Rounding off the first AJAXWorld University Bootcamp of the year yesterday, AJAXWorld Magazine editor-in-chief Dion Hinchcliffe (pictured) completed an intense day's instruction for the participants assembled in The Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, New York, with a whistlestop tour of the world of AJAX, Anno 2007.

Starting with The Basic Elements of AJAX, Hinchliffe recapped the main services driving next-generation Web apps, from SOAP (dying out) to REST (hugely dominant), and explained how AJAX-driven SOAs are becoming the predominant enterprise paradigm.

Tools are now being built with Service Oriented Architecture in mind, Hinchcliffe noted.

He talked then about the sophisticated AJAX frameworks that are emerging, including Microsoft's "Atlas," which he described as "traditional." One of the biggest advantages of the Dojo Toolkit, in contrast, is that it is open source, he noted. 

The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) allows you write AJAX software in Java - what Hinchcliffe described as "a capable and safe AJAX play."

JackBe has a very customizable, high-speed framework, NQ Suite and Presto. (JackBe is a Hinchcliffe and Company client, he noted in the interests of fair disclosure.)

IBM has entered the market too, with QEDwiki, and there are also lightweight AJAX web stacks like Ruby on Rails (currently in v 1.1).

But AJAX is only one part of the overall Rich Internet Applications story, Hinchcliffe continued. Flex 2 and OpenLaszlo are two platforms currently vying for supremacy, and Microsoft's Vista is soon bringing Windows Presentation Foundation to a computer near you .

AJAXWorld Magazine editor-in-chief Dion Hinchcliffe wrapping up today's
AJAXWorld University Bootcamp in New York City.

All the users are out there, though, and you have to support all the different devices, including mobile devices. "AJAX is the best way to bring all this together," HInchcliffe said. SOA and Web 2.0 are converging, and AJAX is right in the middle of that.

The round-up ended with a comprehensive review of AJAX Design Patterns, such as Foundational Patterns (including Web Remoting) and Programming Patterns (such as REST and JSON). Hinchcliffe also discussed some Performance Optimization options, including submission throttling and "predictive fetch," which he called his favorite one--Google Maps uses it.

 

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