AjaxWorld session: Steve Maryka & Ryan Moquin
General session by ICEsoft: How Can AJAX Improve Homeland Security?
Instant communications for first responders. Demo/application built with British Aerospace.
IceFaces: open-source, standards based. Ajax platform in pure Java (no need to write JavaScript). Extends JSF. 50K registered developers. Deploy to any app server, combine with leading Java frameworks. Key innovation: direct-to-DOM rendering. Presentation code is rendered to DOM on the server-side, then sync’ed through client-side JavaScript library to the client. Uses a push mechanism to route state changes from server to client without waiting for a user interaction on the client.
Portals add complexity. Browser-imposed connection limits (IE limits connections to two). Their framework adds client-side connection sharing, and similarly need server-side connection sharing. Hide this complexity from app developers.
conclusions: the asynchronous web will be everywhere; foster developer creativity, not focus on low-level Javascript plumbing.