dambalah

I’m in New York City attending the Ajax World conference. It feels so great to be in New York. I love coming here.

Today was the first day of the conference and it only lasted half a day, with four 45 minutes sessions. There are a total of 6 tracks so there were a 24 sessions to choose from today. It’s not easy to make a selection since many of them sound very interesting. Nevertheless, I picked my sessions carefully and really enjoyed the ones I attended.

Session 1: Picking the Right Technology for Enterprise Rich Internet Applications

The first talk that I attended was from Yakov Fain, entitled “Picking the Right Technology for Enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIA)”. Yakov’s talk was a survey of the top technologies to build RIAs. The main contenders in this area are:

Yakov started by identifying the qualities that an RIA technology should share to be successful:

I found it rather ironic that during the first five minutes of the first session I am attending at Ajax World, the speaker said “Ajax is no good.” What Yakov meant when he said that Ajax is no good is that it is difficult to build Ajax applications due to cross-browser compatibilities. Javascript developers have to spend a lot of time writing code to deal with these issues (or use a framework such as Prototype or jQuery). Ajax’s communication protocol (HTTP) is also not the most efficient.

On the other hand, Silverlight/Flex/JavaFX all run in a Virtual Machine (VM) so the environment will be the same wherever the code is deployed, which makes it easier for the developers. Yakov believes that this is where the future lies: to have a small VM deployed on the client. The availability of the runtime is crucial for user adoption and this is why Adobe has the edge currently since Flash Player 9 is installed on more than 90% of PCs in the world.

The current trend is to have a declarative GUI programming language backed by another language, such as the following combinations: MXML/ActionScript, JavaFX/Java, XAML/C#. Yakov believes that Flex is the better technology today, that Microsoft will catch up next year with Silverlight and that Sun still has some work to do before JavaFX becomes stable and competitive.

There is an interesting competition between Microsoft and Adobe. Adobe already has a crowd of loyal designers that are used to their product and they are trying to get the developers to join them. On the other hand, Microsoft has a stable base of developers as customers, and needs to get designers to buy their products. They’ve released Microsoft Expression with that in mind.

Here is a rundown of the characteristics, pros and cons of each technology, as discussed by the speaker.

Ajax:

JavaFX:

Silverlight:

Adobe Flex:

Yakov demonstrated a couple of RIAs that he developped with Flex and they were very impressive, particularly a financial analysis application.

Session 2: Performance tuning Ajax applications

Bob Buffone presented on improving the performance of your Ajax applications. The first half of his talk was very familiar to me, having read ‘High Performance Websites’ from Steve Souders. I highly recommend reading it if you are building web applications. Bob went over a few of the 14 rules for performance improvements mentioned in the book, in particular:

After that, Bob went on to cover lower-level optimizations in Javascript:

Bob then started covering other types of optimization and showed benchmarks for some of those. They can be found here.

Some members of the audience were not agreeing with him on these micro-optimizations and it started a discussion on premature optimization versus code readibility and maintainability. I agree with some of the members in the audience. While it is great to know some of these low-level optimizations, I do not think that one needs to apply them for every single line of code, before even knowing whether or not this will be a bottleneck or performance hog. If you are gonna call that line only once, why go through the trouble of optimizing it. If it happens that you will call it thousands of time, then you can always go back and make it faster.

Session 3: RIA Approach for Web 2.0 Development Using jMaki

I’ve been subscribing to Arun Gupta’s blog for a while now. I started following it because of his posts on Rails and JRuby but started learning more about NetBeans, Glassfish and Jmaki thanks to him. jMaki is a very cool idea and I hope that it keeps growing. The j in jMaki stands for javascript and the Maki from Makisushi. Essentially, jMaki is a set of wrappers around javascript libraries such as YUI, Dojo, EXT JS, Scripaculous, Google Maps, etc…It makes it really easy to use components from these libraries if you are using Netbeans or Eclipse. All it takes is a drag-and-drop to have a widget on your page such as a Google Map, a YUI table, an accordion, etc…

Everytime I see someone use NetBeans 6, I’m reminded of how cool this IDE is and I tell myself that it is about time I start using it. With jMaki plugin, Netbeans is even more powerful and you can create great mashups in an instant.

Arun’s presentation had a lot of demos. One of them was demonstrating how to use jMaki with Rails while others showed how to use jMaki with JSP pages.

You can learn more about jMaki by going to jMaki.com and by reading Arun’s blog. He has some good screencasts showing how to get started with jMaki.

Session 4: RIA Development on the Microsoft Stack using Flex.

For the last session of the day, I went to see Mike Grushin talk about his experience using Flex with a Microsoft .NET stack on the server. Mike decided to use Flex with Microsoft because he came from Microsoft and was familiar with their technologies.

Mike started by describing what he calls a rich experience:

Mike’s talk was similar to my first talk of the day. He had a comparison of the four main contenders in the space: Silverlight , JavaFX, Ajax, and Flex. He came to some of the same conclusions as Yakov. Today, the Flex world is the place to be. JavaFX doesn’t have enough momentum and is not ready yet. Pay attention to Microsoft Silverlight.

After this overview, Mike focused his talk on using Flex with .NET. First he compared the different ways that the UI can access server-side data with Flex:

Mike blogs at blog.grushin.com and is a founder of feedbackfx.com.

Since Mike finished his talk a little early, I caught the end of the Silverlight presentation that a Microsoft employee was giving next door. It looked interesting and I look forward to learning more about Silverlight during the remainder of the conference.

The main lesson learned during the first day of the conference is that I really need to start looking at Flex and Silverlight. I’ve been focusing on learning and improving my Ajax skills but have paid very little attention to these other technologies. I will spend some time on them from now on. I particularly want to take a deeper look at WebORB.