A Bustling Day of Ajax in San Jose (Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog)

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A Bustling Day of Ajax in San Jose

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I just got back from Monday's terrific Real-World Ajax conference in San Jose. Admittedly, I was an invited keynote speaker so I might be forgiven for being a bit partial, but the sold-out crowd said it all: That Ajax has become an incredibly popular, mainstream subject in Web software development. The hosts of the conference put together an amazing schedule that lasted the better part of 12 hours of practically non-stop Ajax information and education. By the end, everyone had seen leading Ajax thinkers and evangelists, including the man behind the term itself, Jesse James Garrett, give their take on that rich Internet Application (RIA) technique that seems to be on everyone's mind these days.

Is Ajax for Web developers only?

Jesse James Garrett gave the opening speech and covered the reasons for how and why he came up the term. He also surveyed the audience to see how many corporate developers, Web developers, and Web designers were in the crowd. Surprisingly, the latter two about equally split up the bulk of the audience.   This bore out my experience with my conversations with many in the crowd. With so many Web designers having acquired fairly deep skills in markup and scripting languages over the years, particularly with technologies such as XHTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, and Perl, it's not surprising that they feel ready to start using Ajax. And depending on how motivated they are, they will have varying levels of success.

I would assert that one key adoption problems for Ajax will be that it does require full-up software development skills to do more than simple tasks. Issuing asychronous requests, tracking outstanding ones, using timer loops to check on their completion, all while throttling or batching requests can be pretty daunting to implement. And that can be the easy part. So while I believe Ajax applications can be used to create beautiful, immersive user interfaces, it comes at a fairly steep cost in development skills.

And as I said in my keynote, Ajax is primarily made of Dynamic HTML and XmlHttpRequest(), neither of which were designed initially to form the foundation of a new platform for Web development, though they both are certainly up to the task when using the newest browsers. Developing Ajax software, even with the tools that are available to make the job easier, is just not for the faint of heart, though the results can be very rewarding.

My Just Before Lunch Keynote on Ajax

While the official description of the speech was flattering, I do think I managed to cover many of the aspjects of Ajax that I find newcomers struggle with most, including the essential elements such as the DOM, Web services, asynchronicity in the browser, and the home Web server problem. I also discussed popular frameworks and widget libraries and their the design options as well as the overall context of Ajax, including performance. I also covered some of the patterns from the great collection of Ajax patterns at AjaxPatterns.org. As much as I could, I also squeezed in material about Ajax in the context of Service-Oriented Architecture, or SOA, something that will become increasingly common, particularly behind the firewall. As I'm sometimes liable to, I even waxed poetic about Ruby on Rails for building Ajax software.

Ajax is the RIA with Buzz: But Don't Count Out Flash, Flex, or Laszlo

Of course, Ajax isn't the only game in town, as long as you don't mind a Flash plug-in that is.   Flash is actually available in more browsers today than Ajax is, given that it become prevalent earlier. Flash plug-in distribution approaches 99% by some estimates. That being said, Flash has the disadvantage of not running fully in the browser "stack" and has a tendency to curb blendability with Ajax code, analytics packages, and other elements in the Web page.

However, the world of Flash and Ajax are increasingly become integrated as developers use one or the other -- at the same time -- depending on what is needed in a given situation. And on Monday, this is where I saw some particularly impressive demonstrations of Flex, an enterprise Flash application solution from Adobe. During his presentation, Christophe Coenraets gave a compelling tour of using Ajax and Flash (Flex 2.0) together in the very same Web page. The two communicated together to coordinate the activity in an Ajax widget with a Flash widget elsewhere on a Web page.

In the afternoon I sat down with the founder and CTO of Laszlo Systems, David Temkin, and he gave me quite a detailed overview of Laszlo, a declarative application development platform that also targets the Flash runtime. David showed me some absolutely terrific looking Web-based software built with Laszlo, including Gliffy, a feature-rich online Visio-like drawing application.

Laszlo has recently become an entirely free open source platform with the advent of the OpenLaszlo intiative, which also announced the inclusion of the popular Dojo Ajax toolkit yesterday. Understanding why Laszlo is better for Web application development than a native Flash development tool can be tough to figure out however. So I put the question to David on how to best capture the difference. David replied that approaches like Laszlo are targeted specifically at application developers as opposed to Web designers that might just be building animated content or other non-application Flash experiences.   Laszlo also jumps on the growing interesting in mark-up approaches for applications like XUL and Microsoft's XAML (see comparisons of these two with Ajax). Lastly, and certainly not least, Laszlo will offer the ability to target their markup to DHTML instead of just Flash in the near future. And that folks, will likely make Laszlo one of the most interesting Ajax approaches on the market in this author's humble opinion.

The Day's End: The Real-World Ajax Power Panel

The last session at Real-World Ajax was the Ajax Power Panel, a format where a bunch of Ajax experts get up on stage and respond to topics from the moderator and questions from the audience. I was fortunate enough to be on the panel along with Google's Adam Bosworth, Laszlo Systems David Temkin, Jesse James Garrett, Paul Rademacher of HousingMaps.com/Google, and Microsoft MVP Sahil Malik. Moderated by SYS-CON's always eloquent Jeremy Geelan, the initial topic surprisingly turned out to be the state of Web 2.0, certainly one of my favorite topics.

The panel ended up roaming all over the Web 2.0 map but inevitably ended up focusing primarily on the topic of the day, Ajax and Rich Internet Applications. Google's Adam Bosworth made the strongest showing, though all the panelists were quite good. Bosworth talked about physics being one of the biggest drivers of the latest round of software evolution on the Web, specifically with the predominance of broadband. He also talked about simplicity gradient of software, particularly in applications that are used less frequently, since users just won't spend time learning the complex features of seldomly used software. I got in some good pieces on the future of Web 2.0 and in general, it was one of the better Power Panels.

The next Real-World Ajax will be a two day affair in New York City on June 5th-6th, hope to see you there. I'll very likely be giving my Ajax keynote again as well as an important presentation at the accompanying SOA Web Services Edge conference on the convergence of Web 2.0 and SOA. Finally, Ajax is just one optional piece of Web 2.0 but it can richly enable the experiences and immersion which make the two-way Web such a better place. At the same time, Ajax also offers the most visible demonstration of the next generation of the Web. I will continue to follow the story of Ajax as it unfolds throughout the rest of the year, you can be sure to find all the latest right here.

Are you looking at Ajax, Flash, Flex, Laszlo, XUL, WPF/E, or something else entirely, to build your RIA?

posted Wednesday, 26 April 2006
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