Day 1 - Reporting from Ajax World

I arrived in New York City yesterday early morning to show Sun's offerings at Ajax World. The Roosevelt Hotel reservation desk was courteous to allow me a really early check in (7am). After spending day with family & friends yesterday, I attended the opening keynote by Douglas Crockford this morning. After 20 minutes of delay Jeremy Geelan of SYS-CON, chair of the show, opened it and highlighted that they are neither vendors nor developers and they are here to listen and share with the community. I think that was an interesting statement considering there are multiple players involved in the game.

Doug started with a show of hands asking questions about Ajax awareness and finally asked "Who knows what does Web 2.0 mean?". And there were around approx 10 hands showed up. This term "Web 2.0" is fuzzy and any attempt to version the world wide web seems irrational. At Sun, we refer to this fuzzy term as "Next Generation Web Application" that allow to develop Rich Internet Applications. But you'll see Sun using "Web 2.0" sometimes because of a general adoption of this term.

Sun Web Developer Pack is one such toolkit that provides binaries, tutorial, documentation, samples (including source) to build your next generation Web applications and deploy them on industry-grade containers such as GlassFish and Sun Java System Web Server and others.

Most of Doug's slides were saying just few words and then he was talking through them. He introduced Ajax, it's history, different attempts at Rich Internet Application development, JavaScript, security in Ajax applications, Ajax in mobile applications, and competition (Adobe's Apollo and Microsoft's WPF).

Even though the keynote started late, but it finished slightly before time allowing me to attend Real World Web 2.0 Comet-based Applications by Jean Francois. There he gave an overview of the problem solved by Comet, different approaches of Comet, Grizzly Comet in GlassFish, and how to write a Comet application using GlassFish. In summary, Grizzly Comet solves reduce the latency and load on server but there is no standard way to for Comet-based applications so there is no interoperability between implementations. Please stop by at Sun's booth if you are interested in seeing a demo or talk more about Sun's offerings in this space.

A complete glimpse of schedule is available here and Sun sessions are listed here.

As a side note, I find it weird that there is no free internet connectivity at Ajax World. Isn't the conference about sharing, community and connectivity ?

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