Wednesday, May 17, 2006

The Ajax Experience Recap

I just finished speaking at The First (but certainly not the last) Ajax Experience, in San Francisco. It was held in the beautiful St. Francis hotel in downtown San Francisco, and it had the who's who of the Ajax world there. Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, the creators and maintainers of the Ajaxian web site, along with Jay Zimmerman of No Fluff, Just Stuff fame, put on a first-class conference. It was an interesting conference in that Ajax doesn't exist in a vacuum: it must be hosted on top of some other technology. I told one of my friends that it was like a condiments conference: you can't really have Ajax without some medium to present it upon. In any case, it was interesting to see such a diverse crowd rub elbows and get along so well. At one of the expert panels, we had the Lead Program Manager on the IE7 team sitting next to the creator of JavaScript. On another panel, the evangelist for the Microsoft Atlas framework sat next to the creator of Dojo (and 2 seats down from me). I represented pretty much the entire testing track there, showing a packed room how to use Selenium to test Ajax applications.

Because Ajax is at once broad (represented by the number of frameworks) but diverse (because it can be applied to just about any underlying web technology), I wondered if this conference would be a success. I can safely say that it was a resounding success, and it's going to happen again in the fall on the East coast. Kudos to Ben, Dion, and Jay for a great experience.

2 comments:

Brent Ashley said...

Great to meet you there, Neal. Looking forward to meeting you again.

BTW, Laurel Reitman isn't in marketing, she's a Lead Program Manager on the IE7 team in charge of a set of features including the DOM.

Neal Ford said...

Hey, Brent, thanks for the correction, I've made the change in-line. Nice to meet you too -- the new group of speakers I met was a nice bit of icing on the Ajax Experience condiments cake (OK, I think my metaphor just became tortured).