Blogs

Way back in May of this year (I have been thinking about this post for a while now!) Andre and I were down at JavaOne to give a presentation and also had the chance to take part in the always interesting (at least two years in a row now) RedMonk CommunityOne session. It was good to take part in the cloud computing, twitter and open source discussions - one great take away was “don’t drink and tweet”. I digress.

Of most interest to me was the round table discussion about “what is an RIA?“. There were various opinions on this that I will not repeat here and let you read over on RedMonk.

What didn’t come through on the RedMonk review was what I thought, arrived at through the great discussion, was really the defining characteristic of Rich Internet Applications. In the end it was not about flashy graphics or animations. The one defining characteristic of an RIA is that there is no page refresh.

That’s it. That is all there is to RIA. If you have an application running over the network that does not have a page refresh then that is an RIA - be it using Flash, Ajax or a Java Applet. The discussion went back and forth until Jeremiah Stone from SAP finally talked some sense (afterwards we had a very interesting discussion and I really need to follow up with him) saying that good design is dependent on the context of the problem being solved. Now this is a really important idea since if you are used to working with a keyboard accessible green screen application, a visual mouse driven GUI will probably be far less usable. It is all context dependent. I may take longer to learn the green screen application but it will likely pay dividends in productivity down the road.

At any rate, long story short, the one common theme that people presented was that an RIA is defined by an application that has no page refresh, whether it is made for a user of a terminal or a new web 2.0 application.

I had my epiphany at the very end of the session and was pretty much lost on deaf ears of people who were about ready for a cold one (aside from Duane who was thoroughly liquored already ) . However, I felt somewhat vindicated when I was reading James’ post about the session when I noticed that there was a comment from David Mendels of Adobe, who was possibly responsible for defining the term while at Macromedia in the early 2000’s. Indeed David suggested that the original definition of an RIA was an application with no page refresh.

Based on that I think that the case of the meaning of RIA can be considered closed.

RIA == No page refresh

QED

UPDATE: Oh yah and hopefully we will be hanging out at the Redmonk unconference the rest of the time as Andre mentions below.

Looks like I am going to be speaking at CommunityOne again this year which is immediately before JavaOne down in San Fran.

I spoke at both last year but to tell you the truth I thought that the audience was much better (and bigger) at the CommunityOne presentation. Hopefully it will be good again this year.

Last year I presented on Ajax testing and debugging while this year I am going to talk about something more JavaScripty in DOM design patterns. I am going to write a blog post shortly about the idea and try to get some feedback from everyone.

It looks like Joe will giving a presentation on Free the Net at Open Web Vancouver this year!

Nice one Joe!

It feels like I have been sitting on half a dozen blog posts about AIR and JavaScript for a while now - and I will sit on them for a little longer still

Anyhow, things have been busy at Nitobi of late with starting new projects, deploying projects like Jiibe, hiring new people to fill in our Interaction Design and Information Architecture positions, speaking at GWT conferences (well Andre and Alexei did all the talking), and consulting on various projects.

Currently I am down in Portland for another few days where I am helping Nike implement our Ajax Grid in some of their B2B systems. Undoubtedly the best thing about Portland is the fact that there are so many breweries, pubs, and even, oh yes, brew pubs. So last Friday I hit North 45, Lucky Lab, Bridgeport and Rogue with a few of the very nice folks from Nike. I also started to make a Portland pub map - the traveling salesman problem really hits home once you start thinking about how to enjoy a few pubs most efficiently.

Needless to say it was a good time with great beer! Looking forward to coming back that’s for sure.

The Ajax Experience East 2007 conference is now all done, I can tell because I am finally back at home in Vancouver

Yesterday was a long day since we were up at 4am PST for our flight to Seatle, where we met up first with Ryan Stewart of Adobe for a quick beer at the Airport (Thermo sounds _really_ cool) before he went on to MAX in Tokyo and then had lunch with Adam Phillabaum of Payscale somewhere in Seatle. After that we drove for three hours back up to Vancity at which point I was starting to get a bit tired but instead had a few beers ad when to check out the Parade of Lost Souls.

Very scary stuff! (picture from blackeyedpete)

I gave my presentation on Ajax Testing and Debugging on Friday and Andre was part of a panel discussion about the future of Ajax with John Resig, Doug Crockford and Aza Raskin. All in all the conference was really good and I finally met fellow Canadian Brent Ashley face to face along with a pile of other smart people.

Andre and I are in Boston for The Ajax Experience!

I am presenting tomorrow at 3:45 on Ajax Testing and Debugging so be there - or be around after to go for a beer.

Ok, I was a bit quick on the draw there about chapter 8 (thanks for the comments about the broken link!) but now the link for the Enterprise Ajax chapter 8 sample is live! Get it while it’s hot.

Btw Andre is in New York this week at Ajax World East and the OpenAjax meetings so if you are also in town be sure to ping him!

It appears that I have been accepted to give a talk at JavaOne this year - w00t.

The title of the presentation is “Practical Parallels: From Development on the Java Platform to Development with the JavaScript Programming Language”. So essentially I will be talking about all the tools of the JavaScript trade used for testing, debugging, deployment, and documentation.

I will be talking at 6:45 on the Wednesday night (May 9 I think) and will certainly be around for some beers afterwards

It looks like I will be in Paris to give a presentation at XTech 2007 (May 15-18).

I will be talking about declarative approaches to Ajax and looking at some of the important cross browser issues that may be encountered. I will also give a quick high level overview of some of the important declarative languages that we can use for guidance and inspiration.

Ping me if you will be in Paris during that time - I will also be spending a little time in London around then as well.

It has been a while since any serious blogging has taken place but I think that I should get some in over the upcoming holidays. Also, we have been very busy getting the final touches on Enterprise Ajax and getting started on new development plans.

As some will know from listening to the Nitobi podcast, we are currently building some new components such as a Tab, Tree and a Date Picker. For the start they will be fairly standard Ajax components but we have some cool new ideas for old patterns that should make some waves in the Ajax user-interface space.

At any rate, one of the first parts of our yet to be named Ajax user interface suite is going to be the Framework. The Framework is going to be where all the nuts and bolts are located that allow developers to build their own Ajax solutions using both our basic cross browser libraries as well as our component architecture.

For the most part, the Framework will have some important features such as:

• XMLHttpRequest (Throttling, polling, timeout, events etc)
• DOM Events
• JavaScript Events (MVC)
• DataSet / DataTable (ActiveRecord)
• Object Serialization (XML and JSON)
• Declaration Parsing
• Back Button History
• OOP Inheritance, Interfaces and Garbage Collection
• Effects
• Drag + Drop
• Cross Browser HTML and DOM
• Cross Browser CSS
• Cross Browser XML

While many are similar to those things found in other frameworks out there (like the DOM events), we are keen to hear both what people think is lacking in other frameworks and what is a must have.

I am most excited about the serialization and declartive component stuff myself. It should really help developers build their own declarative components really easily.

One final note is that the Framework will be included in the suite but other than that we are not too sure what to do. Any ideas or comments on if, when, and how we might open source the Framework code would be more than welcome!

Oh crap, one more thing. What is important to people for a cross browser XHR object? What’s missing? I think that comet, throttling, timeouts and better events are a good start but what do you think? As the pipe gets bigger and more action is happening on the client we are thinking a lot about how the data is flowing from the server and how it gets handled by the client.