AjaxWorld 2007 Day Two (Afternoon)

Since I'm interested in Dojo - I decide to attend James Harmon's talk "Creating AJAX-Powered Forms with the Dojo Toolkit". This was a bad choice for me because I didn't really learn anything new. But for those that have no exposure to the Dojo Toolkit - it would've been a really good session. His 50-minute presentation enhanced a typical JSP HTML form using Dojo elements that included client-side, and server-side validation, Rich Text Editor control, and a Combo Box. Slides can be found here.

Finally - food! During the lunch break- there was a Power Panel in the main ballroom - unfortunately - I'm eating lunch and chatting with others during the lunch break and miss most of the panel.

For the 2:40pm - the only game in town is Laszlo System's presentation. I created a separate blog entry just for this one....Laszlo had a big presence at AjaxWorld.

On to the next presentation....Dylan Scheimann: Web Vector Graphics & Dojo Draw This! I want to watch this again when the AjaxWorld DVD comes out because I had to run out of the room to take a call from work. But in a nutshell - Dojo provides a vector graphics library (dojo.gfx) that's supposed to be easier to use than VML or SVG, and it hides cross-browser issues. That sounds like a good thing. So if you want to do graphics, and build charts in the browser -- definitely check this out.

At 4:30pm - I watched a presentation on ICEFaces. I never heard of them before AjaxWorld. It appears to be a fairly rich looking java-centric Ajax platform that was recently open-sourced. Their presentation certainly looked good - and this presentation focused on security aspects of the product which seems to plug potential holes in Ajax. Using Java EE enforced security roles (I think Stephen said he's using Tomcat and Tomcat roles) - you can prevent users from running particular Ajax features. My impression is that ICEFaces and BackBase play in the same space.
What does this mean? Just another Ajax libary to explore some day....but not today.

The conference continued further with 2 more sessions - but I was completely spent at this point. I didn't have the energy to continue due to jet-lag from Bangalore, and I felt that 10 hours of Ajax presentations was enough fun for one day. Too bad I won't be able to make the boat-trip sponsored by Laszlo - I'm sure they'd provide enough free drinks to convince me to rewrite everything using Open Laszlo :-)

Some other things I would miss:

• Dion Hinchcliffe's presentation "Mashups: The Future of Enterprise Apps in the Web 2.0 Era".
• And Tj Kang's presentation that was picked up by TechCrunch, "Elegant Complex Applications for Large Data Operations".