My Thoughts: International AJAXWorld Conference & Expo

The first International AJAXWorld Conference & Expo took place on October 2-4, 2006, in Santa Clara, California. The conference was presented by SYS-CON events. These are people that publish the .Net Journal, Cold Fusion Developers Journal, SOA, and now the AjaxWorld Magazine. The conference spanned 3 days, with an Ajax Boot camp the first day and 2 more 13 hour days filled with sessions on a variety of Ajax subjects and tools.

I did not attend the boot camp but I did talk to several attendees that did. They all said they were disappointed. The word was it was too much copying lines of code and not enough actual instruction on Ajax developing.

The other two days were filled with a lot of information about Ajax. There were several vendors of Ajax tools, frameworks and components. Each got several sessions to present their particular wares and explain how they helped or applied to Ajax development. I myself stayed away from these and visited the vendor’s booths to see what they had to offer and if it was something I could use. So far I’ve seen nothing to make me adopt any one of the many presented.

Both days started out with Keynote speakers. The first day Jesse James Garrett gave the keynote. It was a good presentation on the state of Ajax and where it could be headed. The second day Patrick Grady of Rearden Commerce gave the keynote. It was a very good talk on Service Oriented Apps (SOA) and he presented several ideas on how we should be thinking towards the next generation of SOA development.

As far as technical sessions three really stood out in my mind. Granted I only could attend a select few out of the 72 that were offered. I’ll start with the one that I walked away from with disgust. I won’t mention any names but the subject was about moving legacy apps to use Ajax. The presentation started pretty good but the speaker made a reference to cyclical references in IE. When he was asked to explain in more detail during his question and answer session he tried three times to come up with an answer. Three times he back tracked and finally gave up and said he couldn't remember the exact reasoning. As far as I was concerned he really blew his credibility.

Another standout, and one of the best sessions I attended was “Storyboarding Ajax Applications” by Eric Pascarello. Eric is coauthor of AJAX in Action. He discussed how story boarding can help both sell your idea to the client and provide an outline for development and assist the designer in developing the UI. I’m going to have to buy his book and read it.

Another one of the best was Professional JavaScript by Douglas Crockford of Yahoo. He gave a very good presentation on JSON (javascript object notation). He went over many of the aspects of JSON and how it can be used. It is a really good, easy to implement alternative to the X (xml) in Ajax. Be sure to visit the JSON link above and check it out if you haven’t already.

There were several other good presentations covering everything from 3D graphics in Ajax to creating mash-ups. Overall it was a good conference. I didn't meet many individuals who were developing in Ajax. There was a good many there that were evaluating whether Ajax would fit into their companies strategies. Hopefully there are more developers in attendance next time and the conference is more technical in nature.

Plan on attending next year. There is one planned in the spring in New York and I am hoping they do another one on the West Coast next fall. See you there…..