This was my first time at AjaxWorld, which celebrated its fifth year as a conference. It was well-attended with more than 300 people from many parts of the world. Big players like Sun, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo were there. I did not see anyone from Adobe. There were many new players, mostly offering tools and framework for rapid Ajax development. Unlike Web 2.0 Expo or Web 2.0 Summit, there were no consumer-oriented Web 2.0 companies. Here everyone focused on enterprise-class application development. The crowd was a serious programming crowd well versed in object oriented programming and UI design. The first keynote from a developer at Yahoo warned everyone of the security exposures of scripting languages like Javascript. for enterprise-class applications. There were many sessions on architecture, and standards such as Comet. A whole track focused on iPhone as a platform for new mobile applications.
What was interesting to observe was the shift from "pure Ajax" to much wider coverage of RIA. Of course Microsoft was there extolling the virtue of Sileverlight 2.0, which was just announced for beta, one week ago. They claimed that Silverlight 1.0 was very weak in many respects but the 2.0 will be far better. One speaker even said if 1.0 was like a Black and White TV, then 2.0 is the equivalent of a 1080P HDTV quality. There were enough mention of Adobe Flex and AIR by various speakers.
Curl was presented by Bert Halstead in a topic titled "RIA beyond Ajax" and it was well attended. I also happened to be on a power panel on day 1 with 3 others like Coach Wei of Nexaweb and Jeff Haynes of Appcelerator. We got good visibility through that forum. IBM presented their Info 2.0 architecture which focuses vary much on Mashups as a way to bring rich user experience to the enterprise. Sun presented JMaki, a set of configuration and customization tools for JavaFx. Someone mentioned that 2008 is Adobe's year, whereas 2009 will see Silverlight into prominence. By 2010, Sun's JavaFx will become a key player. This is the opinion of a respected technologist, an Adobe Flex consultant and educator. We believe the emerging desktop delivery of web applications (minus the browser) may add velocity to RIA adoption in the enterprise, as they start migrating legacy client-server to the web.
I was convinced that the enterprises are open to explore new technologies beyond Ajax to address their critical needs. And this is good for Curl.
