Day two for me was all about focusing on dojo and DWR seeing as how that is what we’ve been using in Contour. The day started off with an intro to dojo which was a good overview. Alex Russell is a fantastic speaker and represents dojo very well. If anything, the talk at least gave me confidence in the people behind dojo. After that came the advanced dojo topic which was more a promotion of the new things in .4 which was fine with me. Many times that’s really more what these conferences are about, that which is new and exciting. And to be sure the .4 dojo does have some exciting little ditties.

I then sat in on the Advanced DWR with Joe Walker who, with the help of Bram Sheets put on a “live” demo of DWR in action building an interactive battleship game. I certainly like the idea and felt that they pulled it off quite well. But it did seem to distract from the “advanced” aspect. Seems there may have been more time spent the 2.0 implementations such as the engine.js having to refresh each time. He mentioned in passing that this will change soon, I’d be curious what this change will be. Over all however, a great demo and also reaffirmed my decision to use DWR in our application.

Arrived late last night and with a solid 4 hours of sleep head into the first day at The Ajax Experience. My presentation is this afternoon at 5:15 when I’ll be sufficiently worn out.

Just finished the keynote with Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer. In summary they gave a rousing tribute to the reasoning behind having a term for Ajax. The market place seems to thrive on buzzwords and hype to make change happen. Ajax is nothing new and could have been done years ago however since the hype of Ajax many websites are now Ajax enabled. Finally it’s time for the users to benefit from the evolution of technology. As Ben and Dion mentioned years have gone by with many advancements in technology that served to improve the lives of developers but nothing change in the front end leaving users to fend for themselves as they struggled along using applications that where so 90′s. Let the revolution begin.