View the "Real-World AJAX" New York Photo Album

View Dion Hinchcliffe's Exclusive Interview with David Heinemeier Hansson on SYS-CON.TV

David Heinemeier Hansson (pictured), the Danish-born wunderkind who featured as one of the top-billed speakers at SYS-CON's recent "Real-World AJAX" One-Day Seminar in New York City, is described in this month's Wired as "The Hottest Hacker on Earth."

Web 2.0 Journal editor-in-chief Dion Hinchcliffe, who interviewed Hansson at the "Real-World AJAX" event for SYS-CON.TV, said that he'd given "probably one of the more engaging and entertaining talks I've seen at a conference recently."

Titled "Beyond the Rocket Surgeons with AJAX on Rails," Hansson gave what Hinchcliffe described as "an edgy and smart performance that ranged across the Web application design landcsape."

Saying AJAX is the most important wave for the Web in years, Hansson's presentation lambasted the sorry state of browsers, the underworld of older browsers, that though dying, still trips up AJAX application developers.

He also went over some of the really good things about the browser programming model including innerHtml and eval().

He then gave one of his now-famous fascinating demonstrations of the simplicity and power of Ruby on Rails that makes the common uses easy and pushes out the complexity into the edge cases that are less common.

All delegates of the upcoming "Real-World AJAX" San Jose event on April 24, 2006 will receive a copy of a 12-hour SYS-CON.TV Webcast DVD, including Heinemeier's first ever presentation on Ajax-on-Rails.