brentashley

There were two levels of conference going on at The Ajax Experience last week.

The first level was the conference where the presenters put on a terrific show for the attendees, with lots and lots of presentations about tools and techniques and a number of expert discussion panels.

The second level was the conference among the presenters, tool providers and industry experts, making the connections that will sow the seeds that make the coming years as exciting and fruitful as those recently gone by.

I was very happy to meet Douglas Crockford again. His work on JSONRequest and Javascript advocacy have been instrumental in sparking the conversations that will lead us towards changes in the browsers that will take us to the next level of not only interactive but even robust web applications. I applaud Douglas for taking a stand and proposing change. It comes as no surprise that Douglas is at Yahoo with Bill Scott, another guy at the absolute top of his game as an interaction designer. I’m noticing lately that Yahoo is quietly attracting the creme de la creme to work with them on advancing the state of the art in various ways while the other big guys are busy chasing the ball around.

In the browser camps, Brendan Eich shared his directions for Javascript and Mozilla, and Laurel Reitman helped us to understand that the IE7 team is keen to help us all move forward and solve the challenges that are decelerating our efforts – cross-domain security for instance. While there was some contention, the overall impression was of cautious steps towards increased levels of openness and collaboration.

Michael Mahemoff impressed me as someone who is truly passionate about patterns. His work in gathering patterns from far and wide has no doubt helped us all tremendously.

Big thanks to Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, who had the foresight to gather together a remarkable mix of thought leaders and catalysts to make a lasting difference, and who along with Jay Zimmerman did a stellar job of hosting what to many in attendance will be remembered as the tech event of the year.