brentashley

Those of you who visit my blog with a browser rather than a newsreader may have noticed that for the past couple of weeks I’ve had a new banner up for the new Ajax Experience show in Boston on October 23-25 2006.

I’ll be there giving my Ajax Transport Layer Alternatives presentation, participating on panels and mixing with the attendees and presenters.

The first AE show was in May this year and was a resounding success for both the experts and the audience.

As I said to Ajaxian founder Dion Almaer when accepting the invitation for Boston, I’m really interested to follow up on the potential advances sown at the last AE and see whether I (have managed to || continue to) exert any influence whatsoever as regards connecting people who need to work together to make this technology realize its potential.

Again the sessions are 90 minutes each, so lots of time for Q&A. Although many of the sessions from the first show are slated to be repeated (many like mine updated with current information), with 5 concurrent tracks, if you attended before this is an opportunity to get to see the ones you missed last time.

The swag was great at the last show – branded AE iPod Shuffles for all. I understand alumni will qualify for a Nano this time!

If you come to the show, be sure to find me. I’ll be fairly easy to find wearing my Ajax duds.

(via Ajaxian) IBM Developerworks has just published an Ajax Transport Method tutorial that describes a few of the alternatives to XMLHttp and provides example code to make them work.

For a more complete reference to all the available Ajax Transport layers, see my constantly evolving Ajax Transport Layer Alternatives presentation documentation. As someone who has actively used and promoted these techniques since 1998, I can say that I’m pretty familiar with the entire gamut of methods and their pros and cons.

The universal acceptance of the Ajax meme only became possible after more than 7 years of evolution and convergence of tools and techniques – CSS and DOM for presentation, XML and JSON for encoding, and various transport layers.

Much of the experimentation that took place during this time was centred around finding a way to transport data to and from the server in the background. Java applets, frames, layers, hidden iframes, image tags, script tags, XMLHttpRequest and Flash were all put to the test, each solving parts of the problem but mostly failing on compatibility, reliability or unwanted sideffects. XHR’s failure to take hold for the first 5 years of its existence was due to it being implemented as an ActiveX control only available in IE.

When Mozilla, Opera and Safari included the XMLHttpRequest object, it finally became the “good enough” solution upon which the Ajax juggernaut was launched.

While XMLHttpRequest has served to bring us to this stage in the game, it has some serious shortcomings that limit its long-term utility. As far back as 2002, Scott Andrew LePera pointed out an as-yet unfixed implementation problem, and more recently, Alex Bosworth enumerated a whole raft of issues. Harry Fuecks has spoken eloquently about network reliability and latency, the solutions to which would be best addressed with better control over timeouts, retries and error handling than XHR can provide.

As I’ve mentioned many times, Douglas Crockford’s JSONRequest proposal is one of the first real attempts to begin the discussions necessary to bring the changes about that will solve these issues. There was futher discussion at The Ajax Experience that included the major browser vendors, so I’m hoping that some from these beginnings, momentum will build.

Until there is a purpose-built Ajax transport built into browsers, advanced developers may want to learn all of the ins and outs of the different alternatives in order to choose the one that best fits the problem they are solving.

Jordan Frank of eBusiness Applications had an article on Ajax development published last November, in which he describes some of the Javascript debugging tools available.

I met EBA’s CEO Andre Charland at Ajax Experience and we shared some Canadian hilarity, as you do. Seems these EBA guys are all hella brainy.

Michael Mahemoff talks about Ajax transport layers and their problems.

In my Ajax Experience presentation last month, I covered all the available transport layers, their history, pros and cons, and provided some example code. My main intention in doing so was to demonstrate that there has been over 8 years of evolution of Ajax-related techniques to bring us to where we are, and to underline that Ajax is not a done deal, there is still work to be done.

The ReadyState 3 issue that Michael talks about has been well known (well, apparently not well known) at least since Scott Andrew LePera described the problem in late 2002. It really needs to be fixed.

Cross-domain issues also still need to be addressed. I spoke to Brendan Eich from Mozilla about this at the conference and he mentioned that there are other W3C specs that use access control lists, which may provide an existing base upon which to build an XMLHttpRequest ACL model. Laurel Reitman on the IE7 Team was also involved in discussions about this issue.

Douglas Crockford‘s JSONRequest proposal goes a long way towards suggesting solutions to the various limitations of the current state of available Ajax transport layers.

Jesse James Garrett communicated very clearly in his keynote that Ajax is no longer an acronym to be limited to its original initials. According to Jesse, as long as these two basic ingredients are involved, what you have is an Ajax application.

• asynchronous interaction model
• browser-native technologies

Hopefully, organizations like the new OpenAjax Alliance will be able to reach consensus on what needs to be done and how in order to take us to the next level in Rich Internet Application evolution.

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.

I’m in San Francisco at The Ajax Experience. Alex Russell is explaining the Dojo Toolkit, one of the primo Ajax toolkits. I’m seated beside Douglas Crockford and directly behind Michael Mahemoff of Ajax Patterns.

Last night I sat on an expert panel, after which a few people gathered by the podium to speak. Laurel Reitman, Lead Program Manager for IE7 came over to get involved in the conversation, and I took the opportunity to introduce her to Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla. It certainly looks like this conference could be a catalyst in some really great forward movement.