Boston AJAX Experience

06 Oct 2008

Last week I attended the 2008 AJAX Experience conference in Boston. This was one of the best conferences I've been to in a while. There wasn't a lot of "fluff", but rather some great technical presentations on topics directly applicable to my job. Hopefully I can make this one an annual stop (employer willing). Here are a few random impressions:

Most of the show seemed to revolve around the big-name Javascript libraries, namely jQuery, Prototype and Dojo. I was initially skeptical about this since we're not presently using anything but ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX, but the night before the conference I learned that Microsoft was going to be adopting Query as part of its official development platform. This was great news for me, since now it'll be much easier to sell jQuery at the office. I was also very pleased to hear that MS won't be forking the code and will even be contributing back to the project.
With the MS/jQuery development, I altered my initial plan and concentrated more on the jQuery sessions. I got a great crash course over three days, and should be able to hit the ground running.
There was a guy there who actually had the word "Javascript" shaved into the back of his head. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he lost a bet.
I learned about a few interesting tools I hadn't been aware of. SmushIt scans all your images, optimizes them for speed, and creates a zip file of all the new images. Steve Souders of Google talked about three of his projects that look useful for analyzing performance: Cuzillion lets you quickly create a web page to see how different components react. This is a helpful way to see if anything on your pages can be "blocking" the loading of other components, thereby increasing page load times. Hammerhead compares the load times of two pages, with and without caching. UA Profiler measures a list of useful performance characteristics of your browser.
In a previous post, I mentioned that my site crashes IE8 Beta 2. There were some Microsoft browser folks at the conference, so I talked to them a bit about the problem. They did some live testing of my page and a little investigation. Turns out the issue has already been fixed in the latest dev builds, so it should be showing up soon.