The Ajax Experience 2009
This week I was fortunate enough to attend The Ajax Experience (put on by the Ajaxian folks) out in Boston. The conference was spread over 3 days, covering a range of topics from ECMAScript5 and the future of JavaScript to running continuous integration suites against a web application.
It was a pretty hard coming back to Fargo Thursday afternoon and trying to jump back in to work the next morning with a head full of ideas that need to be pulled down, polished and persisted somewhere, but I managed to get through a few issues that I left unfinished the previous Friday.
The Future of Ajax
Monday morning, Ben Galbraith (co-founder of ajaxian.com) gave an excellent talk titled The Future of Ajax. His talk focused appropriately on the way new technologies like Canvas are changing the web. He demoed Bespin, a Mozilla Labs project that aims to create a full-featured web code editor in the browser using HTML 5 technologies.
There was also some focus on old things turned new. Ben had this to say about the JavaScript speed war:
When you increase the speed of something by an order of magnitude, you haven’t improved something, you’ve created something new.
That quote rightly focuses how critical the browser wars, specifically the JavaScript speed aspect, has been to modern web applications. Other innovations, such as the generational garbage collection built in to Chrome’s V8 engine is revolutionary, and I have a feeling that it will be copied by others in the future.
The Tools
Steve Souders is a pretty cool guy. He introduced two new tools at the conference: Browserscope and SpriteMe.
Browserscope is a crowdsourcing tool being used to profile various browsers. If you head over to the site, you can run a broad set of tests against your browser to test it’s capabilities. As you might expect, most of the tests are based on Souders’ rules for high performance web sites (get the book), but since the results are all captured, the hope is that Browserscope will be a resource for web developers needing information on the capabilities of different browsers.
SpriteMe is a JavaScript bookmarklet that searches a page for all of the CSS background images and then suggests how you might put them into a sprite to improve page performance. If you page has 20 background images, your browser has to make 20 requests to see if the images were modified (depending on how your web server is set up), so it can be a huge performance bottleneck on older browsers. SpriteMe even contains a link to generate the sprite for you (using CoolRunnings), and you can add or remove images to the sprite as you see fit.
The Crowd
Perhaps one of the best aspects of the conference was the group of attendees. I’m guessing there were around 300 people there, so it was a smaller conference, but it’s so valuable to be able to chat with other people who’ve faced problems you’re experiencing and be able to chat about how they solved them.
The Twitter crowd was pretty active. Common topics included, “Holy shit it’s cold in here”, “this Wakanda presentation is terrible”, and “The Hilton’s wireless would be great for testing our app against a spotty connection”.
The End.
All in all, the conference was great, and I’m so happy that I was able to attend. Having an oppurtunity to see Douglas Crockford and Steve Souders speak was well worth the trip alone.
I was also excited to see that there is a huge desire for automated testing in the Web world, but it’s still a tough problem to solve in an elegant manner.
The server-side JavaScript buzz will be an interesting thing to watch over the next year, but it seems to not have any real traction yet (perhaps the finalization of ES5 will change that).
Slides for many of the presentations can be found here.
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