Ed Burns's Blog

JavaOne Video: AJAX DONE RIGHT

If you really want, you can skip the prose and go straight to the video. However, if you do, you'll miss out on where to download the demos.

This was an interesting JavaOne for me because I was in a funny position with respect to my talk. I had submitted a proposal for a JavaOne talk when the call for papers went around. JSF EG members Jacob Hookom and Adam Winer submitted a similar talk, unbeknownst to me. The JavaOne paper review team suggested we collaborate on a talk, and, since we were already collaborating informally on ideas, it was no problem to collaborate on a talk. But speaking of collaboration...

With AJAX being hot and new and all, everyone wants to get a piece of the pie, do something cool, and get famous. (I'm certainly no exception). With all of these chefs in the kitchen, approaches to AJAX are bound to overlap and in come cases conflict. I had been working with the Sun Blueprints team on their AJAX components, and some of the ideas we developed in those components have been picked up and extended by Shale Remoting. Meantime, Greg Murray had been working on his jMaki project. Then there's Jonas Jacobi and John Fallows and their weblets thing they have in their book. There is also ICESoft's icefaces and Exadel's ajax4jsf. Finally, there are a lot of ideas bobbing around on the myfaces dev list, some of them from my co-speakers Adam and Jacob. Clearly, there is a need for some community refactoring.

Now, here's the funny part. The approach to AJAX and JSF that Adam and Jacob have been advocating, and that I advocate as well, is different, yet potentially complimentary, to what Greg was doing with jMaki. It also does not align perfectly well with some of the things in Shale Remoting. It fits pretty well with ajax4jsf and I'm not sure really how it relates to icefaces. Now, come JavaOne, here I am standing on stage with Jacob and Adam, and the developers of all the AJAX technologies listed above (and probably more) were in the audience, and our talk was titled, "AJAX Done Right". As if to say, "everyone else is doing it wrong". I wasn't too comfortable with such a confrontational title, but, hey, this is the age of the technology smackdown and all that jazz, so I went along with it.

People tend to take critique of their creations personally, so I want to set the record straight and say that each approach has value and none of them have all the answers for all situations for doing AJAX. That's a good thing because we can harvest all these great ideas in the upcoming JSF 2.0 spec. In the meantime, Jacob and I are putting forward our take on JSF and AJAX in the JavaServer™ Faces Technology Extensions. Project. For more on the future of that project, I'll have an upcoming blog.

Now without further ado, here is the complete video of our talk AJAX DONE RIGHT in Flash Live Video format. Thanks to Dennis Byrne for shooting the video on Adam's camera.

The demo shown in this talk, as well as the demo shown at the Sun Web Tier Pod on the JavaOne 2006 show floor, are available for download here. You'll need to or Glassfish to run them.

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Comments

• Ed,

  You are soooo right about there being so many "recipes" for AJAX out there now,
  and, everyone is fighting for a piece of the pie. As long as something good comes out of all this, then a little "competition" might be good. Great presentation at JavaOne. Kudos to you, Adam and Jacob.

  -roger (JSF co-spec lead)

  Posted by: rogerk on May 31, 2006 at 11:59 AM

• Ed,I am really glad that you made this post.Sitting out here in "net land" and just reading about Java One, I have become confused about the relationship between JMaki, Jacob's work with you, etc.I would love it if you and Greg Murray would create a public forum for discussing the pros and cons of each approach.It's exciting to see the possibilities of AJAX, the server side Javascript stuff (phobos?), etc.... but it is also confusing to tell what's "ready for prime time" and what's just a cool idea.Please keep us posted.-JohnR

  Posted by: johnreynolds on June 01, 2006 at 06:22 AM

• Wow. This really highlights the different models of closed versus open source. At one extreme is Microsoft with .NET dictating everything just like the managed economy in the old Communist collective model and on the Java side is the free-market Capitalist creative destruction chaos of a dozen or more ways to 'do' AJAX all both similar and dissimilar and incompatible. I appreciate the creativity, but early markets are tough to work in because change is constant and there is no method to pick a technology that won't shift materially in the next 'seismic event' or invention. Are we this far down in the leading 'tail' of the curve of adoption with the innovator demographic until things settle or is the majority of AJAX being deployed using Java on the server-side. If its too early, then we should see a lot more LAMP than Java.

  Posted by: daniellord on June 01, 2006 at 07:42 AM

• Ed, Thanks for this post. I'd concur with JohnR about the need to clear the 'confusion' around these various approaches.
  Also, I really would like to look at the TS-1161 slides. I can't seem to get it from
  http://www.cplan.com/javaone2006/contentcatalog/ (liked from JavaOne conf. home page).

  Posted by: saisat on June 02, 2006 at 02:04 AM

• Hello Saisat,

  I'm not sure I can distribute the PDFs, so you'll have to watch the video. I have incorporated the slides into the video.

  Ed

  Posted by: edburns on June 02, 2006 at 06:25 AM

• Hi
  I am new to ajax, Today I wrote my first ajax program. I want to know is it possible using Ajax I can notify the client that some thing has changed in the server side. {My server side is in JAVA related tech}.
  Thanks
  Deepak

  Posted by: deepujain on June 09, 2006 at 05:24 AM

• I am amazed at the lack of documentation for integrating JSF 1.2 with Tomcat, JBoss or any other servlet containers/app servers.

  If we expect people to adopt these technologies, we should put up a simple installation page for people like me. The best I could find was this:

  http://java.sun.com/javaee/javaserverfaces/download.html

  Any help will be gratefully appreciated.

  Posted by: anonymouse on July 29, 2006 at 10:28 AM

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