Here’s a random picture someone took of us right before we gave that first talk:

(Surely we’re just reviewing the slides in this pic, not hurriedly hacking together something at the last minute.)

Because the Ajax space was moving so quickly, we wanted a place to track the fun hacks, great libraries, and fantastic showcases that were coming out daily, so we started using Ajaxian to post Ajax news and very occasionally, an editorial. It’s fun to think back to those early times; the web world was drunk with new possibilities and no one was really quite sure how the draw the boundaries.

After a few months, things were moving so fast we thought it would be great to get the emerging Ajax community together. With help from Jay Zimmerman of No Fluff Just Stuff and Chris Haven, we put together the first Ajax Experience show in San Francisco. It was incredibly fun seeing so many of the folks in person we’d been covering on the site, and sharing with the broader developer community what was now possible.

Our little Ajaxian blog grew over time–we still remember with awe when someone compared the traffic Ajaxian sent them to Slashdot–and we’ve gone on to co-produce several more Ajax Experience shows. It’s been a thrilling ride.

Now, years later, it’s time for us to formally hang up our Ajaxian hats. We’ve always juggled the site with our full-time jobs (various start-ups, Google for Dion, Mozilla, Palm, and now HP), and posting daily while balancing families and work can wear on you after a while–we can’t do it all anymore. TechTarget (the company that has owned Ajaxian.com for some time) will take on editorial ownership of the site. We will still carry on posting every so often–it’s in our blood–but it won’t be on a regular schedule.

This transition comes at an important time for us. Palm was an opportunity to show the world that an OS based on the Web can be fantastic, but now, with HP’s resources behind Palm, there’s an even bigger opportunity ahead that will require all of our focus and energy. Oh, and it’s summer, too. :-)

Thanks for being there for us over the years. We look forward to the next series of adventures. With HTML5 continuing to build steam and browser innovation hotter than ever, it is going to be a great time for us Web folk.

As always, you can keep up with us on Twitter: Ben and Dion.

All the best,

Ben and Dion

Below is the latest agenda at-a-glance with over 40 essential sessions, case studies, interactive panels and insightful keynotes from Dion and Ben of Ajaxian.com, Brendan Eich, Douglas Crockford and Ross Boucher. Register now to take advantage of $100 early-bird savings and join your peers right in Boston. This great offer expires on Friday, August 28.

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DAY ONE – Monday, September 14

7:00 – 8:00 a.m.   Registration and Welcome Refreshments

8:05 – 9:05 a.m.   Keynote: ‘The Future of Ajax: The Browser Reinvented’ with Ben Galbraith and  Dion Almaer, Co-founders, Ajaxian.com

9:05 – 9:45 a.m.   5-minute Lightning Rounds (HOT Ajax topics coming soon!)

9:45 – 10:10 a.m.   Refreshment Break, Peer and Vendor Networking

10:10 – 11:10 a.m.   Choose between:
‘Design Tips for Dynamic UIs’ with Patrick Lightbody
‘Beyond IFrames: Web Sandboxes’ with Scott Isaacs
‘Building Accessible User Interfaces with jQuery and Fluid Infusion’ with Colin Clark
‘From Desktop to Web – Getting it Right’ with John Trelfa

11:20 – 12:00 p.m.   Luncheon Keynote

12:00 – 12:50 p.m.   Lunch and Peer Networking

1:00 – 2:15 p.m.   Panel: ‘ES5: ECMAScript Standards for a Better Web’ led by Allen Wirfs-Brock
Panelists: Brendan Eich, Douglas Crockford, Mark Miller

2:25 – 3:25 p.m.   Choose between:
‘Interoperable Ajax Tools and Mashups’ with Adam Peller
‘API Doc Smackdown: YUI Doc versus JS Doc Toolkit’ with Ted Husted
‘Even Faster Web Sites’ with Steve Souders
‘Designing for Interesting Moments’ with Bill Scott

3:25 – 3:50 p.m.   Refreshment Break, Peer and Vendor Networking

3:50 – 4:15 p.m.   New Technology Launch

4:15 – 5:15 p.m.   Keynote: ‘The JSON Saga’ with Douglas Crockford, Author, ‘JavaScript: The Good Parts’; Creator, JSON

5:15 p.m.   Ajax Experience Evening Event

DAY TWO – Tuesday, September 15

7:30 – 8:00 a.m.   Registration and Welcome Refreshments

8:05 – 9:05 a.m.   Keynote: ‘ECMAScript Harmony and the Future of JavaScript’ with Brendan Eich, Creator, JavaScript; CTO, Mozilla Foundation

9:05 – 9:35 a.m.   5-minute Lightning Rounds (HOT Ajax Topics)

9:35 – 10:00 a.m.   Refreshment Break, Peer and Vendor Networking

10:00 – 11:30 a.m.   Choose between:
Standards Session with Brendan Eich
‘Web Compatibility and Performance Testing in a Multi-Browser World’ with Imad Mouline & Ryan Breen

11:40 – 12:20 p.m.   Luncheon Keynote

12:20 – 1:10 p.m.   Lunch and Peer Networking

1:20 – 1:50 p.m.   Vendor Tech Sessions

2:00 – 3:00 p.m.   Choose between:
‘Advanced Web Application Security’ with Joe Walker
‘Adaptive Static Resource Optimization in the Ajax World’ with David Wei & Changhao Jiang
‘Object-Oriented CSS: for Scalable, Fast and Beautiful Web Applications’ with Nicole Sullivan
‘JavaScript: The Good Parts’ with Douglas Crockford

3:00 – 3:25 p.m.   Refreshment Break, Peer and Vendor Networking

3:25 – 4:25 p.m.   Choose between:
‘Ample SDK: Standards-based Runtime for Client-side Applications’ with Sergey Ilinsky
‘How to Simplify and Automate Testing Ajax Applications’ with Ted Husted
‘Web Services and JavaScript – Using and Offering Data on the Web for All of Us’ with Christian Heilmann

4:25 – 5:25 p.m.   Ask the Expert Discussion Groups (Meet one-on-one with speakers)

5:25 p.m.    Ajax Experience Evening Event

DAY THREE – Wednesday, September 16

7:30 – 8:00 a.m.   Welcome Refreshments

8:05 – 9:05 a.m.   Keynote: ‘The Future of Development Tools’ with Ross Boucher, Co-founder, 280 North

9:05 – 9:20 a.m.   5-minute Lightning Rounds (HOT Ajax Topics coming soon!)

9:30 – 10:30 a.m.   Choose between:
‘Improving Facebook’s Performance with Ajax and Browser Caching’ with David  Wei & Changhao Jiang
‘Bringing Data to Life in the Browser with the YUI Library’ with Jenny Han Donnelly
‘Designing for the Mobile Web with JavaScript’ with Brian LeRoux
‘Building Voice Recognition and Audio Recording into Web Applications with WAMI’ with Andrew Sutherland

10:30 – 10:55 a.m.   Refreshment Break, Peer and Vendor Networking

10:55 – 12:55 p.m.   Panel: ‘Secure Mashups: Getting to Safe Web Plug-ins’ with Douglas Crockford, Scott Isaacs, Mike Samuel, Marcel Laverdet

12:25 – 1:15 p.m.   Lunch and Peer Networking

1:25 – 2:25 p.m.   Choose between:
‘The Challenges and Rewards of Writing a 100K-line JavaScript Application with Laurens van den Oever
‘Building Rich Web Applications with Ext JS 3.0′ with Rich Waters
‘Cappuccino Web Framework’ with Ross Boucher

2:35 – 3:35 p.m.   Choose between:
‘Testing the Testers: YUI Unit versus QUnit’ with Ted Husted
‘Building a Web Application with Atlas, Start to Finish’ with Ross Boucher
‘Web. Smartphone. Future. Now.’ with Jason O’Keefe
‘ARIA – Pushing Accessibility Even Further and How to Get Your Boss to Join in’ with Joe McCann

3:35 p.m.   Conference ends

Visit AjaxExperience.com to learn more and save $100!

What are Lightning Rounds?:
Lightning Rounds are 5 minute sessions are designed to showcase new cool Ajax stuff, cutting edge technology, new solutions and emerging trends; it is also an opportunity to get new information out to the community.  Speakers are limited to 3-5 slides.

The Perks:
The Ajax Experience attracts the very best experts in the field. In addition to free registration to the conference (for speakers unaffiliated with a commercial Ajax vendor), as a speaker, you will enjoy the prestige and satisfaction of presenting to the most active and committed members of the profession.

What to submit:
- Your bio: 100 words or less with information that ties your presentation to your area of expertise.
- Your photo: jpeg file preferred.
- Lightning Round Proposal Form

Where to Send Proposals:
Email your proposal form to ajaxexperience@techtarget.com

Thanks for your interest in speaking at the show!
- Dion and Ben

And, don’t forget – not only will you get a free book, you also save $100 through August 28th!

Here’s the scoop:

Anyone who registers for The Ajax Experience over the next 2 weeks can take their pick of a FREE book from our extensive developer’s library. Book titles include Javascript for Programmers, Ajax Security, Comet and Reverse Ajax: The Next-Generation Ajax 2.0, Practical Ext JS Projects with Gears, Scripting Intelligence: Web 3.0 Information, Gathering and Processing and more – valued at up to $100+!

The packed agenda is reason enough to attend, but we thought you’d enjoy a free book as an incentive for registering early. Register before Friday, August 14 and select a free book of your choice. A special thanks to our publishing partners for making this happen!

Sincerely,
- The Ajaxian.com team

PS – We’re considering putting The Ajax Experience online at a future date. Would you be interested in attending a virtual seminar? Sign up here to let us know you’re interested and to stay informed about future events.

A quick reminder that $300 off The Ajax Experience conference expires this Friday, July 31. The Ajax Experience is September 14 – 16 in Boston, MA.
www.AjaxExperience.com

Be an early bird. Save $300 now!

We hope to see you there!
The Ajaxian.com team

The Ajax Experience is September 14-16 in Boston. $300 early bird savings are good through this Friday, July 31.

Awesome keynote presentations include:

• Ben and Dion of Ajaxian.com’s ‘The Future of Ajax: The Browser Reinvented’
• Douglas Crockford’s ‘A Web of Confusion: Security in the Browser’
• Brendan Eich’s ‘JavaScript 2 and The Future of the Web’
• Ross Boucher’s ‘The Future of Development Tools’

Check out the The Ajax Experience at-a-glance. Register now to save $300!

It’s only been two weeks since we announced open registration for The Ajax Experience with the promise of additional sessions being added to the web site over the next few weeks. And while a number of your peers have already applied and taken advantage of the $300 early-bird discount (which expires at the end of next month), we’ve already added more sessions to our agenda, including:

• ‘Cappuccino Web Framework‘ with Ross Boucher, Co-founder of 280 North
• ‘Even Faster Web Sites’ with Steve Souders, Performance Engineer at Google and author of Even Faster Web Sites
• ‘Testing the Testers: YUI Unit versus QUnit’ with Ted Husted, Author of JUnit in Action, Struts in Action and more.  Others from Ted: ‘Testing Ajax Applications‘ and ‘API Doc Smackdown: YUI Doc Versus JS Doc Toolkit‘
• ‘Advanced Web Application Security’ with Joe Walker, Creator of DWR
• ‘Building Accessible User Interfaces with jQuery and Fluid Infusion’ with Colin Clark, Co-founder of Fluid and Contributor to jQuery UI
• ‘Designing for the Mobile Web with JavaScript‘ with Brian LeRoux, Co-creator of XUI and a Contributor to the PhoneGap project
• Panel: ‘ES5: ECMAScript Standards for a Better Web’ led by Allen Wirfs-Brock, ECMAScript Language Architect, Microsoft
• Panel: Secure Mashups: Getting to Safe Web Plugins led by Douglas Crockford, Author of JavaScript: The Good Parts
• And more!

The speakers and attendees at The Ajax Experience are working with the most advanced technologies today, building Ajax and rich Web front ends, as well as figuring out new ways to make response time still faster. And if security, performance, and SOA are important to you, you’ve come to the right place.

Your $300 discount expires the end of July – register now

If you have any questions about registration, traveling to Boston or bringing a team, please contact your Delegate Relations Manager, Jackie Anderson at janderson@techtarget.com or 781-657-1380. She’s more than happy to assist you.

See you at The Ajax Experience!

Over the last 3 months that is, without question, the most frequently received email we’ve had from Ajaxian members like you. The good news is that the wait is finally over! Registration has officially opened for this year’s Ajax Experience conference and best of all, we’re offering you $300 off when you register by July 31st. Check out our just-launched Web site right here for all the benefits we have lined up for you this year:  The Ajax Experience, September 14-16 in Boston, MA

Please Note: While we’ll be adding the bulk of our sessions to our individual conference tracks over the next few weeks, we want to be sure you take advantage of the early-bird discount now. That said, we’ve once again confirmed today’s best and brightest Ajax minds from across the globe and we’re featuring a number of these keynote presenters and session experts for your review on the site right now, including:

* Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, Co-founders of Ajaxian.com
* Brendan Eich, Creator of JavaScript and CTO of Mozilla
* Douglas Crockford, Creator of JSON and Author of JavaScript: The Good Parts
* Bill Scott, Director of UX at Netflix
* Ross Boucher, Co-founder of 280 North and the Cappuccino & Atlas frameworks
* Joe Walker, Creator of DWR
* Nicole Sullivan, Creator of Object-Oriented CSS
* David Wei and Xiang Chaong, Research Scientists at Facebook
* And more! 

More essential speakers and sessions to be announced in the coming weeks, so stay tuned and start planning. One feature we think you’re going to love this year is “session previews.” Each morning we’re featuring 5-minute lightning rounds where presenters entice the audience to attend their session by giving them a brief synopsis of what they will learn. Now you’ll have even more exposure to new, cutting-edge technologies and proven solutions – and a better idea of how to spend your days.

 Don’t delay, register now for The Ajax Experience to take advantage of your $300 early bird savings.

Please click here for more details on what we’re looking for and how to submit your proposals.  Here is the official submission form. Deadline for submissions is April 1st.

See you at The Ajax Experience in September!

• Contribute news and become a part of the innovative future of Ajax and Rich Internet Application development?
• Post comments to discussion threads and share your insights with your peers?
• Receive focused email updates on the topics such as news, technical resources and announcement that matter to you most?
• Be the first to learn about new site features such as in-depth tutorials, exclusive research and more

Activate your free Ajaxian.com membership today and begin enjoying all the benefits that thousands of your peers have been taking advantage of.

Bonus: If you register thru this link by this Friday, November 21st, you will be entered to win 1 of 5 Ajaxian t-shirts. Get yours today!

Today, we are really excited to be able to announce a big personal change. Ben and I are joining forces, full time, for the first time. What are we doing? We are joining Mozilla to create a new group with the charter to create developer tools for the Open Web.

Mozilla is placing a big bet, not only on us, but in the developer tools space.

Why are we doing this? Ben and I are passionate about a couple of things: compelling software and developers. In various roles in the past, we have built tools that attempt to make developers productive. We are huge advocates for the Open Web, yet we feel that tools are lacking on our collective platform. We want to help make a difference.

As we ramp up this new group, we will be looking at the problem and seeing where it makes sense to step in. We are going to be experimenting, and thinking about how to make developers lives better in different ways, so we aren’t expecting to see traditional tools come out of this group. Also, we don’t want to do this alone. We want to involve the entire community which is one reason that we are so excited to kick off this work at Mozilla. We believe that we have a unique opportunity to put developers first. We can build these tools in the open, with total transparency; the Mozilla way.

We respect the work being done by other vendors, and very much want to work together. We can’t wait to reach out early-on in the process, involving companies that believe in the Open Web like we do. Together we can drastically improve productivity, allowing developers to build compelling user experiences.

We are just getting started. As soon as we come up with some ideas, we will be sharing then with you and asking for community participation in various forms. You, the Ajaxian community, have been phenomenal over the years, and we can’t wait to do more together.

For our personal takes, see what I said and Ben thought.

Continuing their march into the RIA space, Adobe announced today the official release of AIR v1.0 and Flex 3.0.

Adobe has taken the beta off of the wrapper as their have released both AIR 1.0 and Flex 3.0.

As Ajax developers, Adobe is trying hard to get us developing applications, not just Flash folks. They have a place for us to start with AIR:

The new Adobe AIR runtime enables Ajax developers to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that deploy on the desktop. AIR applications run across operating systems on the WebKit HTML engine and are easily delivered using a single installer file. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use their existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web.

Adobe AIR

The AIR runtime and SDK has gone through an especially long beta cycle (since June 2007) to ensure that both security and compatibility with existing frameworks was achieved. Some key new and/or updated features include:

• Enhanced Desktop Fucntionality: Drag and drop to the operating system, copy and paste between applications, launching of AIR applications from the desktop or the browser, and run in the background with notifications.
• Data Access: Adobe AIR now provides both synchronous and asynchronous access to the local file system, as well as structured data within a local database. This database is implemented using the open source SQLite database.
• JS Library Support: Most major Ajax frameworks can be used to build AIR applications. Supported frameworks include jQuery, Ext JS, Dojo, and Spry. Adobe AIR integrates JavaScript and ActionScript to allow cross-scripting between the two languages, and integrated rendering of Flash and HTML content.
• Security: Applications built on Adobe AIR can only be installed through a trustworthy install process that verifies that the application is signed via industry standard certificates, providing users with information about the source and capabilities of the application.

Flex 3.0

Adobe’s Flash-based RIA development platform, Flex, continues to mature and has been picking up steam in both the corporate space as well as sites such as blist and Scrapblog who have embraced Flex whole-heartedly. Some of the new features in Flex 3.0 include:

• Intelligent coding, interactive step-through debugging, and visual design of user interface layout
• New capabilities for creating RIAs and building applications on Adobe AIR
• Integrates with Adobe Creative Suite® 3 making it easy for designers and developers to work together more efficiently.
• New testing tools, including memory and performance profilers and integrated support for automated functional testing, speed up development and lead to higher performing RIAs.

One of the most compelling parts of the Flex announcement is the fact that Adobe has released the Flex SDK under the open source Mozilla Public License.

Adobe Open Source Site Launch

Finally, Adobe announced the launch of their new Adobe Open Source site which aims to “presents the definitive view into open source activities at Adobe, including details regarding projects that Adobe participates in and hosts.”

The new…website is designed to keep you up to date on Adobe open source activities, within Adobe as well as with the larger world. It will also be the point of entry to our source code contributions, including Flex, BlazeDS and others. We’ll post news items, tell you where to see us, and keep you in touch with some of our favorite bloggers.

Currently, the site houses the Flex SDK, BlazeDS and Tamarin projects, all of which have been open-sourced by Adobe.

Aptana has coordinated the release of their AIR plugin that includes support for Jaxer which allows you to write AIR apps that run on the desktop that include server-side code, written in JS, that can run on your backend server.

Adobe also put together a list of featured applications that you can check out.

Hitting a “1.0″ release is a big deal (as is a 1.0.1 ;), so congratulations to the entire Air team. Adobe is working hard to raise the bar in the RIA space by giving developers more tools with great functionality. 2008 is panning out to be an interesting year in web development.

Ben and I are at Adobe Engage today, and hope to find out more about Adobes plans in the coming year. We are live twittering using the #engage hash tag.

To end with something a little fun, and since it was the Oscars tonight:

NOTE: Rey and I both wrote a post on this big release. This post is a conjoining of both posts into one

1. It is the end of the summer, and people are probably working again. As such, we have seen a huge increase in submissions and interesting news out there
2. Rey Bango has joined the ranks as an Ajaxian. He has been adding a lot to the Ajax community for quite some time, so it is fantastic to have him contributing directly to Ajaxian through his own insightful posts.

Welcome Rey. Here is his bio:

Rey Bango



Rey Bango is Vice President of Business Development for Ext JS and member of the jQuery JavaScript library’s Core Project Team. With over 18 years of experience, Rey brings a unique perspective to RIA development having built true desktop applications for 8 years prior to moving into web programming and being keenly aware of the challenges involved in building desktop-like web applications.

He has developed a wealth of knowledge stemming from his work with such technologies as client/server, OOP, PowerBuilder, Sybase, ASP, ColdFusion, DHTML, & Ajax. His blog can be found at reybango.com.

On a side note, the rotating snippets at the top of the site are getting a little stale aren’t they. Since you as a community are all more witty than the few of us, I thought that you may have some ideas for new bylines. Take a shot in the comments!

We’re also pleased to announce that the Ajax Experience conference registration site is now live. Check it out at www.ajaxexperience.com and sign up today. With the call for papers in the review stage, obviously there’s going to be a ton of content at the show not yet represented on the site, but you get the idea.

You may also notice that ajaxexperience.com now redirects to ajaxexperience.techtarget.com. Earlier this year, we joined forces with TechTarget to co-produce the Ajax Experience conferences and to bring more resources to running Ajaxian.com. Ajaxian has been getting less and less of our time through the years as our lives have gotten busier and we felt like it was time to get some help as we move into the future. This means you can expect to see more content from us and more features on the site (e.g., resources for people who are new to Ajax and don’t find a stream of news stories as helpful as more remedial content, a section devoted to the frameworks, a *regular* podcast, and so forth).

Thanks to TechTarget for agreeing to help out and we hope to deliver great content to you for years to come.

If you are blogging, tag it with “ajaxexperience” and/or “the ajax experience” so we can find it via Technorati.