JavaScript integration the main theme at AJAXWorld

By Alex Handy

October 22, 2008 —

With a new version of Silverlight, updated Adobe AIR and Flex tools, and an ever-expanding storm of interest in dynamic languages, you'd think the hype around AJAX would have died down a bit by now. But at the AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in San Jose on Oct. 20, developers learned that JavaScript is like the color black or a sprig of parsley: It goes with anything.

Conferences focused on mixing AJAX code with existing and future application architectures. Those topics ran the gamut from building solid software foundations to assembling cloud computing platforms.

Chris Keene, CEO of WaveMaker, said that cloud computing doesn't change much for AJAX itself, but it does fundamentally change the way JavaScript applications must be architected. As an example, he discussed Google Gadgets, tiny JavaScript applications that can be embedded in existing Web pages to do everything from check eBay sales to monitoring user errors. The toughest thing about writing a gadget, said Keene, is testing it properly.

“If you're doing a Google Gadget that displays eBay items for sale, being able to test all the possible combinations of data that might get jammed into your gadget is almost impossible," said Keene. "Testing gets more difficult. So Google has done things like limited the total size of the payload for a widget to 20[Kb] to try and address some of those scaling issues. One Google Gadget I heard about went to the No. 9 of Google's internal traffic site in two minutes. You update a Google Gadget, you unpause it."

With no actual site to call home, such embeddable applications can propagate anywhere on the Internet. If those gadgets have a central location where they are doing processing, scaling can become an issue that can only be solved by proper architecture, said Keene.

Keene focused specifically on hosting applications in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). He said that there are a number of issues that developers must overcome in such an application, none the least of which is e-mail.

“E-mail servers don't like weird dynamic IP addresses, and they tend to view them as very suspect," said Keene. "I've heard 80 to 90% of e-mail sent from EC2 is going to be blocked by a spam filter. There are ways around that, though. You can send e-mail out through Gmail. But there are planning requirements this brings with it.

JavaScript everywhere
Elsewhere at the conference, Ian Selby, owner of Gen X Design, told attendees how to use JavaScript on the server-side. Much of his talk focused on replacing glue technologies with JavaScript.

“Why bother with server-side PHP scripts to fetch database results when you can do it all in JavaScript on the server? Why mess with Curl to fetch content that your JavaScript code can grab in one line?” Selby asked his audience.

Selby highlighted Mozilla's Rhino project and Aptana's Jaxer, which can be used to embed the Mozilla browser in a server.

Yehuda Katz, core contributor to the Merb Ruby framework and to JavaScript library jQuery, spoke about building sites with jQuery. His talk focused on solving Web application problems by writing plug-ins for jQuery.

ICEsoft Technologies used the conference as a venue to announce new integrations between its ICEfaces Web application construction tools and ILOG's JView visualization software. The integrations will allow JView users to dynamically update visualizations, thanks to ICEfaces ability to push content to clients.

All over the expo, it was rare to see any talks focus exclusively on JavaScript. Most discussions centered on using AJAX or JavaScript in conjunction with other languages and technologies typically associated with rich Internet applications.

Two speakers—Douglas Crockford, architect at Yahoo, and Michael Girouard, senior developer at Magnani Caruso Dutton—concentrated on JavaScript as a language rather than as a glue. Girouard said that JavaScript was actually a beautiful language, capable of performing elegant lambdas and executing dynamic scope resolution.

Crockford, on the other hand, felt that the beauty in JavaScript is often marred by the ugly side of the language.

“In JavaScript,” said Crockford, “there is a beautiful, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders.”

Related Search Term(s): AJAX, cloud computing, e-mail, Java, Adobe, Amazon, Gen X Design, Google, ICEsoft, ILOG, Merb, WaveMaker

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