David Cilley's AJAX Imaging Blog

Atalasoft at AjaxWorld NYC 2007

Lou and I recently returned from the AjaxWorld Conference & Expo in NYC.  Most of the sessions I attended were very informative, some were advertorials, some were advertisements, and a few were actually laughable.  This AjaxWorld conference was not run as well as the last one I attended.  The biggest problems I saw with this conference were:

1. Lack of communication for wireless access. Last year they had the login info on the main presentation slides before every session... this would have been a great idea.  We didn't even know that they offered it until the second day.
2. Wireless access quality was minimal, and non existent in several of the session rooms.
3. Session rooms were way too small in most cases, I had to sit on the floor for several of the sessions.
4. Projector screens were usually in the corner, making it nearly impossible for anyone after the 3rd or 4th row to follow along.
5. At least one of the presenters I was interested in didn't show up, and we weren't notified until after all the other sessions had started. 
6. All session slides were provided on an unmarked cd-r (which I discovered when I got back to Atalasoft)  I had assumed that it was a demo or something, like all of the other cd's provided.
7. They did not appear to enforce any of the badges, everything was open to everyone. (except meals)

Sessions I attended:
Day 1:

• AJAX, the Browser Application Platform by Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!): Douglas gave a very well thought out keynote to start off this conference.  He basically described how we got to where we are now with AJAX, and discussed several of the failed attempts at making the web more interactive (like Java Applets).  He also explained what's driving this technology, pointed out several flaws with current technologies, and gave a great overview on where we're currently at with AJAX.
• JavaScript Performance: Speeding up Your AJAX Apps by Ryan Stout:  This session was by far, the most beneficial topic that I went to.  Ryan gave an in depth view of several things you can do to speed up your JavaScript.  A few important points that he brought up were profiling with FireBug, avoiding page re-flows, using setTimeOut on long operations to allow the browser time to breathe, compressing js files with gzip, and setting expiration dates on js files to make sure that they are cached.  You should take a look at his slides if you are writing any performance hungry JavaScript.
• Enterprise Web 2.0 - Programming with Levers, Dials and maybe Switches by Coach Wei & Bob Buffone (Nexaweb): This ping-pong keynote compared using Nexaweb for Web 2.0 in enterprise to using a lever.  They had an interesting demo that transparently switched from thin client to thick client when the amount of data increased to more than the thin client could handle.  It's an interesting concept, but the demo that I saw didn't show the scroll bars correctly, and didn't seem to maintain state when it switched clients.  They promised that it was easy as a lever, but they never told us exactly how easy it really was.
  

Day 2:

• Scaling AJAX: The Promise and the Challenge of Modern Web Development by Bret Taylor (Google):  This was an extremely informative keynote.  Bret described many of the hurdles that were encountered during the development of AJAX apps like Google Maps.  He also went into current projects, and predictions on what the future holds for AJAX.
• The User Is the Killer App. Empower Them! by Luis Derechin (JackBe)
• Google Gadgets and Componentized Websites by Adam Sah (Google): This session was very well done.  Adam gave an in depth view of Google Gadgets, how they were made, and how people are using them.  Basically speaking, the gadgets are IFrames of content offered by just about anyone.  Many of the gadgets in Google's Gadget library are provided by outside developers.  This really got me thinking about what could be useful inside a Google Gadget, and how I could help the gadget community.
  
• Q&A session with Google by Bret Taylor, Adam Sah, Scott Blum
  
• The Face of Enterprise 2.0 by Ric Smith (Oracle):  This keynote was canceled by the presenter because his laptop black screened.
• Delivering Data To Your AJAX Solutions by Bob Zurek
• Web Vector Graphics & Dojo: Draw This! by Dylan Schiemann: This was an overview of vector based graphics using the Dojo.gfx toolkit.  It looked like it's easier to use Dojo, instead of native browser offerings such as VML and canvas, as they wrap all of the functionality into one framework.
• Microsoft AJAX Library Architecture – A Deep Dive by Nima Dilmaghani (Microsoft):  I had been looking forward to this session the whole day.  Nima gave a quick overview of the Microsoft AJAX Library, and emphasized that the library could be used on other platforms besides ASP.NET.  This session lost steam quickly as the presenter appeared to be unprepared.  He did offer some useful links at the end of the presentation.

Day 3:

• AJAX in the Balance by Brad Abrams (Microsoft): This was one of the main keynotes I was interested in.  Brad showed us a demo web site that he created to sell dice.  He used ASP.NET AJAX to stop the full page refresh, and add autocomplete to the search box.  He also showed us how that demo worked with PHP and Linux, on a Mac.  He gave us a preview of JavaScript intellisense in Orcas (which looks really sweet btw).  The 'wow' part of the keynote was when he showed off a WPFE demo that had turning pages, music, and video.  Very impressive.
• 'HDUX' – High Definition User Experience with Flex & Apollo by Christophe Coenraets (Adobe):  This keynote was another impressive one that wowed the audience with an Ebay on the desktop using Apollo. He also showed another page turning demo with biological transparancies as the subject matter.  This was just as impressive as the previous keynote's demo.
• Step by Step - Helmi Open Source RIA Platform by Juho Risku (Helmi): The initial speaker was pretty good, it was the second presenter that appeared to be too nervous.  He couldn't speak loud enough for everyone to hear.  He also didn't explain what he was doing while he was typing out his demo and he couldn't get his demo to work until the very end of the presentation.  I think about half of the total time was spent in silence.
• JavaScript Puzzlers - Is An IDE the Fifth Wheel or the Sixth Sense by Mike Aizatsky (JetBrains):  This keynote was one of the most entertaining ones. Mike started out by handing out a quiz with a bunch of JavaScript puzzles.  These puzzles were focused on quirks of the JavaScript language, and were very informative.  He included the audience in discussion of quirks like the difference between == and ===.  The hardest puzzle that he offered was number 4:
  

  What will be displayed in each case?
  alert("0" == 0);
  alert("1" == 1);
  alert("0x10" == 0x10);
  alert("010" == 010);
  

• JSON: Making the 'X' in AJAX Superfluous by Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!): This was another great talk by Douglas.  He offered a broad overview of JSON, how it worked, and why you should use it for data transfer.  The Q&A session at the end got a little out of hand, as some of the attendees asked questions that Douglas had nothing to do with (such as development of Internet Explorer)
• Performance-Tune Your AJAX Application by Bob Buffone (Nexaweb):  This was a fairly informative session on JavaScript performance.  Some key topics Bob covered were using Dojo to combine JavaScript files on the fly, and profiling in browsers besides FireFox.