AJAX: What Do I Need to Know (SXSW)
After writing my last post, I realized that I had “blogged through” the first morning session, which is unfortunate because I would have enjoyed “Better Blogging Brainstorms“. Jason Toney, who I met on the plane last night, covered it though (link).
But now I’m currently sitting in “AJAX: What Do I Need to Know“. And it is interesting because I know little about developing it. I enjoyed Jason Calacanis “calling bullshit” on it last week at BarCamp Los Angeles (lavoice.org covered Jason’s appearance at Barcamp). Jason’s big point was that there are a host of companies basically creating businesses around cool UI — and that the UI isn’t really that cool anyway because it is basically just bringing web apps to a level where desktop apps were 10 years ago. He’s repeatedly made the claim that a big list of AJAX-based sites will be out of biz within 3 years (insert link).
I also remember a great post from VC Fred Wilson on how Indeed.com’s new tools show how much job demand there is for Ajax right now (link).
So the specific references to various toolkit libraries are currently a bit over my head (note to self: really need to work on API mashups skills soon to get good frontend development experience).
Highlights:
- Dylan Schieman (Dojo Toolkit, Renkoo Inc) primarily
talked about the standardization issues with Ajax (lack of
stardardization about what happens with Back Button, etc). He also
spoke about various toolkit libraries and how most look very similar to scripting languages (Prototype = Ruby, Mochikit = Python, Zimbra = Java, YUI = PHP, but his Dojo toolkit is more of a blend).
- Dori Smith (dori.com) also talked about standardization issue (back button, bookmarking) and harped on most toolkits’ lack of browser, platform, and version support (she plugged the Yahoo! JavaScript developer tools and overall YDN developer kit for being “surprisingly clear and transparent” for a large corporation in terms of what is supported.
- Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path (I love that I’m in Texas listening to a guy names Jesse James talk about web stuff) stated that he coined the term AJAX as a cool name. He asked, “why is this happenning now?”. And he stated it is primarily because we are smarter now and the sophistication of programmers has
evolved significantly over 10 years. (Dori rebutted that broadband ubiquity has also helped since most AJAX apps are broadband dependent). He also mentioned that people are excited about AJAX because it is the obvious next step in web apps, but it isn’t the last step…it is just a step in decoupling user interaction from server-client interaction.
- David Humphreys (dbhumphreys.com) was also on the panel but I missed his intro…!
Now it is on to lunch and the afternoon panels. I’m thinking that “Cyberplace: Online in Offline Spaces — And Vice Versa” looks fascinating. And with a little downtime, maybe I’ll finally get my work documentation done too (though I also would really like to look through the film screening schedule!)
Technorati Tags: SXSW, SXSW06, SXSWi06, AJAX, Austin, design
