AjaxWorld Keynote: Ajax in the Balance

I had a great time this morning doing the closing keynote… I talked about how great, productive Ajax application are optimized for a set of balances. Client and server, proprietary and open source, established and emerging technology, etc.

The most fun for me was the demo… I started off by showing how trivial it is for a wide range of developers to incrementally Ajax enable their applications with NO client side javascript code with ASP.NET AJAX… And of course, I showed how it just magically works great in Safari on the mac.

Next I showed off a little of the cool VS Orcas JavaScript work including Intellisense, statement completion and type inferencing.   In the same demo I showed how easy it is to use a Dojo widget with ASP.NET AJAX… I used a Dojo color picker widget to choose the background color of the page. I use ASP.NET Profile store to keep up with the users preference on the server via a JSON call so that whenever and from where ever you visit the page you get your preferences.

You can see below, the code is very easy trivial to wire up…

Next I showed how well the Microsoft AJAX library works with PHP and Linux. I did this whole demo in Linux Ubunto.. The client was FireFox and the server PHP on Apache, both on Linux! Also, check out Steve Marx’s codeplex project for more information… The demo is a very simple chat application that does both client and updates to the DOM as well as update a div based on other user’s changes.

Next I had a little fun with WPFE… The audience loved the “pager turner” demo where I showed how we can do rich graphical processing on the client.

And of course I had demo’ed that plus a bit more on the Mac. There I hit on progressive download, MP3 paying and full screen high-def video playback that doesn’t reset as you change in and out of fullscreen mode.

Finally, I closed with an early peek at how we are making it easy for Ajax developers to use their existing skills to incrementally take advantage of WPFE… In this demo, I show how easy it is to manipulate the WPFE DOM from javascript running on the page. I show a “play” and “stop” button written in HTML\JavaScript and I subscribe to a chapter change event to go pull text down over a web service via JSON to provide additional data on each part of the movie.

BTW, see the full video on ScottGu's blog...

Notice the $xamlGet()… it drills into the WPFE control and returns the Xaml element with the ID “chapterDetails” and allows you to manipulate it with client side javascript.

And, of course I talked more about joining OpenAjax.. https://blogs.msdn.com/photos/brada/images/1920973/original.aspx

As I hope you can see, it was a very fun talk… This is a very cool time to be a web developer… Enjoy!