I am here with Richard at WebBuilder 2.0 in Las Vegas. Monday was the first day. There are about 200 people, mostly developers and this is the second year of this conference. The first keynote was given by Scott Dietzen, President and CTO of Zimbra (now part of Yahoo). According to Scott, RIA only stands for Ajax and imporvements. Zimbra is one of the largest Ajax applications (over 200K Lines of Code). It's all Javascript, CSS, DOM. It's funny to hear about new trends in bringing "offline Ajax" and better security. The dreaded word in security is memory leaks in browser-land. He demonstrated the key mash-up features in Zimbra. Now the question is what would Yahoo do with Zimbra in future, which is an alternative to Microsoft Outlook (Open source, Web 2.0, and SaaS are its claims). Time will tell. Scott said Rich Internet Application is Javascript and Ajax and big players like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon have backed this big time. Ajax challenges include - browser incompatibilities, tooling, security, performance, and offline - all relevant to Enterprise scale RIA.
There was an interesting talk by Coach Wei, CTO at Nexaweb ( a Boston company). He described the basics of RIA technologies. His positioning on simple browser-based approach to a full desktop approach was similar to our positioning.
My talk was rescheduled to Monday from Tuesday. So instead of the last talk in the last day, mine was the last talk on the first day. Because of the timing, the attendance was disappointing. But I did talk about our theme of enterprise scale RIA and Curl's positioning. I also described the results of our benchmark study between Curl, Ajax, and Flex.
More later.