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Dave and I just got into Boston for the Ajax Experience.  We’re giving a talk on Ajax testing and debugging Friday at 3:45pm.

Here’s the brief from their site:

Building high-performance, robust Ajax applications is challenging at the best of times. But, without proper quality assurance and testing techniques, it can be treacherous.

Testing, QA and performance optimization is more important today than ever because of the large increase in Ajax user interfaces and the growing number of developers who have recently started using Ajax. Once Ajax developers have mastered using a popular framework they will need tools and techniques to ensure they are delivering a quality product into the marketplace. Properly tested and tuned Ajax applications will mean a reduced number of bugs, shorter QA cycles, faster websites and better user experiences.

In this session, Andre and Dave show you how to set-up a reliable test framework, methodology, and build process that automates much of the tedious, manual effort that comes with browser-based development.

This session will cover JavaScript unit testing, functional testing for your web application, automating the testing process, and debugging JavaScript and debugging server responses. Learn about testing and debugging with current tools such as FireBug, YSlow, JSUnit, Selenium and CruiseControl, as well as how to find memory leaks and increase performance with JavaScript optimizations. Andre and Dave will walk you through the debugging and testing tools available for Ajax developers, and how to use these tools to minimize bugs and build better Ajax applications.

In this session, you will learn:

• Testing tools and concepts for Ajax;
• Debugging techniques and tools;
• How to implement a solid QA strategy for your Ajax team.

Drop us a line or follow us on Twitter.  (Me & Dave)

Technorati Tags: ajax, ajaxexperience, boston, testing, qa, debugging

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I’ve pondered for a while where all this rich web and easier desktop development stuff is headed. I have a couple ideas:

1. Flash player could make your browser irrelevant much like the web browser makes your personal computer irrelevant.
2. AIR can do the same thing for the operating system irrelevant

Let me me explain this in a little more detail. The browser makes your operating system irrelevant (or less relevant) because you can access web based applications from a standard web browser the same way whether you’re on Mac, Windows or Linux. If I use MS Office, like I used too, I’m committed to windows, switching to Mac would be a pain.  If I use Google Apps, I  currently use Gmail and some Google Docs (but not exclusively) I can switch to any operating system or computer for that matter and booya all my tools and data are already there. The only catch is that the browsers do have slight differences that create a significant amount of work for the developers. The Flash player is evolving faster and faster. the browser is stagnating not due to technical challenges but due to battles between vendors and infighting within open-source projects. No single browser has the same mass adoption as the Flash player. Flash is one run-time, not cross-browser. Just having to develop for more than one environment (IE, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Barf!) should make that self evident. Although this went mostly unknown in both the Ajax and Flash/Flex communities, there was talk after the last Ajax Experience to run WebKit inside of the Flash player (like AIR does kind of) and run all your Ajax in there. One HTML renderer across all browsers via Flash. Ironic eh.

Their proposed solution is this:

1. You make a web page using HTML, CSS and JS as you do today.
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 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.

OR

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.

Sounds like crazy Adobe marketing speak doesn’t it?  Well this was proposed by a group including Brad Neuberg, Glen Lipka and Alex Russell.  None of whom are Adobe fanboys, and open-source advocates to the end. This is totally feasible especially with the advances they’re making in the Flash player and converting C code to Action Script. So there you go our just barely “good enough” technology, Ajax, leveraging the far superior Flash for it’s ubiquity and uniformity to run everywhere.

A similar thing may happen with AIR.  While the war between Windows, Linux and Mac wages on users and developers won’t care, they’ll just turn to AIR.  But AIR isn’t powerful enough to build “real” desktop apps you say?  So what!  Sure it’ll be a while before we have Halo 3 or PhotoShop running and performing in Flash/Flex/AIR, maybe less than a decade though according to Bruce Chizen.  We already have word processors, Wii style games and image management/editing which my grandmother and the lions share of all computer users need and/or use.  I bet Adobe will have more desktop installs of Webkit with AIR than Apple with Safari.  I think a few things have really accelerated Flash penetration in last few years namely video and advertising. I don’t know what the killer driver for AIR adoption is going to be yet.

AIR, Flash/Flex and Ajax can all have a very similar development models, which are already widely used. How many people do you know who can write a little HTML or maybe even Flash?  Probably a few to a lot depending on your scene. How many people do you know who can write Java, C++ or .Net? Probably not as many. Ajax already has one of the fastest uptakes and steepest growth curves of any development technology. When you combine this with the ability to switch at runtime from Ajax to Flex with the same markup, you can imagine hybrid Ajax/Flex developers becoming the norm. So now we’re looking at nearly ubiquitous runtimes and development models. Then you combine the ease of development of the Ajax or Flex world with the power to run existing C code that can run anywhere, well that’s hard to beat.  I guess the one downside is only that one vendor can control most of it, which we’ve experienced before.

I think with a little better tooling, some interesting cross pollination and some innovative companies we could be in a very different place in the near future.

One thing is for sure, the cost of switching applications from a consumers perspective is quickly approaching zero as you’ll be able to run any application or any operating anywhere! Which means user experience becomes king!

Technorati Tags: ajax, flash, flex, air, adobe, webkit, browser, operatingsystem, windows, linux, mac

One more tick on the openess belt for Adobe. The barriers to adoption keep falling for Flash/Flex as an RIA platform. Now for the rampant promotion of 1 pixel swfs from them is all that’s left…but in the meantime.

Adobe is announcing tonight that the Flex SDK will be open sourced under the Mozilla public license, the same license that they open sourced the Action Script VM under (the Tamarin project). The move is just the latest in a trend of an increasingly open ecosystem around Flash and Flex which started with the Tamarin project.

More this from Ryan Stewart.

It’s interesting how they’re doing it progressively with the next release of Flex 3, first bugs then code. I think a lot of developers will be very excited about this. I wonder how this compares to the process went (is going) through. It makes sense from a revenue stand point if they’re only making money off builder and LCDS anyway. Smart move IMO.

“Open source co-creation is a powerful way to build a strong development community,” said James Governor of RedMonk.

I find James’ quote from the press release interesting as I suspect it’s going to be a long time before there is really co-creation of the Flex guts. Mind you I guess Fidelity is writing code for us. But who knows. I’m sure the development community will be able to find some new hacks and tricks with access to the code. I know we will:)
Technorati Tags: flex, opensource, compiler, ria, open, adobe, flexbuilder

Here are my slides from yesterday’s talk. If you can’t see the presentation below view them on SlideShare