Some of the things I learned and saw at AjaxWorld 2007…
Dylan’s demo of the Ajax push with real time data and SVG/VML graphing was pretty cool. According to Dylan from Sitepen the new version of Webkit (that’s the browser engine in Safari) is the fastest, by far for rendering SVG in the browser. Kind of interesting considering it doesn’t really work right now, but he says the new version is going to have a lot more kick ass drawing and graphics stuff in it. Nice! Also interesting because now that Apollo is using Webkit, Adobe is going to be involved with Safari and Mozilla/FireFox through Tamarin.
Joe Walker and Kevin Hakman’s presentation on push with DWR was really good, these guys are ballsy they were modifying code on the app they were demoing in real time. I would probably die if I tried this:) The DWR polling feature in DWR seems pretty fast, they demoed it with a Battle Ship / Live Chat demo. They ran a bit long but that’s cool. DWR is not doing widgets, just remoting and trying to do the best job they can there. They were showing off stuff using the same demos as Lightstreamer, using the same code using a publish subscribe method. So Tibco GI and DWR are decoupled. DWR works with struts, spring and webwork it’s all good. I wish they’d find a new name other than Reverse Ajax as I find it very confusing, but oh well.
Last talk I saw was Joe Stagner from Microsoft. He’s a very energetic speaker, but sat down the whole time and used an ugly MS standard background. Vista has some issues with the projector, Joe’s presentation is totally washed out. Seems like MS is doing a lot for Ajax devs and most of it is free. Some of they’re partners are building entire component suites ontop of Atlas. MS has an update panel which seems to a be a common approach advocated by big platform vendors here. Sun has an Update Zone I think they called it. I think it’s so they can drop their old-school-non-ajax components into their page use this panel thing, and call it Ajax. I don’t think it does much for the user experience though. This certainly is not a good approach if you’re trying to optimize your app for performance, since the whole page has to process on the server for every request. Joe claims that Ajax increases server side traffic a lot when you start, I wonder if this has something to do with MSFT’s approach to it. I have to say though from the development workflow standpoint the MS stuff looks better and demos slicker than anything else I’ve seen, at least in terms of dragging and dropping components onto the page. Joe’s a really funny dude with good sense of humor:) He’s going to post his slides Friday. And he likes cold beer. I missed Brad Abrams earlier presentation on MS Ajax stuff but I hear it was really good.
I also missed Troy Angrignon‘s presentation on business models for web 2.0, but there’s a good right up here. Sharpstyle has bunch of other good blog posts on the event. Francis Wong has a bunch of good write-up too, but my favorite is how to do AjaxWorld for $100. Conference hacking, I love it! Ryan Stewart has some notes on NexaWeb and Laszlo.
Overall a good event. My one complaint is that you can’t get to enough of the non-vendor-pitch sessions because they’re all at the same time slots.
I have a podcast with Ryan Stewart about AjaxWorld coming soon…to an iPod near you. (man that’s a lame joke).
Ok off to the OpenAjax Alliance meetings.
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