Edd Dumbill's Weblog: 'ajax' articles

Ajax day finalised

Edd Dumbill — 2006-03-28T16:19:40Z

I've got some exciting news about the Ajax Developers' Day at XTech, which is on Tuesday 16 May. Ajax guru Alex Russell of the Dojo toolkit project will be delivering the day's keynote presentation. He's subjecting himself to a punishing flight schedule on our behalf, so I'm grateful that he's able to take part.

In addition, Yahoo! genius Simon Willison will be chairing the Ajax day. As well as delivering a talk on the Yahoo! interface toolkit, Simon will be marshaling the speakers and discussion so everybody gets the best out of the day.

Be there, or forever regret your old fashioned UI.

Join the conversation about this post

New XTech web site, and why we don't sell presentation space

Edd Dumbill — 2006-03-14T14:52:55Z

My too-long absence from writing much here can be ascribed to two, differently pleasant, activities. First, a fantastic vacation in Cuba, and second, the redesign and launch of the XTech web site.

Of the first, come to my place for dinner and I'll bore you at length about how amazing it was. Of the second, I'd like to bore you right now!

Thanks to Ruby on Rails and a few late nights, the XTech site now has these new features:

Full conference schedule (apart from 6 Mozilla talks I'm still nailing down)
A blog. With go-faster Atom 1.0 stripes and everything!
Details on the newly-added Ajax Developers' Day.

A few more details on the Ajax Developers' Day. As I mentioned before, when putting together the schedule we felt there was a lot of excellent content still missed out (I'm still feeling guilty at having rejected proposals from many good friends and excellent speakers). So, we put together an extra day at the beginning of the conference where we could go further into detail on Ajax technologies.

This day, featuring speakers such as Simon Willison from Yahoo!, XML expert Kurt Cagle and OpenLaszlo's Max Carlson, will allow those working on Ajax projects--either deployment or toolkits--to meet, discuss best practice and move forward on new ideas. Although it's a day-long event, we didn't want to make the price tag as high as a full-day tutorial, so you can register for the cost of a half-day tutorial.

A few implementation details

If that all sounded a little like advertising, here are some technical details worth sharing. The site's CMS is built on Ruby on Rails. Development was done on Linux, with the help of WINE to check out the view from Internet Explorer. The newsletter is managed by the absurdly wonderful CampaignMonitor.

This conference not for sale

Before I went on vacation, there was some debate in various quarters about paid-for plenary and keynote slots in conferences. Though I hope it is obvious, I wanted to state where I, and thus the XTech conference, stand on this issue.

It has always been my policy to maintain a strict separation between the commercial and editorial aspects of XTech. Although each year there's always a company who thinks they can buy a speaking slot, I never let this happen. The content of the conference is formed by editorial selection by the programme committee, who take the scores from the peer review panel as their primary guide.

Aside from what I hope shows in the excellent quality of the talks and generally interesting keynotes (yes, we get it wrong occasionally!), there are two effects on the conference.

Sponsors are that much more respected. When a sponsor respects the delegates' time and intelligence, but still attends, you know they're serious about engagement with attendees.
A higher portion of the conference cost is in the registration fees than for some other conferences. We're still trying to keep the costs as low as we can, but we're not prepared to compromise the quality of the schedule by letting vendors buy talk time.

I hope this explains a little of my position. As a stance, it often creates more issues for me than it solves, but I believe it preserves XTech's reputation as a conference where you can hear some of the best no-fluff presentations on web technology.

Join the conversation about this post

Firebug: neutralizes nasty niffs

Edd Dumbill — 2006-01-22T14:13:46Z

Sometimes, coding for the web is like having a co-worker with a body odor problem. Everyone's far too polite to say anything, so you all put up with it and nobody tells the poor smelly soul. Meanwhile, they sense something's wrong but don't know what.

Web browsers are so insanely great at making sense of tag soup, that if you code only for the end-result--a reasonable strategy, adopted by most when starting out--you can get into all sorts of tangles. Misery ensues: you're stuck with days of fiddling in the dark. You know something's up, but it's hard to see what's going wrong.

In that sense, browsers are lousy at one half of Postel's law. They get the "liberal in what you accept" bit right, but they don't help the developer one bit in implementing "be conservative in what you do." Using three or four different validators for HTML, CSS, etc. often helps a lot, but the state of the browser as an integrated development platform leaves something to be desired.

Firebug is a Firefox extension that goes a long way to providing integrated web application debugging. It is a full-featured error console that shows your errors in Javascript, CSS (a godsend!) and XML. Not only that, but it does full logging for XMLHttpRequest calls, so it's a powerful tool for debugging AJAX applications as well. Firebug also manages to bundle in a DOM inspector, and a command line for evaluating Javascript.

With these features, Firebug should let me throw out about four separate extensions I already had installed that do a similar thing. The final star turn in Firebug's act is a Javascript call to log information to its console, the equivalent of the all important debugging printf() call in C. I hope this means this will make it easier to deploy things such as unit test frameworks for AJAX applications.

Although its author Joe Hewitt cautions us to remember that Firebug is still an alpha release, I'd still recommend rushing to install it. If you're developing anything for the web browser this year, it's the most important tool you'll find.

While it won't rid you of the problems of cross-browser compatibility, Firebug will speed you in uncovering the smelly bits of your web application.

Join the conversation about this post