. Same as above, but instead of a Flash movie, it would be a Webkit native plugin.
2. This would need it’s own JS that was specific to this task.
Back when Adobe started briefing developers on Apollo/AIR, a few of us joked about WebKit running in a plug-in rendering web pages inside of a web browser. Funny to see it proposed as a serious idea.
With ScreamingMonkey proposing essentially the same idea with the JavaScript run-time, it’s interesting to imagine a world where Ajax applications can choose from several HTML renderers and JavaScript run-times, much like IE lets devs choose between the “Quirks” and “Standards” code paths.
1.7 rating from 134 votes
Category: Adobe, The Ajax Experience
Kevin Lynch started out the keynote talking about “Four Generations of Applications”:
- Mainframe
- Client/server
- Web applications
- Rich internet applications
He then discussed the architecture of rich internet applications, focusing on the challenges.
The first challenge he discussed was local storage, and he highlighted how Google Gears is solving that problem, and how Air wants to cooperate with Gears.
The next challenge was searchability and deep linking. He proposed that we as a community use # as a standard for maintaining state in Ajax application URLs. Adobe has sent a proposal to the OpenAjax Alliance to standardize # and begin the process of standardizing deep linking.
Cross-domain access came up next. He reviewed the problem and why the cross-domain security policy exists. He discussed a proposed “crossdomain.xml” permissions file that allows a site to declare exceptions to the cross-domain security policy, which looks like:
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain="*.siteA.com"/>
</cross-domain-policy>
It turns out this file already exists on 36% of Alexa’s top 100 sites in order to support cross-domain Flash behaviors. Because Flash already supports this mechanism, you can use Flash today as a hidden communication mechanism to allow cross-domain behaviors (see adobe.com/go/crossdomain).
Kevin hopes this same mechanism can be implemented in browsers and offered to work with standard bodies to add this to browsers.
Next, Kevin chatted about the Tamarin project, reviewing the guy features and described it as “JavaScript from the future”, reviewing key features, such as:
- Much faster performance
- E4X
- Strong types
- Sealed classes
- Runtime exceptions
- (Highly optimized, fast) regular expressions
To tempt the audience, he showed off some E4X syntax, like:
- feed.channel.title.text()
- feed..title.text()
- feed..item[1].text()
- feed..item.(@id==”82″).title.text()
Kevin showed off the adoption of Flash Player 9, showing that it was pushed out to 83% of the web in 9 months, calling it “the most ubiquitous platform in the world, even more than operating systems” and the “fastest deployment” ever for a new platform.
Kevin announced a new free, open-source Flash/Ajax Video kit that allows really simple syntax for playing movies.
<div id="videoBox"></div>
video = new FAVideo("videoBox", "myvideo.fly", 500, 500);
video.play();
The playbar beneath the video can be hidden or customized:
video.skinVisible = false;
He also showed how to create HTML controls:
<p align="center">
<a href="#" onclick="video.play()">PLAY</a>
<a href="#" onclick="video.stop()">STOP</a>
<a href="#" onclick="video.seek(video.getPlayheadTime() - 5)">REW</a>
<a href="#" onclick="video.seek(video.getPlayheadTime() + 5)">FWD</a>
</p>
This toolkit is available at adobe.com/go/favideo. He went to hbovoyeur.com to show off how you can use the video capabilities of the Flash player to do some really cool interactive stuff.
The next weakness Kevin highlighting is developer productivity. He said that a declarative way to do development is more productive than procedural mechanisms. He highlighted how Flex’s MXML gives a much richer declarative mechanism than HTML. To this end, he reviewed that Flex 3 is now open-source, with a public bug database and daily builds. The project will be fully up and running by the end of the year under the Mozilla Public License.
Data synchronization. This is clearly a hard problem and Kevin reviewed how Adobe is currently solving this problem with LifeCycle Data Services. He pointed out that Ajax applications can be used to talk with LifeCycle via HTTP or their own RTMP protocol (RTMP adds push capabilities). He had a demo showing Dojo use the sync services, but sadly the demo was broken. He did show the code, which was about 6 lines of code to bind a JavaScript data collection to the LiveCycle sync services.
And now the transition to AIR, which Kevin described as a way to bring Web apps to the desktop. He highlighted that AIR adds these services to web applications:
- File system access
- Network detection
- Notifications
- Application updating
- Drag-and-drop
- Local database
He also reviewed that AIR applications can be written in two styles: HTML or Flash. In both cases, you can seamlessly integrate PDF documents into the application. He also highlighted a capability I hadn’t seen before: support for deploying to “Device OS’s”. He then showed off some AIR applications:
- Simple Tasks, an Ajax application written by Jack Slocum of Ext JS running as a local Air app.
- Finetune, a Flash application to stream music
- Buzzword, a high-quality Word processor that shows off some very sophisticated layout and UI features. From his quick demo, it seemed more powerful than Apple’s Pages but adds collaborative features like co-editing with other users over the network (but is turn-based not concurrent)
- Adobe Media Player, a way to play Flash video on the desktop (similar to the Quicktime Player)
- Pownce, a client for Kevin Rose’s new Twitter-esque service
Pownce is invite-only, but Adobe obtained 300 invites. First-come, first-served by emailing pownceme@adobe.com.
Adobe has an Ajax homepage at adobe.com/go/ajax.
1.8 rating from 127 votes
Thursday, July 26th, 2007
Category: Conferences, IE, The Ajax Experience
Chris Wilson (Platform Architect of Internet Explorer) led off Day 2 of The Ajax Experience with his keynote: “Moving The Web Forward”. The talk centered on challenges faced by browser vendors and web developers to achieve more secure, stable, interoperable, and performant solutions. Here’s a bit of a summary…
Security and privacy are incredibly important to developers, browser vendors, and the average user. Ajax introduces some challenges in providing these protections due to code sharing, proxying, script inclusion, etc. It’s as important as ever to have a security model and spend some time “hacking yourself” to find loopholes.
Privacy is a growing concern for not only IT departments but governments. While cookies are perhaps the best known vulnerability (Chris recommends checking this out), many new “danger points” have been introduced by mashups and syndication. Having a privacy model and letting your users know just what you’re doing with their information is key.
Stability and interoperability are a tough pair. The volume of applications relying on non-standard implementations is staggering. Producing a strictly standards compliant version of IE is not an option as many users (and companies) would simply not be able to move to the new version. While many sites (attempt to) implement entirely standards compliant solutions already, many sites (even medium/large sites) do not. Often these violations are implemented without developers even realizing what’s happening. To maintain stability (and not “break the web”) interoperability is something that must be approached methodically (by way of things like “standards-comliant” mode).
Performance is another major concern voiced by users, unfortunately it’s hard to determine exactly what this means to them. Performance can be measured in a variety of different ways against a variety of implementations and approaches. While it’s always a goal to make the browser itself more efficient, many of the largest performance gains are via better designs and implementations of applications themselves.
Chris closed with what is pushing the web and what we can all do to move it forward right. To paraphrase Ben Galbraith (from last years TAE): “Caring about the quality of web UI” is what’s pushing us today. Enabling online social experiences, providing friendlier layouts, graphics, and imaging drives people to sites and gets them participating.
Making browsers (and other devices) interoperable is a huge step in improving what we can provide on the web. While vendors move towards that goal, it’s vital the developers be as careful as possible to implement standards based solutions, even in environments that facilitate non-standard solutions.
The QA:
Would IE be more secure if under a more permissive license? and will we ever see it?
Not really. It’s already frighteningly easy to get a copy of the windows source code (which includes IE). The challenge is making sure that lots of very smart people look at the code very closely for vulnerabilities. This is something the IE team has been quite proactive about, especially since 2002.
Chris doesn’t know of or anticipate any plans to change the license like this but won’t say never
Outlook 2007 doesn’t use the IE renderer and seems to be much less standards compliant, “Why did Microsoft do this to me?!?”
While Chris isn’t part of that team, he sees what they were trying to do: increase consistency between what is used for rendering received email and what is used for creating outgoing mail. He believes that team does realize that it’s a problem and will be working on it.
You had mentioned an issue of when developers don’t know they are relying on something that isn’t standard or writing something that isn’t standard. How can that be resolved or limited?
Workarounds are sometimes going to be necessary - Things need to work and you often can’t wait for the browser vendor to fix it. Developers need to (1) educate themselves on what is standard and what’s not and (2) document anything non-standard that they are doing or relying on to check back with when the next version is released.
Many problems are regarding the inclusion of frameworks included to get some widget or behavior. These frameworks may do something non-standardized under the covers that the developer is not aware of. To framework creators: Stay compliant wherever possible. Releasing a patched framework to accommodate new browser versions is good but there’s still trouble as people often won’t know to update (they’ve forgotten all about that).
What are your top 5 tips to making IE a good debugging env?
(Microsoft Download Center)
1. Install Visual Web Developer Express.
2-4. Get IE Debug Toolbar.
5. Keep updating the debug toolbar.
6. Get the full version of Expression Web Designer. (it’s pay-for so he’s making it #6).
oh, and #3. Fiddler
I’ve heard developing on Vista is broken.
It’s not broken, the challenge is IE runs in “protected mode” by default which sandboxes IE process to prevent others from connecting to it - and it from connecting to others. Disable protection mode and it will work.
Should i start with FF and then fix bugs with IE? What does Microsoft recommend?
Remember the tips before for debugging.
Reference the IE Developer Center for what the platform contains.
As for the general process: start with the standard and test with multiple browsers as you go. What you’re testing in any browser is that browser’s implementation of the standard - so, even if two browsers implement the same standard - you can run into trouble. By testing in several as you go, at least you know when you’re hitting incompatibilities.
What are the big things users are asking for?
Users don’t give very consistent answers to this question but research told us the important things for IE7 were tabs and printing. When starting IE7 they had no plans for enhanced printing but people were really mad about the right hand side being cutoff. They ended up getting a big win with their printing improvements.
Now (post IE7) people want performance but it’s hard to know what that really means to them. Normally the “feel” of browsing is pretty similar, to the normal user, when just casually browsing.
Another request is enabling customization and hiding portions of the UI that the “normal user” isn’t utilizing. Part of this task is to enable more customization while another large part is making existing customizability more friendly and accessible.
4.5 rating from 111 votes
Sunday, July 22nd, 2007
Category: The Ajax Experience
The Ajax Experience is this week, and Ben and I have the fun job of leading off with our thoughts on the State of Ajax.
I have had to do this in the past with other technologies, and often, a couple of years into a technologies life it gets hot to see what is past, present, and future. This hasn’t been the case so far with Ajax. As soon as I feel like the pace is slowing, something big comes along that changes the game. Ajax currently feels like the universe in that it is constantly expanding. Our abstract probably says it best:
Join Ben and Dion as they walk attendees through the rapidly evolving and often confusing Ajax landscape, covering the important topics and trends that will affect how you develop web applications. Far from a fickle fashion, Ajax is continuing to revolutionize the way software is built, from providing the new model for desktop applications to the new model for mobile applications. The Ajaxians will start the keynote analyzing the large impacts Ajax is having on the development landscape, including the latest in end-to-end JavaScript (i.e., JavaScript serving up JavaScript to the client) and server-less Ajax. They’ll next discuss how the frameworks are changing to make development easier and it better address the challenges of cross- browser development. The final part of the talk discusses the state of the browsers, the Ajax community, and the future.
As always, I can’t wait to get a feel for what is going on from learning from the community at the event itself. There is nothing better than to touch base in person.
Monday, July 16th, 2007
Category: The Ajax Experience
Time is flying by. I have gotten back into the conference mood with some time on the Adobe event, where I got to give an ignite-style presentation on Google Gears, and popped by Mashup Camp today.
Before I look around we will be time for The Ajax Experience and as I look over who is speaking at the event, I get excited.
It is always great to hear from heavy hitters like Brendan Eich, Kevin Lynch, and Chris Wilson. They have different thoughts and opinions on the Web, and the direction it should be going. I can’t wait to get an update on their current thoughts. I am sure there will be some gentle IE 8 ribbing too, but Chris can more than handle himself.
Here are a few other presentations that I am excited about too:
The sessions are only one piece of the action though. The fun part is getting the community together throughout the show to get to know each other, share the pain and fun of developing Ajax applications, and plan the future. See you there!
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
Category: The Ajax Experience
The Ajax Experience is drawing really close. I am excited to get together with everyone on July 25-27th in San Francisco to talk all things Ajax.
Ben and I will be giving our traditional State of Ajax talk, and as we look over the time between the last show and this one quite a lot has changed.
When Ajax took off it was a great boon for JavaScript/Web hackers. Suddenly we were taken serious again, and it wasn’t all about the server-side folk (of course, many of us are also server side folk!).
Now the world keeps expanding. We want from small components such as auto complete widgets, to rich forms, to “oh, we can now make a really nice experience for our users”, to the phone (iPhone, Nokia, etc), to the desktop (Dashboard, Google Desktop Gadgets, Yahoo! Widgets) and offline (AIR, Google Gears, Dekoh), to applications within online platforms (Google Gadgets, Facebook) to the server (Rhino, Helma, Phobos, …) and more.
JavaScript and Ajax is everywhere. Let’s get together and really think about how we can help the overall user experience, and push things to the next level.
Thursday, June 21st, 2007
Category: The Ajax Experience
With all that’s going on in the Ajax space lately, we didn’t get a chance to mention that the Early Bird discount closed for the Ajax Experience last week. So, we’ve extended it to this Friday if you use the code “EXTEB” when you register. The first 100 folks to use that code also get a free book from a large list of Ajax-related titles. See you there!
Friday, June 8th, 2007
Category: The Ajax Experience
As we’ve mentioned before, it was really tough to choose from all the great content that all of you from the community submitted this year. You can see what we chose now that we’ve got the schedule for Ajax Experience 2007 West finalized. Well, somewhat finalized. We’ve also got a session on the new Google Gears and a few other surprises yet to add. The early bird registration deadline expires June 15, so now’s the time to sign up. :-)
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