brentashley

I’m just starting to settle back in after getting back from last week’s Ajax Experience show in Boston. It was a great conference, with superb speakers, fantastic swag, and lots of really interested and interesting attendees. I was extremely pleased that my friends Pete Forde and Joey deVilla came along not only as attendees but to participate wholeheartedly at every turn. Toronto’s vibrant tech community was well represented by our collective presence.

When I attend these shows, one of my main objectives is to seek out people in influential positions who can work together to effect advances in the state of the art and to put them in front of each other in the hopes that some strides can be taken in a fruitful direction. I was really pleased to have had some success in doing that this past week. It’s not that these things wouldn’t happen without my being a meddling matchmaker, but I like to think that as an independent without ulterior motives I can help to accelerate the relationship building process.

One of the biggest challenges in the Ajax world is that the whole “data channel back to the server” piece doesn’t support mashups well. The solutions that support cross-domain access do so in limited or insecure ways, and the solutions that can be made secure or that afford superior control lack cross-domain access. The parts of the browser that we have used to perform these tasks were designed either for entirely different purposes or for subsets of what we now want to do.

Douglas Crockford is well known in Javascript circles. He has an uncanny ability to distill complex concepts and, using a remarkable economy of expression, present them in such a way as to be simple to understand.

In his first talk at the show, Douglas offered a series of proposals that together would enable developers to build mashed-up applications that are secure and robust. The key would be to get the browser manufacturers to implement support for JSON, create a new JSONRequest object, and introduce a new <module> tag (see Doug’s module proposal: it would provide compartmentalization of secure zones from multiple sites on a single page with controlled communication between them).

Even if Douglas’s proposals don’t end up being the solution to these problems that is implemented , I believe that he has provided the most comprehensive place to begin discussions towards fixing up the browser to be a place that was purposefully designed for mashups.

My small part in helping to kick this into gear was to get some of the players involved to socialize and begin to discuss common goals in these mashup issues.

I found myself talking on Tuesday afternoon to Sunava Dutta, the program manager on the IE7 team responsible for the native XMLHttpRequest object. I invited him to have dinner at our table and also got Brendan Eich (Mozilla Foundation) and Douglas Crockford to join us. Nothing of import came directly from any dinner discussion, but hopefully the seeds are sown for some great interaction.

As Douglas observed on the expert panel later that evening, the web development industry has been turned on its head in comparison to the early years. Whereas originally the browser makers drove the browser feature set and imposed it on the public, the web development community is now ahead of the browser providers in demanding features to support innovation. Our collective voices can influence them to improve the browsers to suit our needs.

I’m really looking forward to the next Ajax Experience (which should be in San Francisco in April I understand) to see how far along these initiatives have come. Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer from Ajaxian and Jay Zimmerman of NoFluffJustStuff all deserve accolades for making this show perhaps the most important venue of the current web lifecycle by attracting both the elements and the catalysts necessary to build the brightest future for web applications.