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Oliver Steele gave a great talk at The Ajax Experience this week on Practical Functional JavaScript.

For his talk, he ended up creating a samples application where you can run the code directly, very similar to what John Resig did in Learn JavaScript.

The samples take you through JavaScript world, stopping for:

• Callbacks
• Functions
• Closures
• Idioms
• Throttling
• Caching
• Retry

The Ajax Experience is coming up in a week and I wanted to share some exciting last minute developments:

1. Google Chrome. Google's Ojan Vafai will be giving a keynote on their new browser. Obviously, this should be interesting. :-)

2. Opera. We've been trying to get them at the show from the beginning. Opera's Anne van Kesteran presenting on "Opera and Ajax".

3. Ext JS. We've got two great Ext JS talks! Jack Slocum is speaking on "Advanced CSS and Theming of Ext" and Aaron Conran will present "Hands-on Ext".

4. Cappuccino / Objective-J. The folks behind the framework behind the impressive 280slides.com on-line presentation site are giving a lightning talk introducing their framework as well as a full-length presentation entitled "The Road to Cappuccino."

5. Processing.js. John Resig's port of Processing to JavaScript--Processing.js--is amazing. Come hear him talk about it in detail.

6. Hacking NetFlix. Bill Scott of NetFlix talks about their new rich open Ajax APIs. Hint: it's not just about queue management and it's pretty exciting stuff.

7. Episodes. Client-side performance guru Steve Souders has added another talk to his Ajax Experience quiver discussing an entirely new way to benchmark "Web 2.0" applications.

And that's just the new stuff! We've got plenty of other goodness in the agenda. Hope you can join us!

We talked a few months ago about something new we're doing at the Ajax Experience this year: the "Framework Summit." Basically, we're providing space for Prototype, jQuery, and Dojo to hold their own half-day events on-site, and these events are free and open to the general public.

Since we announced the summit, the frameworks have created their agendas for their events for their events:

Dojo Developer Day:

- Welcome, Introductions (Alex Russell, Dylan Schiemann)
- Tutorial - Progressive Dojo (Peter Higgins)
- Presentation - DojoX GFX and FX (Matthew Russell)
- Presentation - Secrets of DojoX (Tom Trenka)
- Tutorial - Getting going ... Zend + Dojo (Matthew O'Phinney)
- Tutorial - Dijit Layouts In and Out (Nikolai Onken)
- Tutorial - Reusable code, Widgeting (Peter Higgins)
- Community - Getting Involved (Peter Higgins, Nikolai Onken)
- Lightning Demos - What do you have? Show us.

Prototype Developer Day

- Welcome, Introductions (Prototype Core members)
- Contributing docs (Christophe Porteneuve)
- Contributing code (Andrew Dupont)
- Prototype & Performance
- Extended Q&A (Prototype Core members)

jQuery Developer Day

- State of jQuery (Rey Bango)
- Progressively Enhancing the User Experience Using jQuery (Karl Swedberg)
- An In-Depth Look at jQuery UI (Paul Bakaus)
- jQuery Team Code Review (jQuery Team)

Other Frameworks?

Some have asked why we didn't also include Framework X, Y, and Z at the summit. We have a simple answer: we only had room for three frameworks so we choose the three most popular frameworks (according to every survey we've seen). If the concept is successful this time around, we hope to do it on a bigger scale next year.

Obviously we hope you can make it to the entire Ajax Experience event, but if you can't do that, consider coming to one of the Framework Summit events. See you there!

We're pleased to announce that registration for The Ajax Experience is now open! The event is being held in Boston this year, from September 29 to October 1.

Mini-Events

In addition to the usual agenda full of interesting sessions and compelling content, we're pleased to announce that concurrent with the Ajax Experience, several of the most popular Ajax frameworks will be holding "mini-events" that are both open to attendees and the general public. We're giving space to representatives from Dojo, jQuery, and Prototype to hold half-day events focusing on their own frameworks. These events run at the same time as a special "introductory" track of content geared towards attendees who are new to Ajax.

We couldn't be happier about how this has worked out and we hope both attendees and others who are able to attend enjoy these mini-events. More details coming soon.

Cross-Browser Keynote

Another interesting new feature of the show this year is a unique keynote we're putting together with Peter-Paul Koch (ppk) of Quirksmode.org and folks from Dojo, jQuery, and Prototype. ppk is preparing a presentation detailing the top cross-browser compatibility issues facing Web developers today, and following his remarks, attendees will get briefings on how these popular Ajax frameworks help Web developers address the issues raised by ppk.

Every time we survey attendees and members of the community about what issues they care about most, cross-browser compatibility is either in the top slot or close to it. This should be a pretty cool dissemination of the best information on the topic.

Early Bird Registration Ends August 22...

...so stop on by and get yourself a seat at the show!

Kevin Survance, CTO of MapQuest, gave a keynote speech at the last Ajax Experience show. Kevin came to the company and basically transformed the entire team to create the new MapQuest beta.

MapQuest uses Ajax on a massive scale and also provides commercial Ajax APIs. In this keynote, Kevin shares lessons learned from recent MapQuest development projects and offers insight into opportunities for developers to profit from current industry and social trends.

Watch video of the keynote.

Today is the official start of the Ajax Experience East, but we did something a bit different this time around. Some people asked us to level set a little, so we put out some tutorial sessions a day before.

Marc Grabanski was at the tutorial sessions and he wrote up a nice synopsis of the talks given by Ben Galbraith, John Resig, and David Verba.

Marc finishes up posting the sessions that he think will be going too:

We have kicked into gear on day one, and I am having a great time mingling with the community as usual!

Here are the latest updates on the upcoming Ajax Experience East show in Boston Oct. 24-26:

1. Next Friday, hotel rates go up and the iPhone Giveaway ends; register today! ;-)
2. Speaking to Ajax audiences can be tricky; half of the group usually has a lot of Ajax experience, while the other half has little to none. To try and "level-set" a bit, we've introduced free, pre-show tutorials to the show this time around. Joining us to give 'em are John Resig of jQuery and Mozilla fame and David Verba of Adaptive Path. However, space is running out fast (only 30 seats left), so you've got to reserve your seat quick!
3. Aza Raskin, son of UI pioneer Jef Raskin, spoke at last year's Boston show and did such a bang-up job that we've asked him to keynote at this year's show. We're really looking forward to his talk.
4. Alex Russell of Dojo fame will be speaking on the upcoming Dojo 1.0 release and the importance of the open web.
5. jQuery founder and Mozilla evangelist John Resig has added a "Future of JavaScript" to his talk line-up at the show.
6. And more!

Another Ajax Experience is over. We had a blast and it was a tons of fun to see so many of our friends in the community and to have so much top-notch content. Many thanks to all those who came out, especially the speakers, many of whom came to present at great personal sacrifice. And, a tip of the hat to those who held some announcements for the show, such as:

• Brendan's monkey triplets
• Adobe's surprising URL state standards proposal and JavaScript Flash video embedding library
• Steve's YSlow! library (okay, this went to beta right before the show, but we're claiming it) ;-)
• Greg's jMaki RC

As the last sessions were wrapping up, a group including Brad Neuberg, Glen Lipka, Alex Russell were seen huddled together in an animated discussion. Glen kindly pointed us to a summary of their chat, which includes what he's calling "browser possession":

The most exciting idea, which several people seemed to be noodling on at the same time was what I am loosely calling Browser Possession. It goes like this:

1. You make a web page using HTML, CSS and JS.
2. You test it in ONE browser. Probably Webkit.
3. You include a single JS at the top of your page, a spinoff off of SWFObject.js
4. The JS would instantiate a SWF file which would fill the 100% of the height and width of your browser window.
5. The JS would then suck in the HTML of the page, and feed it to the Flash Movie.
6. Then the Flash movie would instantiate Webkit inside it and render the page.

Glen goes on to simplify the proposal as:

1. Same as above, but instead of a Flash movie, it would be a Webkit native plugin.
2. This would need it’s own JS that was specific to this task.

Back when Adobe started briefing developers on Apollo/AIR, a few of us joked about WebKit running in a plug-in rendering web pages inside of a web browser. Funny to see it proposed as a serious idea.

With ScreamingMonkey proposing essentially the same idea with the JavaScript run-time, it's interesting to imagine a world where Ajax applications can choose from several HTML renderers and JavaScript run-times, much like IE lets devs choose between the "Quirks" and "Standards" code paths.

Chris Wilson (Platform Architect of Internet Explorer) led off Day 2 of The Ajax Experience with his keynote: "Moving The Web Forward". The talk centered on challenges faced by browser vendors and web developers to achieve more secure, stable, interoperable, and performant solutions. Here's a bit of a summary...

Security and privacy are incredibly important to developers, browser vendors, and the average user. Ajax introduces some challenges in providing these protections due to code sharing, proxying, script inclusion, etc. It's as important as ever to have a security model and spend some time "hacking yourself" to find loopholes.

Privacy is a growing concern for not only IT departments but governments. While cookies are perhaps the best known vulnerability (Chris recommends checking this out), many new "danger points" have been introduced by mashups and syndication. Having a privacy model and letting your users know just what you're doing with their information is key.

Stability and interoperability are a tough pair. The volume of applications relying on non-standard implementations is staggering. Producing a strictly standards compliant version of IE is not an option as many users (and companies) would simply not be able to move to the new version. While many sites (attempt to) implement entirely standards compliant solutions already, many sites (even medium/large sites) do not. Often these violations are implemented without developers even realizing what's happening. To maintain stability (and not "break the web") interoperability is something that must be approached methodically (by way of things like "standards-comliant" mode).

Performance is another major concern voiced by users, unfortunately it's hard to determine exactly what this means to them. Performance can be measured in a variety of different ways against a variety of implementations and approaches. While it's always a goal to make the browser itself more efficient, many of the largest performance gains are via better designs and implementations of applications themselves.

Chris closed with what is pushing the web and what we can all do to move it forward right. To paraphrase Ben Galbraith (from last years TAE): "Caring about the quality of web UI" is what's pushing us today. Enabling online social experiences, providing friendlier layouts, graphics, and imaging drives people to sites and gets them participating.

Making browsers (and other devices) interoperable is a huge step in improving what we can provide on the web. While vendors move towards that goal, it's vital the developers be as careful as possible to implement standards based solutions, even in environments that facilitate non-standard solutions.

The QA:

Would IE be more secure if under a more permissive license? and will we ever see it?
Not really. It's already frighteningly easy to get a copy of the windows source code (which includes IE). The challenge is making sure that lots of very smart people look at the code very closely for vulnerabilities. This is something the IE team has been quite proactive about, especially since 2002.

Chris doesn't know of or anticipate any plans to change the license like this but won't say never

Outlook 2007 doesn't use the IE renderer and seems to be much less standards compliant, "Why did Microsoft do this to me?!?"

While Chris isn't part of that team, he sees what they were trying to do: increase consistency between what is used for rendering received email and what is used for creating outgoing mail. He believes that team does realize that it's a problem and will be working on it.

You had mentioned an issue of when developers don't know they are relying on something that isn't standard or writing something that isn't standard. How can that be resolved or limited?

Workarounds are sometimes going to be necessary - Things need to work and you often can't wait for the browser vendor to fix it. Developers need to (1) educate themselves on what is standard and what's not and (2) document anything non-standard that they are doing or relying on to check back with when the next version is released.

Many problems are regarding the inclusion of frameworks included to get some widget or behavior. These frameworks may do something non-standardized under the covers that the developer is not aware of. To framework creators: Stay compliant wherever possible. Releasing a patched framework to accommodate new browser versions is good but there's still trouble as people often won't know to update (they've forgotten all about that).

What are your top 5 tips to making IE a good debugging env?
(Microsoft Download Center)
1. Install Visual Web Developer Express.
2-4. Get IE Debug Toolbar.
5. Keep updating the debug toolbar.
6. Get the full version of Expression Web Designer. (it's pay-for so he's making it #6).
oh, and #3. Fiddler

I've heard developing on Vista is broken.
It's not broken, the challenge is IE runs in "protected mode" by default which sandboxes IE process to prevent others from connecting to it - and it from connecting to others. Disable protection mode and it will work.

Should i start with FF and then fix bugs with IE? What does Microsoft recommend?
Remember the tips before for debugging.
Reference the IE Developer Center for what the platform contains.

As for the general process: start with the standard and test with multiple browsers as you go. What you're testing in any browser is that browser's implementation of the standard - so, even if two browsers implement the same standard - you can run into trouble. By testing in several as you go, at least you know when you're hitting incompatibilities.

What are the big things users are asking for?
Users don't give very consistent answers to this question but research told us the important things for IE7 were tabs and printing. When starting IE7 they had no plans for enhanced printing but people were really mad about the right hand side being cutoff. They ended up getting a big win with their printing improvements.

Now (post IE7) people want performance but it's hard to know what that really means to them. Normally the "feel" of browsing is pretty similar, to the normal user, when just casually browsing.

Another request is enabling customization and hiding portions of the UI that the "normal user" isn't utilizing. Part of this task is to enable more customization while another large part is making existing customizability more friendly and accessible.

Time is flying by. I have gotten back into the conference mood with some time on the Adobe event, where I got to give an ignite-style presentation on Google Gears, and popped by Mashup Camp today.

Before I look around we will be time for The Ajax Experience and as I look over who is speaking at the event, I get excited.

It is always great to hear from heavy hitters like Brendan Eich, Kevin Lynch, and Chris Wilson. They have different thoughts and opinions on the Web, and the direction it should be going. I can't wait to get an update on their current thoughts. I am sure there will be some gentle IE 8 ribbing too, but Chris can more than handle himself.

Here are a few other presentations that I am excited about too:

• Achieving a runtime CPAN with Dojo's xdomain resource loader
• JavaScript on Client and Server
• Case Study: Dodging the Pitfalls of Enterprise Ajax Applications
• Ruining the User Experience
• Prototype Patterns

The sessions are only one piece of the action though. The fun part is getting the community together throughout the show to get to know each other, share the pain and fun of developing Ajax applications, and plan the future. See you there!

With all that's going on in the Ajax space lately, we didn't get a chance to mention that the Early Bird discount closed for the Ajax Experience last week. So, we've extended it to this Friday if you use the code "EXTEB" when you register. The first 100 folks to use that code also get a free book from a large list of Ajax-related titles. See you there!

Ajax developers are used to wringing a lot of functionality out of a limited and generally closed platform. Thanks to many pioneers, we've been able to do really rich UIs in HTML for a few years now. But going off-line has always been Really Tough.

Adobe's Apollo project has been ahead of the game in show-casing how a traditionally on-line only medium, Flash, can make the leap to the desktop and work off-line.

Dojo Offline was the first really big attempt at delivering a solution that gives off-line to browser platform in a generalized way. But of course, before that really had a chance to spread its wings, along comes Google Gears, which also aligns with Dojo Offline and Apollo.

We're proud to announced that Kevin Lynch, Adobe's Chief Software Architect, will be speaking at the Ajax Experience West in July, giving an update on Apollo, Gears integration, and more. We'll also have Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO, and Chris Wilson, Microsoft's Internet Explorer architect, and keynoting at the show to deliver their perspectives on off-line, and much more.

Brad Neuberg, the creator of Dojo Offline Toolkit, will be delivering a technical session at the show to dive deep on Dojo Offline. Google Gears was just announced, but we're trying to get a session Gears too; stay tuned.

With great pleasure we announce two things: First, the Ajax Experience is coming to San Francisco once again! We had an absolute blast at the show last year and are looking forward to the second time around. We'll be holding the show from Wed. July 25 - to Fri. July 27 at the Grand Hyatt.

Second, our Call for Presenters is officially open. Please send proposals in by Monday, April 16. We know that's short notice, so we may look at proposals sent in as late as April 23 -- but those sent it by April 16 get the highest priority.

As with our Boston show's Call for Presenters, we are interested in the following topics:

• User Experience / User Interface design (high-level and HTML/CSS specific talks)
• JavaScript
• Frameworks: JavaScript (client and server-side -- here's looking at you, Phobos), .NET, PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, etc.
• Case Studies / Practical Advice from hand-on experience

Speakers get a free pass to the show and paid airfare and lodging.

Click here for more details on the Call for Presenters, including where to send abstracts, etc.

Looking forward to seeing you at the show!

The folks at Scribe Media have started to roll out video that they took at the last Ajax Experience:

• Firefox 2 and Javascript with Mozilla Corp's Brendan Eich
• The Once and Future Web with Microsoft's Chris Wilson
• The Four Quantum
  States of Ajax with Kevin Hackman

More should be published shortly.

Often when you hear discussions regarding Ajax and security, its said that the issues remain the same as they were ten years ago: don't trust user input, don't expose sensitive data without encryption, code for security from day one, never display system errors messages, etc. While that is all true and good, one thing I heard from the Ajax Experience that stuck with me is that "ajax increases the typical amount of attack vectors". We are hitting the server more often, with different transports, and often talking to remote servers as well for services. This will only become a bigger issue as cross domain ajax becomes more prevalent and libraries and tools make it easier to mash things up without having to know each individual services' API. Do the developers you work with keep up to date on writing secure code? Have you seen your ajax app exploited by cross-site scripting attacks or sql injection, or are do you consider things "safe" because you are only doing intranet work?

With that in mind, Michel Sutton's entry on ten common security mistakes might be a good refresher. His earlier entry on SQL injection is also worth a read, particularly if you are hand-coding sql and aren't using a database library that handles parameterized SQL statements for you (though if thats the case you might have bigger issues...)

Recently I went looking for an authoritative book on web app security for some fun-filled weekend reading, and came up with very few hits. The closest I found was How to Break Web Software and Hacking Exposed Web Applications, Second Edition. How to Break Web Software has a bunch of good reviews and looks to be a good high level coverage of many of the common attacks. Hacking Exposed is a bit newer and has less reviews, though the first edition looked to be pretty well received. That title and cover are pretty painful, though. Is there an equivalent to the K&R C Book for web app security?

There are a ton of books on server security and locking down your OS, but not much that targets web applications specifically. Any other good suggestions? Any web security blogs worth subscribing to?

Kevin Lawver (or is it here?) discussed Microformats this morning at The Ajax Experience.

Microformats define ways to make your markup more descriptive, allowing a reader (be it machine or human) to very easily grok the just what you're getting at. Basically, you know what you're doing: why don't you just tell us instead of making us guess?

A simple example: Your link to ajaxian from your blog (you do have one, right?) could indicate that the page you're linking to should have the tag "ajax". By adding that tag it's obvious what you're linking to and why you're linking to it.

<a href="http://www.ajaxian.com" rel="tag">ajax</a>

On my blog I may link to ajaxian a bit differently, but due to the tagging someone would be able to quickly determine that my motivation is a bit different.

<a href="http://www.ajaxian.com" rel="tag">web 2.0</a>

The most obvious implication is making SEO-type tasks a bit simpler. A spider crawling your site can be told quite specifically what topics you are truly covering. At the moment you may not see a profound effect from properly applying these tags, but as microformat becomes more and more prolific (and consistent), they will likely be le