"I enjoyed witnessing first hand the entrepreneurial spirit at its best at this show," writes Chris Schalk (pictured), in this candid account of attending AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, which was held last week in the Santa Clara Convention Center, in the heart of Silicon Valley. A Java expert, Schalk has most recently been working with Oracle's AJAX support in its next generation ADF Faces rich client components. Read his account here in full.

As I've been working with Oracle's AJAX support in its next generation ADF Faces rich client components I was fortunate enough to attend AJAXWorld in Santa Clara. Although I didn't have a session, I was given a spot on one of the "Power Panels" - more on that later.

First of all I did find it refreshing to attend a non "pure Java" or "non pure Oracle" conference. I found the mixture of vendors and overall attendees to be an interesting mix Web developers with a fair number of newbies tossed into the mix.

All in all, the show seemed to show more of the Java/OS segment of the AJAX population - as opposed to the Atlas/.Net crowd. There were actually some reps from the Atlas world such as ComponentArt and Telerik with some neat Ajax "controls".

On the non-MSFT side I enjoyed meeting with reps from Icesoft, Jackbe, Backbase and Tibco. One of the nice things about some of these smaller companies is that they actually send their CEOs, founders and chief architects to meet attendees in the demo pavilion. I found this to be the most interesting in my experience at AJAXworld. I enjoyed witnessing first hand the entrepreneurial spirit at its best at this show.

As I have an interest in JSF and AJAX, I specifically found my discussions with Backbase and IceSoft representatives a lot fun. I'm having fun playing with some of these technologies so we should see them happily playing with JDeveloper soon.

The Power Panel: "The FrameworkWars: Lightweight vs Heavyweight"

As I mentioned earlier, at the end of the show, I was able to participate in a panel to discuss a topic deemed important by the organizers of the show. As it turned out, all of us on the panel didn't really see a "war" but it didn't really matter - we ended up having a fruitful discussion on the various approaches to AJAX and how it will continue to evolve over time.

Other panel members included: Kevin Hakman, TIBCO - Co-Founder & Chief Product Manager, Dylan Schiemann, Dojo - Co-Founder, and Jouk Pleiter - General Manager of Backbase.

All in all, I'd say I was in good company on the panel. :) The panel actually did reflect where we each come from with regards to framework girth.. starting at the Widget level with Dojo, moving on to components with BackBase and ending up with Frameworks such as Tibco and Oracle.

One of my points which I hope didn't offend AJAXWorld conference chair Jeremy Geelan (who was moderating the discussion) was that in a few years from now, the notion of even having a conference on AJAX will seem "quaint" - I really believe this because I just can't see the overall development population continuing to need to concern themselves with the intricacies or low level plumbing of AJAX. Instead the masses will be afforded a higher set of components and frameworks that will OF COURSE offer rich client and asynchronous communication back and forth from the server.

Of course, today we're still in the evolving stages of what will become the common approach to AJAX apps... However in the near future all apps, to various degrees, will have elements of AJAX integrated into them and will be developed with much greater ease. It has to get easier, because right now - it's still pretty chaotic. ;)