André Charland's Blog

This year's AJAXWorld was a great success. Seemed like a lot of people there, the rooms were packed. Many sessions were standing room only if you could get in. The folks who were there seemed very keen and were lining up early to register and to get into the rooms. 

I  noticed that Flex and Flash are starting to be talked about a lot more. I attended one session on Flex and .NET which was interesting, it touched on a wide range of topics and technologies including WebOrb which was interesting, unfortunately it wasn't that detailed in any one specific area. On the Flash side of the house there was a presentation on using a single pixel Flash movie (.swf) to do things like offline storage, push (using sockets) and file uploading, which is great because I love combining technologies like. Use the best tool for the job!

Although I didn't attend a specific session on performance, that was what I talked with most people about. It seems a lot of big industrial weight development teams are moving or considering moving to Ajax and are very concerned about performance. It seems like AJAX adoption is moving past the early adopter crowd and into masses so tooling, performance, framework selection and best practices are being sought more than ever.

I gave a talk on using AJAX development in Dreamweaver. I gave an overview of the current features in Dreamweaver for AJAX developers and which AJAX toolkits were included. I showed a couple code samples of using Spry and Nitobi Dreamweaver extensions. I think a lot of the audience were interested in figuring out how they could get developers and designers working together more effectively.