/ WEB-DESIGN

AjaxWorld - Day 1

First day over and I think the overall assessment is not too bad. The sessions started pretty early at 7:30 and went all the way till 8:00pm. That’s ok if all the sessions had been stellar, but I would say they were only ok.

The day started off with Scott Guthrie showing off some Silverlight and MVC. Some of the talk highlights were:

  • The more api’s the better. As more companies and application standardize and expose api’s, the easier it is to consume those data and create mashups.
  • Business’s need to think about multiple channels of delivering content. Users access the web via browsers, TVs, gaming consoles, their phones, and soon much more.

The rest of the sessions seemed to all blend into one. I’ll try to take better notes on day two, but this is what I captured for the rest of the day,. Right away Dave Meeker said don’t reinvent the wheel for social networks. Use third party frameworks and tools. OK. Now on to the big ideas that stood out.

Use 3D design

This means the z dimension on the page and also changing the size of elements according to their relevance. The examples I can think of is the office tool bar and the ITunes Music slider control. The control where on the edge of the screen the images seemed to be filed and stacked close together, but the center image is large and full. The idea is to put the most important content front and center, and push the rest to the sides.

Ajax Push / Comet.

Where have I been? I was blown away by this idea of the server being able to update content on the client. Ajax Push makes a lot of sense if you have many clients that are sharing a common resource that can change frequently. Ideas are, collaborative documents,  messaging, and alerts.

Open Ajax

I was really excited about Open Ajax Alliance. This is a group that is attempting to create some standards around Ajax. The ideas that stood out to me were the OpenAjax Metadata Specification. This document goes about defining the term Widgets and Ajax api’s. This is a great idea because now toolkits can be created that can read the information. Enterprise should focus on SOA widget end services. Most excitedly is they have a preview tool for widgets, although I forgot where. Widgets become valuable when they can talk to one another. I’m just not entirely sure how they do this.