Alexei@Nitobi

It’s great to be here in Portland at Webvisions, a conference for web developers, designers, and the like. Dave Johnson, our illustrious CTO, is presenting on the Ajax User Experience.

He’s giving us a good history of Ajax.. beginning with the advent of JavaScript and CSS, and leading to the naming of Ajax by JJG.

He gives us 3 ’stories’ that encapsulate the important of Ajax in the world today:

Its about the Data

– Getting fluid access to data on the fly

– Librarian analogy – Web 1.0 – having access to one librarian getting you information / Web 2.0 (Ajax) – having a stream of librarians available to you to run back and forth to the book shelves as you need information.

Collaboration

– Why collaboration? Working on the same thing at the same time right? Yeah. project planning, document coauthoring, real-time communication.

– Opportunities: Data push – forcing information FROM the server down to the client

– Other oppotunities: Heartbeat – monitoring data changes on the server by periodically polling the server for new information.

– Other opportunities: Throttling – Controlling the pipeline – not congesting it by trying to force too much info through it.. dont transmit mouse moves and stuff.. wait a minute! Why?? I want that information! Dave! Explain yourself.

Web / Desktop Interoperability

– Yet More Opportunities: WPF / Flex & Apollo / XUL.

– Challenges: Rich media! Video, etc… cant be done with ajax along. Also: Offline storage (use flash for this). Drag and drop between browser windows and between the desktop and the browser. File IO.
– Big highlights: Dave did a wicked demo of copy and paste between our ajax grid and MS Excel.. got quite an audible wow from the audience!
Great presentation Dave! Hope he puts his slides online.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 8:16 pm and is filed under ajax, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.