The conference is at The Venetian, one of the nicest hotels on the strip, but found two irritating issues for working people:

• Using fitness center facilities require you to pay $35/day charge. That is ridiculous to me. They anyway charge fortune for the room so why this extra fee ? I used the facility yesterday without knowing the charge but found out about the charge as there were folks lined up on the "reservation desk" for the fitness center. I've never seen that for a fitness center in a hotel.
• There are no power connections on the office table. There is a personalized fax machine but I'd rather have a power connection to make it convenient.

TheServerSide sponsored the travel and lodging and check out the pictures of the suite, it's pretty cool!

I missed the opening keynote by Karen Tegan Padir but heard it went well. Later that day, I attended a session by Ben Galbraith and Dion Alamer (co-founders of Ajaxian) on "State of Ajax".

The session started by asking "Does anyone here not know how to do Ajax ?". There were few hands raised and so the session started by creating a simple HTML form that takes a zip code and returns the corresponding city using XMLHttpRequest without any page refresh. Then the talk explained three main Ajaxian architectures:

• Return data (JSON / XML) - Smart clients, parse XML and JSON and populate the front end.
• Return HTML (responseText + innerHTML) - Slightly dumb client, just shows the results as is.
• Return JavaScript (eval) - Really dumb client, invoke the script sent by server.

The talk identified Google Maps, Google Suggest, Housingmaps,  TaDaList as Ajax innovators. In my opinion, Google Suggest was really the first effort that showed Ajax-like interactions.

Ben and Dion divided JavaScript in two camps: "JavaScript is Good" and "JavaScript is Bad". jMaki was classified in the first camp, Google Web Toolkit in the second camp and Direct Web Remoting in partly both the camps. Project Phobos was also classified in "JavaScript is Good" camp as it enables server-side scripting. Ben will be uploading a new video on jMaki showing Craig's list mashup so stay tuned for that.

Prototype, Scriptaculous and Dojo were rated as the most popular toolkits in a survey conducted last year on Ajaxian. The speakers classified Dojo as "Huge Elephant of JavaScript" with support for offline storage, presentation, remoting, charts and many other features.

IntelliJ IDEA 6.0 and NetBeans 5.5 for development and FireBug for debugging were the recommended tools. Then there were few slides on offline storage, especially the upcoming capabilities in Firefox 3 (off-line cache, off-line events, persistent cache), dojo.storage package and Adobe Apollo with offline flash. There was a brief mention of Project Tamarin that will provide approx 10 times faster JavaScript runtime and this will be integrated in a later version of Firefox. And the talk concluded by giving a future slide including topics such as off-line Ajax, fast JavaScript interpreters, HTML 5 and others.

A complete Day 1 report is available here. Ed Ort also posted notes.

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