It's day 2 at the WEBBuilder 2.0 Conference here in Las Vegas. This is our first time at this conference. Compared to the buzz and hype of Web2.0 Summit and Office2.0 this conference is very low key. Attendees are here to learn in detail about how they can improve their on-line properties. Speakers are not the trend setters but the teachers and doers of the web building world. Sitting next to me is Jeanne Morton from Avon who is here to learn how Avon can improve the way they do business with their partners. Much of Avon's systems are old and the company is very conservative and reluctant to open up to Web2.0 technologies and social networking.
Given the audience, Scott Deitzen's first keynote, a sales pitch for Zimbra seemed off the mark. It is interesting that Zimbra struggled to implement their email application in Ajax - some 250,000 lines of code. To handle off-line they wrote a fat client. Isn't this back to a client-server solution.
There must be a lot of companies like Zimbra that think their only option is Ajax and struggle to make that work. We need to be on a mission to explain there are other RIA options like Curl. Hopefully our work with Forrester will help. We'll see today as Jeffrey Hammond is presenting "Technologies of the Future." I sure hope he mentions Curl.
I thought Mark Lucovsky's presentation on "Interactive Search Applications" was on target for the conference audience. Mark's is currently at Google and his background includes more than a decade at Microsoft. Microsoft understands better than any company how to talk to developers and Mark showed that competence in his delivery. Google's view of the lowest level of web developer is "someone that can cut and paste." This is indeed lowering the bar but you can immediately see the power in that paradigm. Mark went through a host of Google Ajax routines that any one can cut and paste into their web page and create sophisticated full function web applications. Google is now creating wizards that prompt you for defining parameters then generates the java code for the function. From there you simply cut and paste and viola - your web mashup! We should look at doing something similar with our Ajax wrapper for Curl functions.
On to Jeffrey's presentation.
Richard
