Rich Web Experience, Day 1

Today, I’m attending No Fluff Just Stuff's "The Rich Web Experience" conference in San Jose. Having had a great experience with NFJS’s Greater Oklahoma Software Symposium, I have high expectations for this conference, and, so far, I’ve not been disappointed.

After breakfast and an expert panel discussion, I headed off for the sessions. While they were all good today, a couple stand out. The first was the jMaki presentation from Greg Murray and Ludovic Champenois. These two guys (along with others like Arun Gupta and Carla Mott) have put together a REALLY impressive package. Perhaps the coolest thing about jMaki is that it works in languages other than Java, such as PHP and Ruby. Greg and Ludo demonstrated a number of the features of the framework, including have one toolkit’s component (a Dojo tree) control the state of another toolkit’s component (a YUI tabview), all made possible by the normalization of the object model the widgets accept via the jMaki wrappers. Extremely cool stuff and worth your attention.

The other session I’d like to mention is David Geary’s presentation "Ajaxian Faces." David is a VERY funny speaker, and his presentation was every much as good as his book, Core JSF. He obviously knows his stuff and conveys it in a clear, informative and very enjoyable manner. If you get a chance to hear him speak, do yourself a favor and take it.

Apart from the sessions, at the risk of sounding like a fan-boy, my favorite part was getting to meet some of the Sun folks with whom I’ve interacted over the web over the past couple years, such as the aforementioned Arun Gupta and Carla Mott. I also got to meet Greg Murray and Ludovic Champenois of jMaki fame (among other things). They are all very sharp and very cool people. It was fun to finally get to put a face to the names. To cap off the night, I had coffee with my primary Sun contact, Ryan Lubke, the JSF RI maintainer. It was a fun time chatting about football, JSF and other unrelated things, and drinking caffeinated beverages late in the evening. :P As much as I know you’d like to hear the story, I told him I wouldn’t tell anyone about his sub-optimal navigation skills, so please don’t ask. :)

Tomorrow, I have a couple of GWT talks (with David Geary) and a JavaFX session, as well as a key note from Jesse James Garrett, the coiner of the term "Ajax." Should be a good day.