Ajax Experience 2009 … Day 1

Day 1 of the Ajax Experience opened up with The Future of Ajax: The Browser Reinvented. The presentation was given by Ben Galbraith (Co-Founder, ajaxian.com).  This was a really well done presentation. The focus was on new browser features that will greatly enhance ajax and web development.

The Future of Ajax: highlights

• canvas – html 5.0 element for drawing graphics and creating animations when combined with JavaScript. Not supported in all browsers yet. After the conference I found this tutorial from Mozilla.
• Bespin - online code editor that makes use of canvas and JavaScript. Very, very cool! I think this really shows off what’s possible.
• Using the web to extend plugins with: Google Gears, Fluid, Mozilla Prism, and JetPack.

For me the highlight of the day had to be the presentation by Steve Sounders on Even Faster Web Sites. Steve covered best practices for speeding up the loading of web pages along with several tools to help web developers evaluate and correct page load problems. Here are my notes from this presentation:

• Up to 80% of page loading time is spent on the front end and not the back end of the application. If back end processing is longer than this then either the server side code is bad or infrastructure has problems.
• Tools for tracking web page load speeds include: YSlow and Google Page Speed. Both are Firebug plugins.
• Some tips for increasing load times are: compress JavaScript files with gzip, move script tags to bottom of html page, and load JavaScript in parallel (all other elements on page will wait until external scrips are loaded).

Bing noted a 4.37 drop in revenue when page speed times were 2000ms longer. Yahoo saw in 5.9% drop in page views when page load times drop by 400ms. Google sees a .59% drop in page views when load times were up 400ms. AOL sees 50% more page views from users with faster internet speed. Shopzilla dropped their page load times by 5000ms which caused a 7 to 12 percent jump in revenue.

Ajax Experience 2009

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Ajax Experience (09/2009) that was held in Boston. Going into the conference I wasn’t sure what to expect. A lot of my work as of late has been on back end functionality rather then on user experience. Despite this my interest lies in developing the complete application from front to back.

This conference didn’t disappoint. There, of course, was a large emphasis (to name a few) on user experience, ajax, javascript, Json, and mobile phone development.

I’ve now posted all three of my day by day impressions. These are really just a rambling of notes and links, but I felt it was important to post this stuff. Mainly so I don’t lose it.

Overall Conference Rating (4.5 out of 5.0)
Speakers: 4.5
Sessions: 4.5
Location: 4.5

Conference Links
Conference: http://ajaxexperience.techtarget.com/conference/index.html
Slide shows: http://www.slideshare.net/ajaxexperience2009/slideshows

Google AppEngine Java … Initial Thoughts

So far I’m pretty excited about Google AppEngine running Java. While very few will probably end up using java (my guess is they’ll use some scripting language that runs on the JVM), I’m specifically working in Java. My initial impressions have been pretty positive of the Google AppEngine – Java. It’s been really easy to get started and the eclipse plugin is very simple to use. My only dislike is that Java should be a create once run anywhere. The AppEngine doesn’t prescribe to this and you do have to follow some AppEngine defined practices. But, so far I have no real complaints.

The application I’m creating is task list app, which is mostly based on an Access Database (booo) that a civil engineering friend had put together. I’ve decided to go straight Java standards and I’m not bringing in any web server frameworks (Struts, JSF, etc.). I’m not sure if any of those frameworks will even work properly with the AppEngine.  The application I’m writing should be fairly simple and Servlets and Jsps should be all I need. I will need a lot JavaScript so I have brought in prototype.js along with the script.aculo.us effects library.

Google AppEngine (Java)

Here we go … I’m giving Java on the Google AppEngine a try. Now what kind of app can I develop?

Run Django Development Server On Different Port

The development server included with Django runs by default on server port 8000. Changing this to run on a different port is extremely easy. The command is basically the same as to start the development server just with an extra port argument. So to run the Django development server on port 8080 the command would be:

> python manage.py runserver 8080