atom thoughts

Now that I’m back from the Ajax Experience Boston conference and had a little time to let the information settle, I would like to share some of the highlights. You can get the slides here for all of the presentations . Here are some thoughts on a few of the presentations that I found noteworthy.

Google Gears

Google Gears is a framework to allow you to store and retrieve information locally in a web browser. The main motivation behind this framework is to provide a way to allow web applications to still work without internet access. It makes perfect sense that Google is growing this framework since they are planning on using it with their apps such as GMail and Google Docs. It is worth noting that Google says this tool is not ready for production consumption at this time as it is just a developer preview.

Google Gears attempts a worthy goal of addressing a major flaw with web apps by providing a way for them to still work offline. However, there are two major drawbacks to this approach that may give you pause in choosing to use it:

1. It requires your users to install a browser extension to work.
2. It requires you to either implement your data access logic in pure Javascript using something like a REST api for the online mode, or you are required to implement your data access logic twice.

In addition, the implementation of Google Gears stores a local sqlite database so you will also have to manage versioning and upgrading any schema changes to that local database independent of your server application.

Google Gears provides a pretty novel approach to providing an offline mode to your web app. It should be interesting to see how this framework develops.

Javascript Frameworks and Libraries Galore

There were lots of great talks on a bunch of the major Javascript frameworks and libraries including, Prototype, script.aculo.us, JQuery, Dojo, ExtJS, and many others.

Prototype and Scriptaculous

Stuart Halloway of Relevance gave several great talks on the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries. We both live in Raleigh, NC so I have had the pleasure of seeing him give a presentation before at a local Ruby meetup.

I have more experience working with these two libraries than any of the others that were at this conference since I found them by way of Ruby On Rails. As a result, I did not learn a whole lot of new information, but since Stuart is an excellent presenter I found these to be some of my favorite presentations. Some of the more interesting bits occurred during the Q and A. If you ever want to push his “rant” button, ask him about Javascript 2… very entertaining.

JQuery

I attended a couple of sessions by JQuery’s creator John Resig. When JQuery first came out I tried it out and was impressed by its elegance but ended up choosing Prototype and Scriptaculous since it was baked-in to RubyOnRails. However, nothing can beat seeing a presentation by the creator of a framework.

JQuery was a pioneer in using CSS selectors for accessing the DOM via Javascript. Many of the other frameworks have since followed suit. For example, to select all anchors that are within a paragraph tag you could do: $(’p a’)

I wasn’t looking for a new Javascript library to replace Prototype and Scriptaculous, but JQuery is a compelling alternative. Some of the main things about JQuery that speak to me are:

1. It does not pollute the global Javascript namespace. This makes it really easy to combine libraries together. You can even use multiple different versions of JQuery together if you want to (not that I can imagine needing to but it is cool nonetheless).
2. It has elegant and concise apis. When you obtain an element via the $(’some_el’) call, it returns a wrapped JQuery object that contains lots of JQuery methods to manipulate that element. In addition, most JQuery methods return JQuery objects so you can chain them together.
3. It has a well-defined and actively used plugin framework. There are a bunch of great plugins. And because of the well-defined extension points, plugin methods are easy to find and blend well with the standard JQuery api. For example, to turn a form into an ajax form using the form plugin it’s as simple as: $(’someform’).ajaxForm();
4. There is a JQuery UI project for UI widgets and an upcoming JQuery FX project for special effects. Also, the animation implementation used by JQuery is very efficient as it uses a single shared event loop rather than creating Intervals for each event.

Dojo

Alex Russell the creator of the Dojo Toolkit gave a talk as well. Unfortunately I was unable to attend due to a scheduling conflict with my co-worker, Ryan Breen’s, Ajax Performance Analysis presentation. During a panel discussion, the Dojo framework was referred to as “the kitchen sink” of the Javascript frameworks, so if you can’t find what you are looking for elsewhere there is a good chance you can find it in here.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

Chris Shalk gave a presentation on the Google Web Toolkit. GWT allows a developer to create an entire Ajax application from start to finish completely in Java. All of the Javascript and HTML are generated by Java.

One benefit of using this framework is that if you already know Java and don’t want to bother learning other technologies such as Javascript you can dive right in. In addition, you have all of the wide array of Java tools and debuggers available to help in your development. I personally don’t have a need for this framework but if you only like to write in Java this might be right for you. However, if that is the case I would highly recommend branching out and trying something new… you just might like it.

Closing Remarks

This was just a brief summary of the highlights of the conference off the top of my head. There were several other interesting technologies and presentations that I did not discuss since this post is already way longer than I intended it to be. All in all I would say this conference was an excellent way to catch up to date on the latest web development technologies.