Architecture

Building better applications is great – but what about building better, faster, scalable Ajax applications? Do you have the information you need to architect the right application for your business? Session topics at TAE include how to use reverse Ajax techniques like Comet to push data from the server, and best practices for leveraging JSF architecture to work with Ajax. Browse all architecture sessions, or select a title.

•Ajax Comet Communications: The Bayeux protocol and standardization efforts from the Open Ajax Alliance with Greg Wilkins, CTO and founding CEO, Webtide

Communications for Comet (or Ajax Push) remain a problematic issue for deploying scalable Ajax applications. This talk looks at two related efforts to deal with the many concerns of Ajax Comet communications. During this session, you will learn about:

  • • The Bayeux protocol, a multi-channel event bus from the Dojo foundation that spans client and server over a variety of Ajax transports. The protocol has multiple implementations and aims to become a defacto standard for Ajax push communications. This talk examines the protocol and its scalable implementation in the Jetty web server.
    • The Open Ajax Alliance, an industry organization formed to deal with the interoperability issues of Ajax. Through their communications task force, the alliance is investigating common API solutions that will allow the semantics of Ajax communications to be captured without mandating a protocol solution or preventing continuing innovation in Ajax transports, interoperability and browser support.

•Ajax Transport Layer Alternatives with Brent Ashley, Ajax Pioneer

Without question, widespread adoption of Ajax technology has been made possible only after years of evolution, convergence and improvement of tools and techniques – particularly in the transport layer. In this session, hear the pros and cons of each of the methods currently available to enable background retrieval of data from the server, including code examples and a multi-transport demo application. You’ll learn:

  • • How to accommodate different browsers;
    • New objects, techniques and proposed browser improvements;
    • Security scalability pros and cons;
    • What the future holds for Ajax applications and more.

•Aptana IDE: Your Unfair Advantage for Ajax, iPhone and Adobe AIR Development with Paul Colton, Founder of Aptana Inc.

This session will present the open-source Aptana IDE in all of its glory. With nearly 1 million downloads to date, the Aptana IDE is fast becoming the standard way Ajax developers build their Web 2.0 applications. Paul Colton, Aptana’s founder and CEO, will review all of the major features of the IDE including Firebug integration, Ajax library support, iPhone development support, Adobe AIR support, as well as integrated documentation and dynamic code assist.

•Case Study: Dodging the Pitfalls of Enterprise Ajax Applications with Joshua Gertzen, Primary Architect, ThinWire Ajax RIA Framework

For all the great things that Ajax adds to the Web developer's toolbox, it can also add layers of complexity to a Web development stack that is already bursting at the seams. As if that weren't enough to tackle, the needs of enterprise Ajax applications further complicate matters due to their more data centric needs and extensive user interaction demands. The more you know about those pitfalls early on, the better you'll be able to separate the pragmatic Ajax use cases from the fluff. Using examples from a real-life financial application that has been in production at a top-ten bank in the US since early 2005, this session:

  • • Reviews a number of common pitfalls in depth, and details how they impacted this project.
    • Covers the technology and business decisions that went into its final design, and the perceived vs. real benefits of those decisions.
    • Shows how key concepts of this application ultimately led to a fundamental change in the way that this company developed applications for the web.
    • Details how to address server and browser resource constraints and how to overcome the knowledge gap in any project team.

•Comet: Low Latency Data Transit, or Really Bad Pun? with Dylan Schiemann, co-creator of Dojo Toolkit

Emerging reverse Ajax techniques like Comet can help you improve the performance of your rich web applications. During this session, Dojo toolkit co-creator Dylan Schiemann outlines how to implement Comet, and how to weigh reverse Ajax programming pros and cons. You’ll learn about:

  • • Techniques for low-latency data transit from the server to the browser;
    • Comet server platforms;
    • Best practices and ideal use cases for application development with Comet;
    • Demos of the leading reverse Ajax applications in use today.

•Me.dium: Mapping the Internet and Its Users in a 208 Pixel Wide Sidebar with Jonathan Phillips, Software Designer, Engineer and Researcher, Me.dium

Me.dium provides a real-time, shared browsing experience where users are able to see crowds form on popular sites and follow recommended paths around the Internet. This session covers the challenges that Me.dium has faced designing a user interface in a space that is only 208 pixels wide, as well as the technical challenges of implementing a long-lived Ajax application using the Dojo toolkit. Attendees can leverage this knowledge to continue to push the boundaries of Ajax development. In this session, you will learn how to:

  • • Deliver a substantial amount of functionality in a compact space;
    • Gradually introduce complex user interface elements to create a more tenable learning curve;
    • Build an interface that is entertaining.
    • Performance tune a long running Dojo application;
    • Use the Dojo gfx package for client-side rendering of a map of the Internet.

OpenAjax Alliance - OpenAjax Hub 1.0 (And more!) with Jon Ferraiolo, Web Architect, IBM Emerging Technologies and manager of operations at OpenAjax Alliance

Three major trends are pushing application developers towards integrating multiple Ajax technologies within the same application.

1) Ajax toolkit specialization (e.g., one toolkit might have the best calendar widget whereas another has the best data grid widget).
2) The emergence of SOA and web services promotes the proliferation of special-purpose client-side components that access particular back-end services.
3) The mashup trend where end users will build their own composite application by assembling pre-packaged Ajax components.

The OpenAjax Alliance addresses these trends by defining the key Ajax standards to allow multiple Ajax technologies to interoperate and integrate.

In this session, IBM Web architect and OpenAjax Alliance manager Jon Ferraiolo will describe the overall mission of OpenAjax Alliance and showcase OpenAjax Hub 1.0, the first major technical standard to come out of OpenAjax Alliance.

In this session, you will learn:

  • • Why the OpenAjax Conformance is key to achieving long-term Ajax interoperability and cost-effectiveness;
    • Why the OpenAjax Hub in particular enables successful integration of multiple Ajax technologies within a single Web application;
    • Which toolkits, frameworks and mashup applications have committed to OpenAjax Hub 1.0;
    • The role that OpenAjax Alliance plays in setting standards within the Ajax industry in order to help fulfill the promise of Ajax;
    • Why mashups almost always require integration of multiple Ajax toolkits within the same application, and why they are a key part of the future of Web 2.0 applications;
    • How OpenAjax Alliance’s other initiatives (e.g., Communications Hub, OpenAjax Registry, IDE Working Group, etc.) will help developers achieve Ajax interoperability and cost-effectiveness.

•Stylesheet-Based Behaviors: Motivation, Challenges and Implementation with Dan Yoder, Cruiser JavaScript Library author

This session reviews the concept and history of behaviors in Web applications and introduces the benefits of a stylesheet-based approach. Expert Dan Yoder focuses using this approach to support the separation of structure, content, and appearance in Web applications, and details a real-life implementation of stylesheet-based behaviors. You will hear about:

  • • The challenges and design decisions involved in implementing stylesheet behaviors;
    • How to use advanced features of the DOM API and the Prototype library;
    • Lessons learned for testing cross-browser rendering;
    • How design decisions can help manage the increasing complexity of the implementation;
    • Tradeoffs in using stylesheet-based behaviors;
    • Examples of behavioral styles in real-world applications and more.

•What can you do using Amazon EC2? (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) with Brian Leffler, Consultant and Software Developer

Amazon EC2 presents a virtual computing environment that allows you to use a Web services interface to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network's access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you require. This session will present a live demo of configuring and booting an Amazon EC2 virtual machine image. A sample Web application will be installed on the running virtual machine and hit it with HTTP and Ajax requests. In this session, you will learn how to

  • • Host your own Web site on this new, low cost, grid infrastructure;
    • Obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction, while retaining complete control of your computing resources;
    • Reduce the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change;
    • Apply this new hosting grid to real world situations.