HTML5, Ajax history management, and The Ajax Experience 2008 Boston

Brian Dillard, Monday, October 6, 2008 @ 2:38 pm

The Ajax Experience last week in Boston yielded lots of exciting developments on the Ajax history management front:

• My talk itself drew a crowd of 110 people or so despite its 8.10 a.m. start time. I received good questions from the audience and didn't notice too many people heading for the doors when they realized how deep into the nitty-gritty technical details I was getting. Instead of using Keynote or Powerpoint for my slides, I built a basic DHTML application. That way, one artifact could serve as both my content and a demo of Really Simply History, the Ajax history and back-button library I maintain. You can view the application - and the slides - at Pathfinder Labs.
• I did not meet my goal of releasing an alpha of Really Simple History 0.8 in conjunction with the conference. But I did accomplish a ton of work on the library during the build-up to my talk. I'm now hard at work finalizing the alpha and preparing updates to the project's Google Code-hosted homepage.
• The most exciting Ajax history development was the face time I enjoyed with Nathan Hammond, creator of JavaScript State Manager (JSSM), and Brad Neuberg, original creator of Really Simple History. After my talk we enjoyed an impromptu Ajax back-button summit and hammered out a shared agenda for the future of both my library and the topic in general. I'm pleased to announce that Nathan will be coming on as an RSH co-maintainer with the goal of merging RSH 0.8 and JSSM into a single, stable 1.0 library. I'm also excited that Brad, Nathan and I - plus other authors of Ajax history libraries who wish to participate - will be issuing a position paper on the current history implementation in the HTML 5 spec. Ajax history experts, please contact me via Pathfinder if you want to weigh in.
• As for the conference itself, it was my first time attending The Ajax Experience and I really enjoyed it. The topics were many, varied and well-presented. My favorites included Douglas Crockford's discussion of JavaScript's good parts, which could have been a simple book promo but turned out to be far more; the panel discussion between the leaders of YUI, Dojo, jQuery and Prototype moderated by the inimitable PPK; and my colleage Dietrich's un-sexy but vital look at how to resurface J2EE apps for Ajax using the Google Web Toolkit.

  I have to say, the crowd here felt like my tribe. The guys running around with the word "JavaScript" shaved into their hair put a smile on my face. Ajax developers are often third-class citizens at other conferences. They're either jammed together with designers and user experience folks, or thrown into the midst of Java and Ruby developers. That wasn't the case here, and I dug it highly.

  My least favorite aspect of the conference had nothing to do with the crowd or the content; it was the depressing lack of vegan food. One meal was 90% vegan, but most were 0%. Given the conference center's distance from civilization, it would have been nice if attendees' diverse dietary needs had been taken into consideration. On the plus side, I think I lost five pounds.

Many thanks to the folks from Tech Target for the awesome speaker support. My name, so amusingly misspelled on the monitor outside the ballroom where I spoke, had been corrected by the time I took the podium.

And special thanks to Ben, Dion and everyone at Ajaxian for throwing such a jam-packed event, letting me speak at it, and doing so much for the Ajax community over the years.

Related posts:

1. The Ajax Experience 2008: Hope to see you in Beantown
2. IE8, HTML5 and Ajax Navigation: The future of Really Simple History
3. TAE Boston 2008: The Unsexy Presentations
4. A mea culpa, and a launch date, for Really Simple History 0.8
5. The GWT history manager and the Safari/Opera question

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1. 

   ETA for RSH 0.8? Looking forward to it!

   Comment by Erik, Friday, October 31, 2008 @ 7:44 pm

2. 

   Those are great news indeed. It turns out that few people in the world are capable of coping with the details of correct history/back AJAX navigation.

   Looking forward for 0.8 you mentioned!

   Comment by Ilya Kalujny, Saturday, November 1, 2008 @ 12:46 pm

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