AJAX Experience 2009

Ajax Experience speakers: Push cross-platform advantages further

The topic of cross-platform usability came up in several sessions at this year’s Ajax Experience in Boston Massachusetts. Naturally, Ajax is so popular because its open standards model is supported by many browsers and platforms. Speakers urged conference attendees to extend that advantage, enhancing cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility and usability in Ajax-based rich Internet applications.

Paul Burnett of Creative Solutions,, for example, praised Adobe’s Dreamweaver cs4 for its cross-platform functionality, made possible by huge improvements in its Aire bridge program. “Dreamweaver cs4 boasts new usability features and widgets, which have increased the power of this tool and put that power in its users hands,” said Burnett during his session on Building standards-based and accessible Ajax sites with Dreamweaver cs4.

Nicole Sullivan, founder of of Object Oriented CSS, preached the effectiveness of strong base coding for similarities that are no longer machine dependent in her session on creating scalable, fast websites. She has created templates that make it possible to have nearly identical web page layouts, no matter what machine, hardware or server they are viewed on. She has done this through manipulation of CSS for site templates by predefining, and sometimes redefining, site functions. Her co-speaker, Gonzalo Cordero, demonstrated some of the form and function of their appearence driven code would work on a live website.

Developers can now make layouts that will look good no matter who is  looking at them and on what platform, she said.”Fixed dimensions limit the ways in which a module can be used and reused,” Sullivan said. “We have defined structure in a separate class.”

Ajax Experience speaker: Back-end focus key to site performance boosts

Steve Souders, author and respected authority on page performance, issued a call to arms for software users, developers and testers to improve the performance and power of web sites. At The Ajax Experience 2009 in Boston yesterday, he gave a state-of-page-performance overview and tips on boosting performance in a session called “Even Faster Web Sites.”

“We are really in the infancy of page performance,” said Souders, who encouraged new perspectives on the development and maintenance of sites.

Focusing on the web site back end performance is an immature practice that’s not productive, Souders said. “The back end only makes up about 20% of the total load time, and still the largest and arguably most important component the front end goes largely ignored,” he said.

Souders recommended the use of tools available online, such as Yslow, a program that Souders created, as well as Google’s Page Speed. Both can help accelerate load times and overall performance.
Addressing load times is particularly important, he said, noting the adverse effects of slow load speeds on views, traffic, and revenue.

The key to online success, said Souder, lies in attention to detail, user experience, efficiency, speed and, of course, the front end.

Stay tuned in for more from The Ajax Experience 2009.