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Anyone interesting in learning “The Facts about AJAX?”

Started by R. Andrew Lamonica, 2006-02-27T13:09:00-06:00 (Monday)

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R. Andrew Lamonica

I have been working with AJAX recently and I was wondering if any of the CAOSters are interested in a talk on AJAX?  I would be happy to give one but preparing a new talk can be a lot of work and I don’t want to do it if fewer than a dozen people are interested.

My plan would be to discuss the primary AJAX technologies from the ground up providing an introduction to HTTP, JavaScript, the DOM, XML, and XHTML.  Then I would discuss (with practical examples and code) how these technologies work together to form AJAX.  If there is time and interest, I could finish with introductions to some other web technologies that are gaining popularity such as web-services, CSS, and XSLT.

The presentation would probably be scheduled for the week after spring break.  Please post if you would be interested.  

Just so you know, I do not have any particular credentials in AJAX development but I have extensive knowledge of all the individual technologies and am getting pretty good at making them work together.  Here is an example of a Reversi/Othello-like game I am currently working on for fun.
http://lamonica.info/games/reversa/


Tyler

I would be interested.  I can only go however if it's at night or on a weekend.  I'm in Belleville and have the full-time job thing going on.
Retired CAOS Officer/Overachiever
SIUE Alumni Class of 2005

Peter Motyka

SIUE CS Alumni 2002
Grad Student, Regis University
Senior Engineer, Ping Identity
http://motyka.org

EvilAndrew

The presentation would be at night.  I have to work durring the day too. Although I work a lot closer than you do. ;-)
......

rajiv

I am interested .
I would appreciate if you could add
microsoft's "atlas" to your discussion.
Have you picked a date ?


Bryan

if you include something about designing to fully utilize AJAX technology or how it compares form a usability aspect, I'm there.
Bryan Grubaugh
Quickly aging alumni with too much time on his hands
Business Systems Analyst, Scripps Networks.


Peter Motyka

Quoteif you include something about designing to fully utilize AJAX technology or how it compares form a usability aspect, I'm there.
The HCI aspects of AJAX-oriented web applications are huge.  I'm personally a fan of page regions/components being able to asynchronously refresh content without having to send the entire page into a full refresh cycle.  A great example of this type of stuff is http://protopage.com/.

QuoteI would appreciate if you could add microsoft's "atlas" to your discussion.
I really shouldn't chime up here since I can't attend the talk, but it seems touching on Atlas could potentially obscure the underlying technology stack of AJAX.  I'd equate this to rushing into Struts without an adequate understanding of MVC.  It would be neat to see AJAX examples that were platform/language agnostic.
SIUE CS Alumni 2002
Grad Student, Regis University
Senior Engineer, Ping Identity
http://motyka.org

R. Andrew Lamonica

Concerning HCI. I intend to address the technical aspects of AJAX in a sort â€Ã...“Everything you need to know to do your own AJAXâ€Ã, approach.  Thus, I will probably avoid any discussion of HCI and even aesthetics.  

However, it is easy to get carried away with AJAX and make your site not-usable.  For example, you could host your entire site from one webpage and just load different data for each thing your user requests.  This would be cool AJAX but when a user went to bookmark something he/she liked the bookmark would not work because the same URL would point to everything.

So, if you are interested in HCI with AJAX there is definitely some room for discussion along these lines.  Perhaps we can end the talk with such a discussion or schedule a follow-up presentation about â€Ã...“Good AJAX Design.â€Ã, for people who have seen the first presentation and are now ready to move forward.  I am really not qualified to teach HCI, but perhaps there is an SIUE alum out there who would volunteer.

As for Atlas.  I have looked at the project and it looks interesting.  However, I think that if you learn the basics of AJAX then toolboxes like Atlas will be easy to pickup.  Additionally, I will be primarily focusing on the use open-source tools so that anyone can use what they learn from this discussion and not just those people with access to Visual Studio 2005.

On the plus side. It sounds like there is interest in this presentation.  Does anyone know what nights usually work best for CAOS Events?  I have a regular commitment on Thursday nights, but the other days are usually OK.

Steve Bory

I don't know about the rest of the group, but Tuesday and Thursday nights are definately a no for me.  Any other night of the week would be awesome.  I am definately looking forward to this.  I have been meaning to read up on the subject, but due to lack of time have not.  Great idea for a discussion though!


R. Andrew Lamonica

I have to stick with my "...the week after spring break..." statement.  I will need time to create some clean demos,  flush out my outline, and maybe make some power-point slides.  :-x

Hopefully, interest will not wane over the break.

Tyler

Retired CAOS Officer/Overachiever
SIUE Alumni Class of 2005

JR

Retired President of CAOS