I just attended AjaxWorld 2008 in San Jose, California. The theme of this conference was "2008: Decision Year for RIAs". Here is a quick summary.

• The first day keynote was by Scott Guthrie of Microsoft. Scott manages the development platforms including Silverlight. He gave several demos. The first one showed ASP .Net MVC (Model View Controller), JQuery, and Visual Studio 2008. The second demo was Silverlight and RIA-based development. Silverlight claims cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in. The Linux version is done with Novell. Most of the examples were on video streaming at sites such as NBC Olympics, the DNC (Democratic National Convention). He claimed the NBC Olympics had 70 million streams in 14 day period. AOL mail was another example using Silverlight. Some SAP front-ends are now using Silverlight. He claimed one of every four PC's now run Silverlight, kind of hard to believe, specially when Silverlight Release 2 was launched lat week. I wrote a response to a blog post on this. Microsoft deserves credit for "adaptive streaming" on varieties of line speeds ranging from 250 kbps to 2 Mbps. They clearly focus on beating Adobe's Flash player in video streaming. The business application part of Silverlight is weak on examples and functions, but high on claims. Silverlight claims multi-language support like C#, VB, Python. They claim rich query of data and local caching. The download is 4.6 MB and everything fits in that (includes 100s of built-in controls). For example, they have HTML API for programming pure HTML apps. All functions like calendaring have skinnable controls. Visual Studio is their IDE. The combination of VS 2008 and Microsoft Expression addresses the designer+developer community.

• Matt Quinlan from Appcelerator stared by saying "users may times don't now what they want. If Ford would have asked users what they wanted, they would have a said 'a faster horse'". Appcelerator provides a framework to speed up Ajax development. It provides a higher order expression language that generates Javascript. He said Javascript is "mountains of code" and pointed out that Google Map has 6535 lines of Javascript code. He derided Javascript as tedious, error-prone, boiler-plate stuff. It was interesting that many presenters showed Ajax frameworks to speed of development.

• Oracle made a presence this time. They showed their existing tools such as JDeveloepr and ADF (Application Development Framework) all using some new technology. It's "old wine in a new bottle". There is no front-end client-centric RIA story. They are from a Java server-centric culture and are sticking to that.

• Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch presented on day 3 early (poor audience) and I missed that, but supect he glorified Adobe Flex and AIR.

• Curl got good visibility.  I presented on first day a session titled  "RIA - Real Examples and Lessons Learnt", where four concrete customer examples were described, showing benefits of using Curl. Then Richard and I gave an interview to Sys-Con TV (not published yet). I also participated at a power panel yesterday on the subject "How are RIAs benefiting the bottom line?" You can see the other participants including last minute addition of Adobe (James Ward). Our simple booth was busy with many visitors getting a demo of Curl from the expert hands of Richard.

This AjaxWorld had several hundred people (my guess - 400), many did

not show up due to the harsh economic condition prevailing now.