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2008 East
DIAMOND SPONSOR:
Data Direct
Frontiers in Data Access: The Coming Wave in Data Services
PLATINUM SPONSORS:
Red Hat
The Opening of Virtualization
Intel
Virtualization – Path to Predictive Enterprise
Green Hills
IT Security in a Hostile World
JBoss / freedom oss
Practical SOA Approach
GOLD SPONSORS:
Software AG
The Art & Science of SOA: How Governance Enables Adoption
PlateSpin
Effective Planning for Virtual Infrastructure Growth
Fujitsu
Automated Business Process Discovery & Virtualization Service
Ceedo
Workspace Virtualization
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Event Webcasts

2008 East
PLATINUM SPONSORS:
Appcelerator
Think Fast: Accelerate AJAX Development with Appcelerator
GOLD SPONSORS:
DreamFace Interactive
The Ultimate Framework for Creating Personalized Web 2.0 Mashups
ICEsoft
AJAX and Social Computing for the Enterprise
Kaazing
Enterprise Comet: Real–Time, Real–Time, or Real–Time Web 2.0?
Nexaweb
Now Playing: Desktop Apps in the Browser!
Sun
jMaki as an AJAX Mashup Framework
POWER PANELS:
The Business Value
of RIAs
What Lies Beyond AJAX?
KEYNOTES:
Douglas Crockford
Can We Fix the Web?
Anthony Franco
2008: The Year of the RIA
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Real-World AJAX Book Preview: The AJAX Software Platform Requires Real Design
Real-World AJAX Book Preview: The AJAX Software Platform Requires Real Design

This content is reprinted from Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters published by SYS-CON Books. To order the entire book now along with companion DVDs for the special pre-order price, click here for more information. Aimed at everyone from enterprise developers to self-taught scripters, Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters is the perfect book for anyone who wants to start developing AJAX applications.

The AJAX Software Platform Requires Real Design
AJAX Development and Maintenance Challenges
AJAX has raised the awareness of the potential of Web applications. It has also deepened and broadened the use of JavaScript and DHTML in application development. There are significant benefits to AJAX, but there are also significant challenges.

The biggest challenge is its scripting approach. AJAX makes developers write a lot of JavaScript code, which is hard to develop, debug, test, and maintain. JavaScript/DHTML is not standardized and there are incompatibilities between browsers, browser versions, and operating systems. And there is a severe lack of tools for developing, debugging, and testing JavaScript/DHTML code. There is also a slim marketplace for robust components. By definition, a scripting language emphasizes "quick and dirty" at the cost of code maintainability. By contrast, a real programming language like Java and C++ emphasizes formality and strictness. For example, unlike Java or C++, JavaScript is not strongly typed. Programming errors can only be uncovered at runtime. JavaScript object properties and methods can be easily (and arbitrarily) modified regardless of a predefined interface - none of which is allowed in Java or C++.

Second, AJAX does not provide a rich user interface or incremental update capability. Developers have to code such functionality using JavaScript and DHTML. There are various JavaScript libraries available that alleviate this issue to a degree, but they still require developers to write JavaScript, which does not really solve the fundamental challenge.

Third, the AJAX development model tends to break the separation of behavior and presentation. Separation of behavior and presentation is a well-established design pattern that partitions the user interface from the application logic. User interfaces are described as markup documents and application logic is written separately in a procedure language to control the behavior. To create a rich user interface, AJAX developers tend to embed significant amounts of JavaScript inside their Web pages. Mixing JavaScript with presentation breaks the clear separation and makes the application even more difficult to develop and maintain.

In a typical application lifecycle, the most expensive part is not the initial development, but the ongoing maintenance. How to overcome these challenges and enable a "manageable and maintainable AJAX" should be a topic of high priority and importance to any significant AJAX development project.

This content is reprinted from Real-World AJAX: Secrets of the Masters published by SYS-CON Books. To order the entire book now along with companion DVDs, click here to order.

About Coach Wei
Coach Wei is the Founder and Chairman of Nexaweb (www.nexaweb.com), developers of the leading software platform for building and deploying Web 2.0 and AJAX applications. Previously, he played a key role at EMC Corporation in the development of a new generation of storage network management software. Wei has his master's degree from MIT, holds several patents, is the author of several technology publications including JDJ, Web 2.0 Journal, and AJAXWorld Magazine, and is an industry advocate for the proliferation of open standards.

About Rob Gonda
Rob Gonda is the CTO for iChameleon Group and Contributing Editor to AJAXWorld Magazine. He is an Advanced Certified Coldfusion Developer, member of the Adobe Community Experts, frequent contributor to the CFDJ and ADJ, frequent speaker at IT and developer conferences nationwide, co-author of Real-World Ajax Book, author of ajaxCFC, holds a BS in computer science and engineering, an MBA with a specialization in entrepreneurship, and he specializes in Rich Internet Applications and object-oriented architecture. You can reach him at rob[at]robgonda[dot]com and read his blog is at http://www.robgonda.com

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The two-year anniversary of the Novell-Microsoft alliance that scandalized the open source community passed quietly enough earlier this month. The pair waited a couple of weeks to mark the occasion and then said that in the second year of their arrangement they added upwards of 200 new...
Besides SUSE and its own brand of Linux, rPath is now supporting the Ubuntu and CentOS Linux operating systems as part of its rBuilder and rPath Lifecycle Management Platform. The move broadens the start-up’s options for deploying and managing applications in traditional, virtualized...
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Fedora 10 is out and about. Fedora of course is Red Hat's freebie community OS and testbed for coming attractions in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new rev is supposed to have substantial virtualization improvements for remotely installing and managing storage provisioning and includes ...
The Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, has announced the availability of Fedora 10, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. Fedora 10 features numerous leading-edge technologies and continues ...
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