I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

Writing a book is not an easy job, and writing a tutorial on programming language is even harder. 'The Book of JavaScript' (No Starch Press) is a well written tutorial, with clear and well explained code samples. This is a transcript of Yakov Fain's dialog with Dave Thau, the author of this book.

In this interview, Dave Crane not only talks about AJAX but also about how AJAX can fit into the kind of applications and frameworks we are used to working with today. He also tells us why he feels AJAX has become so popular in such a short time and what lies in the future for Java-based AJAX development.