Last week I received an invitation for the ”AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007” in Santa Clara, organized by SYS-CON Media. I got an expo pass an could attend the keynotes and get on the expo floor for free. That’s because I am apparently registered as a contributor back from earlier this year when we published the Mobile Ajax FAQ. So I went to AjaxWorld on Monday.
I ended up at a talk by Michael Carter about Comet and a product called Orbited. Interesting stuff and in fact I was not aware that such a big chunk in Comet is related to the server, not the client. The expo floor was rather big with many big companies presenting amongst smaller ones. I had anice introduction to Silverlight, and enjoyed the cozy sitting-bags provided by Oracle. Even WiFi worked after lunch, which was by the way also very good.
At lunch I met Alex Russell of Sitepen Inc., a.k.a. creator of the dojo Ajax toolkit. He seemed interested when I told him about Frost and he’ll probably also attend the Mobile Ajax workshop on Friday. I ended up sitting at the table of the dojo bunch. It appears that dojo is the framework of choice for big companies. At the booth of IBM I learned that they chose dojo, because of it’s extensibility and overall great performance. Sun is also using it in an upcoming product.
Back in the expo room I also met Max Carlson, founder and original creator of OpenLazlo. We talked quite a while and I hope we will stay in touch. OpenLazlo was also Diamond sponsor of AjaxWorld and they provided for a lot of the free food and drinks - thank you for that. I unfortunately missed the party in the evening.
I also realized that our Mobile Ajax FAQ was printed in the AjaxWorld magazine that was availbale for free at the conference - nice. Overall it was a fun day and a good conference, Ajax is big business now and has definitely arrived at the enterprise level.