Coding & Development Tracks

AJAX, Java, Silverlight and Flash - Rich Internet Application Overview

Coach Wei - CTO, Nexaweb Technologies, Inc.

In the Rich Internet Application (RIA) market, AJAX has been the center of gravity for the last few years while Adobe has been pushing Flash-based offerings. In 2007, Microsoft announced Silverlight, and soon followed by Sun's announcement of JavaFX. It is clear now that RIA is the next mainstream application development paradigm. We have four major technologies for building RIAs: AJAX, Java, Silverlight and Flash. To stay competitive, organizations need to get up-to-speed on these options and understand how they fit into an enterprise infrastructure.

This session gives an overview of the RIA market, including different AJAX frameworks and tools, analysis of Java and JavaFX, and recommendations on when to use which technology. Further, this session explains the evolved enterprise architecture given the rise of RIA, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), mashup and mobile computing. An enterprise reference architecture will be presented that encompasses SOA and Web Oriented Architecture (SOA) to guide organizations in this next paradigm for computing.

Web Scale Computing: Life in a Post Web 2.0 World

Mike Culver - Web Services Evangelist, Amazon Web Services

Launching a site is much different today than it was in the hey-day of the dotcom era. In today's environment investors are much more cautious (some would say "much more realistic") about investing in unknown companies with unproven ideas. At the same time, Internet users have performance expectations that areunrealistic for a frugal startup's bank account. So how do you launch a scalable website without a scaleable bank account?

Fortunately, innovation continues at a mind-bending pace! This presentation will showcase some thought-provoking new directions that Web Services are headed in while at the same time providing the blueprint for "Web-Scale Computing"- enabling you to utilize Amazon Web Services to build an elastic architecture that can quickly respond to demand. Finally, you'll see a demo that shows you how to set up a virtual server using Amazon EC2. Amazon spent ten years developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon web sites for millions of customers every day. Most people think "Amazon.com" when they hear the word; however developers are excited to learn that there is a separate technology arm of the company, known as Amazon Web Services or AWS. Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that powers Amazon's retail business. AWS has now launched eleven services with open APIs for developers to build applications, with the result that over 220,000 developers have registered on Amazon's developer site to create applications based on these services.

OpenAJAX Alliance - Fulfilling the Promise of AJAX

Jon Ferraiolo - Web Architect, IBM

This talk will introduce OpenAJAX Alliance, its recent accomplishments and plans for the future. A key topic will be the OpenAJAX Hub, a small JavaScript library that provides integration glue that enables multiple AJAX toolkits to work together on the same Web page, such as within a mashup. The talk will discuss the current state of industry support for the Hub, including a list of AJAX toolkits who have announced plans to ship the Hub within their toolkit, and there will be demos of the Hub in action. The talk will also highlight other OpenAJAX activities, including the OpenAJAX Registry, the Communications Hub, AJAX IDE metadata standards, Mobile AJAX, and AJAX security.

Practical Design for Developers

David Verba - Director of Technology, Adaptive Path

AJAX, new application frameworks, and more iterative development processes means that many developers find themselves working more closely with designers or even being charged with design themselves. You know that a great user experience is key but how can make sure your project is a success?

In this session, we will survey principals of visual design, interaction design, information architecture and user research. Using these concepts as a foundation, we will discuss important design issues with an emphasis on AJAX, leading to methods to address them. Whether you need to work with a designer or do the work yourself, you will leave this session with resources, ideas, and examples you can apply immediately.

Mobile Ajax with ICEfaces

Stephen Maryka - CTO, ICEsoft Technologies

As interest in mobile Ajax gathers in the wake of the Apple iPhone release, the ICEfaces open source project is poised to deliver mobile Ajax solutions today. This session will discuss the major additional challenges you will face trying to develop RIAs for the mobile space, and learn how server-centric technologies can help you overcome those challenges. This session will start with some live demonstrations of ICEfaces-based applications running on various mobile devices. We will continue with an architectural overview of ICEfaces with an emphasis on development and deployment considerations for resource-constrained mobile devices. Finally, we will discuss emerging best practices for mobile Ajax application design.

CSS, Skins and Themes for the ASP.NET Developer

Paul Sheriff - President, PDSA, Inc.

Want to make your HTML efficient and easy to maintain? Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) are the answer. Many developers use an HTML Table structure to layout their data input pages. While this works it is not the most efficient, and not very flexible. Learn how to use CSS to build input pages that can change without modifying every page and every table in your ASPX pages. Also learn the difference between Themes/Skins and CSS.

You will learn:

1. Why using CSS will make your applications faster
2. How to use CSS the best way
3. How to eliminate tables in HTML with CSS
4. How to create skins and themes
5. How to use skins and themes and CSS together

Mashing Up Map Views on Virtual Earth

Peter Varhol - Executive Editor at Redmond magazine

Geographic mashups are among the most useful custom applications for both enterprises and individuals.  The ability to plot custom data on maps makes possible a wide variety of different applications that bring important information to users.  Further, the ability to overlay custom maps onto mapping Web services provides a way to easily get new data into existing application platforms.  This presentation describes how to mash up data with the Virtual Earth API, and how to use its new MapCruncher plug-in to import custom maps to add layers in addition to data to those applications.

A Blog-Oriented Architecture

DL Byron - Principal, Textura Design

A case study discussion of Textura Design's work with Boeing, Intel, and other Fortune 100 companies that will focus on the unique uses of internal blogging as conversation tools, and how standards and technologies have made intranet user experiences richer. Byron will demonstrate a blog-oriented approach to intranets, blortals (blog + portal), and distributing blog content across the enterprise.

How to get Richer Faster with an AJAX RIA and SOA strategy

Kevin Hakman - Director, Developer Evangelism, TIBCO General Interface

Two trends in applications architecture — AJAX RIA on the client side and service orientation on the server side — are enabling powerful enterprise solutions that can be leveraged in diverse business environments. In this session, Kevin Hakman, AJAX veteran and co-founder of TIBCO's award-winning General Interface toolkit, will use real world case studies to demonstrate how organizations are taking advantage of both of these advancements in application architecture to provide AJAX Rich Internet Applications that double the applicability of SOA investments. Attendees will hear how to deliver feature rich, high productivity end user applications to the business.

Watching the Web Take Shape: Structured Content, Micro Formats and Semantic Web

William Cava - Chief Technology Officer, Ektron

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web that will allow you to find, share, and combine information more easily, provides well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. It relies on machine-readable information and metadata expressed in RDF. The Semantic Web is a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by giving meaning (semantics), in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web. Currently under the direction of its creator, Tim Berners-Lee of the World Wide Web Consortium, the Semantic Web extends the ability of the World Wide Web through the use of standards, markup languages, and related processing tools. This session describes the semantic Web and discusses the use of microformats within HTML code to provide additional formatting and semantic data that can be used by applications.

AJAX in Portals

Ted Goddard - Senior Software Architect, ICEsoft Technologies

While Ajax development can be challenging in its own right, incorporating Ajax techniques in a portal environment poises a host of additional challenges to the developer. This session begins with an overview of the fundamental challenges related to Ajax in the portal environment including markup namespacing, JavaScript library collision, Ajax server request handling, coexistence of Ajax and non-Ajax portlets, and multiple Ajax Push connections. Then, attendees will see how these challenges have been addressed with JSF and the open source ICEfaces technology. Finally, the session concludes with a walk-through of an actual Ajax Portlet, showing the major development and deployment steps required.

Using Silverlight for Business Applications

Billy Hollis - Author/Consultant, Next Version Systems

Microsoft's Silverlight makes software-as-a-service much more feasible because it allows a far better user experience than HTML-based applications. However, the programming model for creating user interfaces and working with data is radically different from traditional browser-based software. This session covers the basics on creating UI and accessing data from Silverlight, and how to publish and deploy Silverlight applications.

Building RESTful Rich Internet Applications

Randolph Kahle, Senior Architect, 1060 Research, Ltd.

A Rich Internet Application based on a RESTful resource-oriented design is easy to compose when built on a RESTful software infrastructure. This session explores the RESTful approach to software design, development and execution from client to the depths of server-side code. Learn how using a RESTful approach not only simplifies design, it increases flexibility and performance.

Exploring the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit

Robert Boedigheimer - Web Application Architect, Schwan Food Company

Discover how to add great new functionality to ASP.NET web sites using the AJAX Control Toolkit. Review the masked edit extender which allows the developer to specify a specific pattern that the input must match. This extends the TextBox control to display the mask to the user for better feedback about what is required for entry. See how the AlwaysVisibleControl extender can keep a control pinned to a specific area of the browser so that even when the user scrolls the content will be visible. Learn how the Accordian control can allow multiple areas with content with only one displayed at a particular time. These are just a handful of the controls available from the toolkit. Why live with dated user experiences in your ASP.NET web sites when these can enhance the site experience so easily?

Data Management for Successful AJAX Development

Bryan Cole & James Farley

New AJAX components are often constructed with the idea of modular reuse—but how do those components behave when tasked with delivering functionality from multiple applications and numerous business purposes? This session covers tips, techniques, and common pitfalls of AJAX component development with a focus on proper data management to ensure a successful deployment and lifespan of distributed SOA components.

Building Web.Next Applications with Silverlight

Adam Kinney - Technical Evangelist for Microsoft

In this talk Laurence Moroney, Silverlight Evangelist, will give a tour of the Microsoft User Experience strategy offerings spanning web, mobile and desktop applications. He will then drill down into more detail on Microsoft Silverlight and how it empowers the designer/developer workflow experience to improve productivity. He will then tour the main artifacts of building in Silverlight including XAML, the Browser DOM integration (including scripting in JavaScript), and the new 'mini' CLR that allows developers to write code in C#, Visual Basic, Python, Ruby and more and have them execute browser-based applications. The talk will be full of code samples and demos.

The Imperfect World of Enterprise Composite Applications

Paulo Rosado - CEO, OutSystems

A lot of excitement surrounds the world of enterprise mashups or composite applications. There is a desperate need from business users to innovate through IT solutions. These solutions need to be deployed fast and be tuned faster as the business learns what works and not works. In a perfect world, some say, this idyllic promise can be satisfied with SOA deployed across the enterprise and browser-based Rich Client Interfaces composition tools.

However, with the first wave of composite applications deployed now for a few years, many companies have realized that there are many other factors important for success. This session will address those issues including: having to use insufficiently-defined Web Services, overcoming inadequate performance SLAs from Web Services, proving that AJAX does not ensure user adoption, and the need for a local persistent database when building a composite. It will provide examples of how enterprises with more mature composite applications have been able to maintain and evolve these systems over a multi-year lifecycle.

Tuning for Performance in ASP.NET Web 2.0 Applications

Kent Alstad

Enterprises are taking advantage of the explosion of Web 2.0 tools and Microsoft's ASP.NET to create highly interactive and personalized Web sites that incorporate a plethora of dynamic features (blogs, user-reviews, personalized views, etc.). As these sites become successful, they inevitably face performance challenges. Highly dynamic content amplifies these challenges. This session discusses these challenges and their solutions. It demonstrates how developers and network managers can optimize ASP.NET applications using both coding techniques and new third party tools and appliances. Kent will provide real-life examples of how innovative ASP.NET sites are increasing performance and scalability without sacrificing flexibility and new features, and without getting stuck in an application tuning loop.

RIA (Rich Internet Applications) Technology Evaluation

Jnan Dash - Chief Strategy Officer, Curl, Inc.

With the onset of "Web as a platform" for building rich internet applications (RIA), several technologies have surfaced. These RIA's are serious business applications for the enterprise, with read/write transactions, and demanding high scalability, operational robustness, and very high performance. Available technologies include Adobe's Apollo (formerly Flex), Varieties of AJAX tools, Curl, and yet to be available Silverlight from Microsoft. A just-completed technical study of deploying these technologies is the basis for this presentation. Areas to be covered: development ease and productivity, operational issues, performance and scalability issues, server-side roundtrips, and ease of use. Catered to - developers building RIA's for enterprises and project leaders evaluating migration of current client-server applications to Web 2.0 technologies.

Mix, Match and Mash-up: Learn How Reebok Created the Paradigm Mash-up

Ricardo La Rosa - Director of Emerging Interactions, Molecular, Inc.

Though not as simple as mashing potatoes, online mash-ups do offer marketers tasty results by creating unique and engaging customer experiences. These experiences may be exciting for the user, but can be challenging for the technologist behind the scenes. Web 2.0 and emerging technologies expert Riccardo La Rosa will share his experiences in leading the development of Reebok's GoRunEasy.com uber mash-up of Google Maps, Flickr, JumpCut, and iTunes. During this provocative presentation, he'll discuss the technical challenges of making complex mashups function smoothly for a seamless user-experience. Riccardo will delve into the many lessons learned along the path to Reebok's successful global online community. He'll show you how AJAX was used to create this ultimate mash-up and provide tips how to utilize AJAX effectively to create yours.

Attendees will learn:

• What frameworks we used to incorporate multiple applications,
• Four different ways to create a mash-up.
• How to build a floating navigation, and
• How to internationalize the site for 15 languages with one code base.