Ajax Experience East 2007 – Thoughts and Notes | October 30th, 2007
Dave and I just got back from the Ajax Experience in Boston. It was a great time, although a bit short given the travel time required from Vancouver.
I was invited to participate on a panel about the future of Ajax with John Resig, Douglas Crockford and Asa Raskin.of Humanized.pan It turned into the future of JavaScript panel which I was a bit disappointed about. I think we have so much innovation that can be done without a new language that’s this conversation is a bit early. Oh well, it is also important to discuss the future of our beloved scripting language(s). I agree with Doug that we need a smaller set of changes that address security, rather than radical changes towards strong typing, etc… with alleged benefits like performance and better programming practices. Of course Brendan Eich has an opinion too:)
Dave gave a talk on testing Ajax that covered wide range of topics to give developers and toolbox of techniques and utilities to improve QA. He covered JSUnit, Selenium, Cruise Control, Firebug and sure . I’m sure his slides will be online soon so I can link to them:)
If I had to pick highlights….talking about Ajax challenges and opportunities with Kevin Hoyt. Shooting the breeze with Ben and Dion about Ajax forms. Drinking and joking with Brent Ashley. Finally meeting Pete Forde and learning about Jester and unspace.
I actually made it to a few sessions this time:) Here are my notes:
Zimbra Offline
-footprint 16Mb (rather large but they have entire web server in there)
-wrote a custom server (client version of the server side app)
-took about 1yr (1 to 2 months to get a demo together, the rest to get it all working)
-didn’t have to write new JS and client didn’t have to change much at all (nice!)
-the browser is just talking to a new server
-Zimbra has 8 Millon paid mailboxes
-150K lines of JS (holy shit!)
More info:
–www.zimbra.com/desktop
–www.zimbra.com/blog
Using Eclipse and to Develop Ajax Applications
-Michael Kaply – [email protected]
-ATF is an IDE for JavaScript developers
-Extensible for ajax toolkits and JS libraries into the IDE
-Built on Eclipse WebTools project
-Has Mozilla built into it for viewing,debugging etc…
-Doesn’t ship with any toolkits or libraries…these need to be downloaded separately (Dojo, Rico, etc.. are already integrated)
-Have to add script tag manually to page
-JS Debugging
-PHP, JSP, etc…
-CSS and Box Model stuff
-they want contributors
More info:
–www.eclipse.org/atf/downloads
Qooxdoo
-An Ajax toolkit and framework
-Open Source – LGPL and EPL
-started by 1&1 in 2005 (thelargest Hosting company in the world)
-Major browsers (Safari 3 only not earlier)
-server agnostic,
-OO JS
-widgets, custom widget framework, layout managers, keyboard support, drag and drop, event based, theming
-qooxdoo.org
-has a build tool (dev and release mode)
-minize etc…
-automatic transport selction (XHR, iFrame, Script)
-php, perl and java backends (docs on writing others)
-back button and bookmarking
-internationalization support
-dev tools: debugging, logging, unit test, code fomratting, validator, profiler, ide support, inspector
More Info:
–http://qooxdoo.org
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