The basic definition of Ajax was integrating JavaScript code at the front end with XML code on the server side was augmented and "flexed" by presenters at the Real-World Ajax Conference at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York June 5-6.

The program offered a tour de force of Ajax approaches, including a pair of interesting presentations by David Temkin (pictured) of Laszlo Systems and Adobe's Christophe Coenraets.

Temkin spoke on the topic of "Ajax, SOA, and the Copernican Revolution," during which he connected the dots between medieval astronomer Nicolas Copernicus' re-thinking of the universe as perhaps not having the earth at its center with a modern-day IT view that no longer places Big Iron at the center of everything. Temkin is CTO and Founder of Laszlo, and has positioned the company to become "the next technology standard for rich Internet applications," according to his official bio. Laszlo previously was senior director of engineering with Excite@Home, where he led a team of 55 engineers.

During his presentation, Temkin focused on end-users, especially consumers, and exhorted the audience of developers, designers, and IT managers to re-orient their thinking from one of pure transactions focused on a central server to one that takes into account what end-users are actually doing with their systems today. Laszlo offers what it calls a "Digital Life" development suite, and is probably best known for its Open Laszlo environment, which an open source platform that creates programs written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Macromedia Flash.

Coenraets focused on Adobe's Flex technology (recently added to Adobe's product line in the Macromedia acquisition) and noted that it worked with Flash, which he said has been downloaded by 98 percent of all users who are connected to the Internet. Coenraets provided what was in essence a master class in Flex, included a demo of Flex Builder, an Eclipse-based IDE for Flex, and outlined how both designers and developers can work with it.

Coenraets is a Senior Technical Evangelist at Adobe, having come over from Macromedia. Prior to that, he was the head of Java and J2EE Technical Evangelism at Sybase, where he started working on Java Enterprise projects in 1996.