If you are starting a new AJAX project, I highly recommend that you watch the video of a presentation made by an expert AJAX developer Joseph Smarr from Plaxo. Joseph is very experienced AJAX developer, and if after watching this presentation you don't get goose bumps, go ahead and start your next RIA project with AJAX.

In my opinion this is THE biggest announcement that I?ve heard from Adobe since the release Flex 2 in the Summer of 2006. This is bigger than open sourcing Flex. This is bigger than AIR. Here's the news: Adobe is open sourcing AMF protocol and messaging under LGPL V3. Christophe Coenraets, a Senior Flex Evangelist from Adobe, told me about this new free product called BlazeDS. While many people are using Flex for creating cool widgets that can make your Web page prettier, enterprise Flex developers have to deal with such boring things as bringing data to the client. And they want to do this as fast as possible. AMF3 protocol allows your Web application to send the data over the wire at lease 10 times faster than a regular HTTP.

Other than Flash Player, ClearBI does not require any additional software install on the client side. At the time of this writing, ClearBI is the only professional reporting solution on the market of rich Internet applications developed using Adobe Flex and Java. ClearBI is available in two versions: ClearBI Plugin and ClearBI End-User.

The recent Real-World Ajax Seminar at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York offered a tour de force of Ajax approaches, including many presentations that spoke of augmenting and 'flexing' Ajax beyond its basic definition.

John Ferraiolo will be leading the OpenAjax Alliance initiative on a day-to-day basis henceforth, an announcement that was made at the recent Real-World Ajax Seminar in New York. John recently joined OpenAjax initiator IBM, coming over from OpenAjax member Adobe. He will be based on the West Coast.

JSON creator Douglas Crockford presented an overview of JSON-what he calls a 'lightweight data interchange format'--at the Real-World AJAX Seminar at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. Crockford said that an advantage of the dot-com bust years is that 'since nothing was going on' in the industry, the browsers actually became much more stable pieces of software, to the advantage of developers and users.

Adobe Flex Evangelist Christophe Coenraets showed how the company's Flex product (acquired via the recent Macromedia acquisition) extends the Ajax approach to web application development, in a presentation at the Real-World Ajax Seminar at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on June 6.

David Boloker talked about 'the promise of richer user interfaces, encompassing all devices' during his presentation at the Real-World Ajax Seminar at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on June 5.

Dylan Schiemann, co-creator of the Dojo Toolkit, will present a talk on 'Engaging Interfaces with Ajax and Comet' at the Real-World Ajax Seminar in New York on June 5. He offers a preview of this talk in this exclusive SYS-CON interview.

Bestselling author Eric Pascarello's session at the 'Real-World AJAX' One-Day seminar yesterday in San Jose and the San Jose Hilton's Almaden Ballroom examined the problems that an AJAX developer may never see in testing but that exist in the AJAX world on the Net.

'Since AJAX is implementation-neutral, it is almost impossible to nail down what characteristiCs are unique to AJAX, which is why we need a test for 'Ajaxiness,'' said Dojo Foundation president Alex Russell today at SYS-CON Events' sold-out 'Real-World AJAX' One-Day Seminar in San Jose, CA. He then proceeded to inform, entertain, and bedazzle his audience with a witty (yet deeply insightful) 50-minute stand-up routine that was the perfect presentation to start the afternoon general sessions with.

'AJAX is on course to become one of the primary application development models of the future,' Dion Hinchcliffe declared at the outset of his fact-packed presentation on AJAX Design Patterns at SYS-CON Events' sold-out 'Real-World AJAX' One-Day Seminar in San Jose, CA, today. Hinchcliffe, whose Web 2.0 blog is widely consumed Web-wide, is one of the world's foremost experts on All Things Web 2.0, and he did not disappoint: his aim, he told the audience, was to 'fit all of AJAX into your head' - and, in just 50 minutes, that's just what he did.

Dissatisfaction with Craigslist is what spurred Paul Rademacher to create HousingMaps.com, he explained to a packed General Session at the 'Real-World AJAX' One-Day Seminar in San Jose, CA, today. Using the JavaScript he saw implemented in Google Maps, Rademacher saw the potential of making location the organizing principle for a new type of housing site. The result was the first 'mashup' on the Web, the best of Craigslist combined with the best of GoogleMaps.

'How do we connect the needs of the business with the needs of the users, and design our applications accordingly?' That is the rhetorical question that led Jesse James Garrett, to write his bestselling book The Elements of User Experience, since that seemed to him the simplest way to answer it. Garrett was delivering the opening keynote at today's sold-out 'Real-World AJAX' One-Day Seminar in San Jose, at which other speakers due to examine the AJAX phenomenon from multiple perspectives include Google's Adam Bosworth and Paul Rademacher, Yahoo!'s Eric Miraglia, and SYS-CON's own Dion Hinchcliffe.

There are 66 common AJAX Design Patterns, Dion Hinchcliffe will be explaining to a packed keynote room in San Jose on Monday April 24, at the 'Real-World AJAX' One-Day Seminar being held in the Almeda Ballroom of the San Jose Hilton & Towers Hotel. They help address serious issues surrounding the design of AJAX software.

AJAX is a marketing term that will retain its power as long as vendors retain a commitment to an Open Web, says Dojo Foundation President Alex Russell. Alex will present his views as part of the Real-World AJAX Seminar to be held in San Jose on April 24, and he provides a peak into his presentation in this exclusive SYS-CON interview.

The first 'Real-World AJAX' event, held in New York City, featured 15 speakers in 11 sessions, including many of the the world's most renowned AJAX experts, and more than 400 delegates attended while more than 15,000 SYS-CON.TV viewers tuned into the simulcast on March 13, 2006. Backbase news blog called it 'a great day, and certainly the first major Ajax Event in the World!' Today, just ten weeks on, 'Real-World AJAX' comes to Silicon Valley, to San Jose at its heart. The speaker lineup is if anything even more stellar than it was in NYC, including Google's Adam Bosworth and Paul Rademacher, Yahoo!'s Eric Miraglia, and the father of the term 'AJAX' himself, Jesse James Garrett.

Whether you choose any of the excellent commercial DHTML libraries (like Zimbra, Backbase, or Tibco) or a free alternative (like Prototype, Dojo, or the Yahoo User Interface Library), the fundamental challenge of USING AJAX remains that of making the user's journey from idea to information (and back again) as light, as intuitive, and as rewarding as possible.

David Heinemeier Hansson, 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.'

A process, not a technology, AJAX is changing the landscape of the Web. Armed with this book, you can become a part of that change. 'Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters' not only showcases the history, the process, and the inspiration, it also helps you design actual AJAX applications using JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the Document Object Model (DOM), and XMLHttpRequestObject.

It's been a busy, busy week indeed in the Web 2.0 and Ajax space. Never mind the interesting discussions and news that came out this week on the Web, I've been traveling and indeed will be traveling to various Web 2.0-related events for the next week or so. Expect lots more coverage as I start to dedicate more time to detailed blogging here. At least for those of you who may not be able to attend all of these happenings, you'll get a good feel for all of things that are going on and can participate here, as always.

Jesse James Garret, Father of the Term 'AJAX' and Founder of Adaptive Path, sits down with Jeremy Geelan

Bill Scott, AJAX Evangelist for Yahoo, Live from 'Real-World AJAX' Times Square

Kevin Hakman, Product Manager for TIBCO, Live from 'Real-World AJAX' in Times Square

I was always skeptical about AJAX. This technology can be useful for Google, Yahoo, or Amazon, and the like. Because regular businesses can not afford it. They can not hire a team of experts to find workaround for dozens of serious problems browsers/JavaScript introduce. Browsers/JavaScript is not an application development environment.

Developers from all over the world are converging today from 07:00AM in New York City's Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square to live and breathe AJAX at the inaugural 'Real-World AJAX' 1-Day Seminar. The 12 top-line speakers are: Jesse James Garrett, David Heinemeier Hansson, Scott Dietzen, Ross Dargahi, Bill Scott, Rob Gonda, Dave Crane, Jouk Pleiter, Kevin Hakman, Sahil Malik, Dion Hinchcliffe and Christophe Coenraets.