Summer is right around the corner - so before you make any vacation plans here’s one quick action item to cross off your to-do list: Register now to lock in exclusive $300 savings for The Ajax Experience conference, September 14-16 in Boston, MA.
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:
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.
”When the heck are you guys going to open registration for The Ajax Experience this year!?”
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.
This week we opened the Call for Papers for The Ajax Experience 2009 being held in Boston, September 14-16. If you have experience with frameworks, techniques, or technologies that drive high performance Web applications, or build frameworks or other tools to enable the creation or test of Ajax applications, take a look at our call for papers to see where your talk may fit in.
We’re seeking a few good technologists and speakers for The Ajax Experience 2009, to be held in Boston on September 14-16, 2009. If you have experience with frameworks, techniques, or technologies that drive high performance Web applications, or build frameworks or other tools to enable the creation or test of Ajax applications, take a look at our call for papers to see where your talk may fit in.
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.
Following-up from our previous posting, we’ve got some more Ajax Experience videos. This post’s theme is JavaScript and JSON:
Advanced Animation & Physics in JavaScript with Paul Bakaus
Forget about Web standards and go way beyond the usual capabilities of Web scripting languages. Learn how to create stunning effects using canvas/svg/vml, how to control animated graphics in JavaScript, and how to merge all kinds of standards and technologies to create a whole new world of possibilities. Using Paul’s latest project as an example, he shows you how to adapt the things he talks about into new projects, featuring his new JavaScript game engine. Paul demonstrates how to control animated graphics in the browser, how to scale and rotate elements smoothly, and how to combine canvas, svg and filters with CSS to adapt new standards in browsers that don’t support them. See how to move physics from the real world to the Web browser. In this session you learn how to: Create a walking animated character; Replicate new standards using existing technologies; Combine new standards to create a new experience.
Adv JavaScript: Closures, Prototypes, Demystified with Stoyan Stefanov
The times when JavaScript was just a toy language for making image rollovers and other, more irritating effects, are fortunately long gone. Today developers build much more sophisticated and complex applications be they for the Web (GMail), the desktop (Firefox extensions) or the server. JavaScript’s prototypal nature makes its object-oriented features really different than “classical” languages like Java and C++, and we have to make sure we use the right tool the right way. In this talk you’ll learn about JavaScript’s most commonly misunderstood features and how you could put them to a good use.
Practical Functional JavaScript with Oliver Steele
This session covers how to use functional programming with JavaScript in real-life applications to implement client-side asynchronous processing, scheduling, and concurrency. These are complex areas that are difficult to think about or implement using straight object-oriented techniques, and become simpler with a handful of idioms that this talk demonstrates. Ajax developers (JavaScript or ActionScript) who are building applications that feature both ambient and reactive functionality, and that perform sophisticated tasks such as precompute display state or prefetch data, will benefit from this session. This session provides: A firmer understanding of closures and when to use them; Insight into implementing time-based and threadlike client-side behavior in the browser.
Applied JSON: HTTP REST, Ajax Databases & Beyond with Kris Zip
JSON has proven to be a very easy to use, yet immensely powerful data interchange protocol. However, by itself JSON lacks a number of important expressibility capabilities and efficient client/server data interaction must usually be customized. This session looks at how we can use various open specifications built on JSON to standardize and automate this interaction. We examine REST JSON, JSPON, and JSONPath. We also explore the capabilities of Ajax-accessible REST databases. The dynamic nature of non-relational databases can provide significant benefits for rapidly developing applications and providing JavaScript object persistence. Client-side code can directly participate in database interaction, simplifying the typical Web application stack. CouchDB, Persevere, and ActiveResource utilize a JSON REST interface. In this session, we learn how to interact with these simple interfaces and how to use JSONPath as a query language for JSON data stores. We see how these dynamic databases utilize JavaScript on the server for a consistent client/server JavaScript environment. We look at how Ajax databases affect security and provide an infrastructure for more secure Web applications. Finally, we cover JSON Referencing conventions as a mechanism for further expressing duplicate, circular, and cross-site referencing. Via a live demonstration, see how to use the Persevere open source tools to utilize these extensions to provide RESTful storage and server-side JavaScript. In this session you learn how to: Query JSON data with JSONPath; Use Persevere to provide a powerful persistence object store for JavaScript; Understand how JSON and the JSPON browser interacts with the Persevere object server; Employ JSON extensions and tools to enable open communication formats that can be used for rich and robust serialized object interaction between clients and servers with full object graph descriptiveness.
JSON SOA-based Client/Server App Dev with Kris Zip
JSON has proven to be a very easy to use, yet immensely powerful data interchange protocol. However, by itself JSON lacks a number of important expressibility capabilities and efficient client/server data interaction must usually be customized. This session looks at how we can use various open specifications built on JSON to standardize and
automate this interaction.
We examine REST JSON, JSPON, and JSONPath. We also explore the capabilities of Ajax-accessible REST databases. The dynamic nature of non-relational databases can
provide significant benefits for rapidly developing applications and providing JavaScript object persistence. Client-side code can directly participate in database interaction, simplifying the typical Web application stack. CouchDB, Persevere, and ActiveResource utilize a JSON REST interface. In this session, we learn how to interact with these simple interfaces and how to use JSONPath as a query language for JSON data stores.
We see how these dynamic databases utilize JavaScript on the server for a consistent client/server JavaScript environment. We look at how Ajax databases affect security and provide an infrastructure for more secure Web applications. Finally, we cover JSON Referencing conventions as a mechanism for further expressing duplicate, circular, and cross-site referencing. Via a live demonstration, see how to use the Persevere open source tools to utilize these extensions to provide RESTful storage and server-side JavaScript.
In this session you learn how to:
Query JSON data with JSONPath;
Use Persevere to provide a powerful persistence object store for JavaScript;
Understand how JSON and the JSPON browser interacts with the Persevere object server;
Employ JSON extensions and tools to enable open communication formats that can be used for rich and robust serialized object interaction between clients and servers with full object graph descriptiveness.
Thanks to the folks at Adobe, we’ve got video of pretty much every session from the Ajax Experience 2008 that we can share on-line, free of charge. We’ll release them over the next week or so in batches. What better way to spend your New Year’s holiday than curled up with a laptop learning about software?
Even Faster Web Sites with Steve Souders
In this session you learn: How to make your Web sites 25-50% faster; The impact of iframes on your Web site, including blank iframes; How inline scripts block rendering in the entire page and downloads; What you might be doing with stylesheets that make your pages twice as slow; The various techniques for dynamically loading JavaScript, and how they vary in how they affect the browser.
Advanced Web App Security with Joe Walker
The security landscape is changing dramatically from month to month. Unless you are aware of CSRF, Anti-DNS Pinning, Javascript highjacking, and the many ways to fool an XSS filter, it’s likely that your Web application is not secure. Attackers used to concentrate on ActiveX, but now Javascript, CSS and even simple HTML elements have are used against Web sites.
In this session, we reveal:
* Security challenges particular to a Web 2.0 world;
* Details of CSRF, Anti-DNS Pinning, JavaScript hijacking, fooling an XSS filter and more;
* How you can protect yourself, from both the point of view of site owners and users.
The 7 Habits for Exceptional Perf with Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan
Improvements in Web site performance are similar to improvements in energy or fuel efficiency: We make great progress, yet we end up consuming more. Learn how to balance design and features with the need for speed. This session highlights Yahoo!’s latest research results and performance breakthroughs. Apple’s iPhone has changed the game for Web browsing on mobile devices. While the iPhone presents new and exciting opportunities for Web developers, it also provides a unique set of performance challenges. Solutions that reduce the number of components improve the user experience greatly by making pages load faster. In this session, we explore case studies that demonstrate how these solutions have accelerated the user experience on Yahoo!’s most prominent Web pages. In this session you learn: Performance optimizations that give you the biggest bang for your buck; Latest research results and performance breakthroughs discovered at Yahoo!; Apple iPhone’s cache characteristics; How to balance features with speed.
This was my favourite presentation of the year. Ben and I have given a lot of talks together, and to spice things up we created the presentation randomizer, a simple Ajax app that would sound a buzzer at random times. Why did we do this? When the buzzer went, we would have to instantly change presenter. “Who’s line is it anyway?” for geeks.
The presentation was recorded by Adobe, and Ted Patrick just pushed it live:
The Ajax revolution is complete: Sophisticated JavaScript user interfaces are nearly ubiquitous. Yet, the innovations in the Ajax community continue. Dion and Ben set the stage for the Ajax Experience by discussing the latest developments, including multithreaded JavaScript technology-powered UIs, robust offline storage, choosing the right Ajax/JavaScript technology framework, Ajax outside of the browser, and more.
Thanks again to the entire community that came out to The Ajax Experience. Without you, we wouldn’t have this opportunity.
At our Ajax Experience keynote this year, Dion and I coded up a simple little program that buzzed at random intervals every 10-120 seconds. Whenever it buzzed, one of us had to stop talking and the other would have to pick up right where the other guy left off. It definitely kept things fresh.
Quite a few folks asked us to release the code. It’s quite trivial; check it out.
We used SoundManager2 to play the buzzer sound; the rest is straight-forward.
We’ve heard a lot about optimizing CSS, HTML and JavaScript but one thing that is less talked about is how much extra information image editors put into image files. You might think you’ve done a great job optimizing your GIFs, PNGs and JPGs while still keeping them visually pleasing but when you use a text editor you’ll realize that there is quite a big amount of data you can save by removing information about the image editor used, the date the file was edited last and lots of other bits that really are redundant.
There are a lot of free tools that strip this information from the files for you and squeeze some extra optimization out of the file without affecting the look. The problem is that all of them are command-line based and you need to know how to use them. Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan of the Yahoo exceptional performance team took all of these tools and their experience in using them and built one application that does all the optimizations for you in one go:
You can upload images, give it a URL or use smushit as a Firefox extension or bookmarklet. Smushit will show you how many bytes you can save by removing cruft from the images and gives you all the images as a zip file to replace them on your site.
Here’s a video of Stoyan and Nicole presenting Smushit.com at The Ajax Experience in Boston (sorry about the audio):
We recently raffled off a free pass to The Ajax Experience on Ajaxian.com. Congratulations to Brandon Aaskov, our official raffle winner! If you’re planning on attending The Ajax Experience in Boston, September 29 - October 1, there’s still time to register.
The raffle drew over 500 entries from all over the world. Considering the worldwide appeal of The Ajax Experience, which major city would you like us to consider for 2009? We look forward to hearing from you!
, Conferences
Summer is right around the corner - so before you make any vacation plans here’s one quick action item to cross off your to-do list: Register now to lock in exclusive $300 savings for The Ajax Experience conference, September 14-16 in Boston, MA.
