The AJAX Experience - Day 1

So, here I am at The AJAX Experience conference in Boston, MA. This is an industry event for Javascript and AJAX developers, as well as a chance for different vendors to promote their AJAX wares. Folks like AOL, Mapquest, Sun, Adobe, Google and the like are all here, along with IBM, and many other people.

There are also some AJAX/JS superstars here, like John Resig, the founder of jQuery, Alex Russel the founder of Dojo, Doug Crockford the "inventor" of JSON, along with a lot of other folks who are just as knowledgable, if not as well known.

Over the next couple of days, I am going to try and blog about the different sessions I am attending, the buzz I am hearing about, and any other minutia I may be privy too. I have already scoped out a couple of interesting sessions, and there are some more coming up.

One comment I will make before I get started on the sessions: this place is freakishly cold. And when the cold is bothering *me*, you know it must be akin to a commercial freezer.

Keynote - AJAX: Through the looking glass
by Kevin Survance, CTO of Mapquest

I thought Kevin did a pretty good job with his Keynote, and he actually hit along a lot of implementation issues and features that they've run into at Mapquest. He definitely is a comfortable speaker, however, I wish he had talked more about what they're doing to take on Google Maps. All he mentioned was the new beta of their service, but it looked like a simple Google Maps clone. Hopefully that's not all that it is for their sake.

One thing I didn't know was just how large their open source stack really is. Kevin took quite a bit of time out to thank the different open source communities, and it was actually nice to see.

The Future of Javascript by John Resig
John did an awesome job in this talk, and it was really interesting to see what's coming up in Javascript 2 and ECMAScript 4.
There are a lot of really cool features coming to Javascript, and a lot of new features that will please the Java developers among us. For instance, true classes, packages, interfaces, strong typing, and some other very cool features like block scope.

Here is something I thought was pretty cool to see:

var x : (string, int) = 5; // x can now only be either a string or an int (or null)

Now, I am a huge complainer and general rabblerouser when it comes to strongly typed languages. Personally, I feel that strongly typed languages hamper adoption, and make things way more complicated than they have to be.
However, I think that the option can be there for when it's needed.

There are however, quite a few strong opinions about this. There are a few people who are really unhappy with the implementation.
The goal is supposedly to make the language completely backwards compatible, but there is some debate on whether that's going to happen or not.

If the features I've listed above are "enforced" upon the users, then I would say they're bad ideas, but if they're options, I say great.

One of the other things Mozilla is working on is called ScreamingMonkey, which will enforce Javascript 2 to IE, if IE doesn't adopt it in their jScript implementation.

The way they're going to do this actually surprised me, considering my most recent post regarding the Flash Rendering Engine.
Basically, Adobe is going to be bundling the Tamarin javascript engine with the Flash plugin, which will give developers access to the new features of Javascript in any browser that supports Flash.
This is not only incredible news, but also makes me think I was on the right track with where I think Adobe should head.

Reaching the Entire World: Accessibility and Internationalization with Dojo with Adam Peller and Becky Gibson

This talk was somewhat dry, but incredibly important to me. It was a bit of a push for Dojo, which is understandable, given the name of the talk, and the fact that quite a few of these talks are very thinly veiled infomercials (much like every conference, I guess).

But what they talked about as far as the topics go were very interesting. The accessibility aspect was one of the ones that impacted me the most, in the sense of how we handle and should handle accessibility in Liferay.
Things like capturing keystrokes, and making sure to tab through the document were things that they addressed, and they listed off some facts that helped me personally realize just how large the market is for accessibility issues, as well as just how important it is for all.
To be honest, many developers have a hard time embracing the issue of accessibility. It seems to be an afterthought in most web applications, and much of the time it really is.
The problem, I think, stems from a lack of knowledge on just how many people have some sort of disability that hampers their access to the web, and just how possible it is for any one of us to be in a similar position.

I will confess that those two issues were responsible for my feelings on accessibility.
But what I didn't know was that:

  1. People with disabilities in the U.S. have over $175 Billion dollars in discretionary income every year
  2. Over 60 million people in China have a disability.

The other side of the talk was the internationalization issues in Javascript, which go way beyond our just submitting string keys. Things like date, time, currency and numeric formats are all issues that need to be taken into account. I have to give the Dojo team a lot of credit for what they've done in the i18n area, as well as the accessibility area.

Advanced Prototype by Stu Holloway
 
 Since I'm not a big Prototype user, and we're using jQuery so heavily, it may be a bit surprising that I visited this session, but I always love hearing new ideas, and the Prototype team has some really good ones.
 
 First, Stu is an awesome presenter. Something about him, his mannerism or something, remind me of Steve Carrell, so it was pretty entertaining.
 He was a big Javascript 2 basher, but he had a lot of interesting things he talked about with new functionality in Prototype, and you can tell he has a lot of experience in the industry.
 
 I can't say I agree with everything he said, but overall it was pretty interesting.
 
 I breifly stopped by the Comet presentation, but it was pretty dry, so I decided to step out and begin writing this blog post.
 
 
Stylesheet based Behavior by Dan Yoder
This talk was by far the most boring I've ever been to. I had to walk out, because not only was the talk only vaguely related to what the title is, Dan seriously was uncomfortable in front of everyone.
The whole thing was just this push his super esoteric javascript library that no one has heard of, has little to no community, and from a design standpoint doesn't really offer any benefit.

It was pretty darn painful.

After the sessions, I went back to my room for a while, where I was able to follow up on some emails, bug fix requests, etc, all of which I'm still trying to keep up on.

Later on that night, I went out to dinner with the jQuery team, and John Resig and I talked for a while about some different ideas, and some proposals for jQuery and some ways that Liferay can help them and they can help us.

It was really interesting to say the least, and when I am able to, I will talk about some of the different ideas we have for jQuery, and some interesting ways we might be working together in the future.

I'm looking forward to a lot of tomorrow's sessions. An old friend of mine lives in town, so we're going to be going to dinner.
Mike Young has been pestering me to visit Mike's Pastry, which seems to be every bit as well known as Mike has been saying, so I am going to be checking that out.

I will most likely be working a bit in the morning, so I will miss a few of the opening sessions, which is fine, seeing as they're all pretty introductory (Intro to jQuery, Introduction to contributing to an Open Source project, etc).

Until tomorrow, I am outta here :)

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