MashUp Camp: Panel Discussion on Standards
These are my Treo notes on the panel discussion
Monday, November 17, 2008 | 10:20am – 11:20am
Write a mashup once, run it anywhere? Hardly. All AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) applications may not be mashups. But a great many mashups are AJAX applications. So long as the browser-based applications you’re building include AJAX code, that code is impacted by the tool used for development, the APIs being called, and the browsers it’s expected to run in. For the first time ever at Mashup Camp, we’ll be hosting an OpenAJAX pavilion where attendees can see some OpenAJAX-compliant solutions in action. But is such a standard necessary to guarantee code-level interoperability? Particularly from one app dev environment to the next? In this panel, we’ll discuss where the lack of such a standard could imperil the efficiency of mashup development and what if any relief a standard like OpenAJAX can offer.
Moderator: David Berlind, Co-Founder, Mashup Camp
Participants
- Jon Ferraiolo, Web Architect, IBM
- Christopher Keene, CEO, WaveMaker Software
- Nikunj Mehta, Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Oracle
- Raymond Yee, Author, Pro Web 2.0 Mashups
Jon, 12 years in standards: only need standards in a few places as javascript and browsers are already covered. Standards help in AJAX tools: compare to the proprietary IDEs flex builder and visual studio (silverlight). Standard documentation is need. Jon cites Google Gears and HTML5. Some Gears specs has been handed over to W3C.
Chris, tool maker, making web ap building easier. Far too hard for visual building. Wavemaker is opensource, studio runs in browser, creates standard JAR file: dojo, spring…. If other systems are standardized they can include in their visual builder. Flash winning, silverlight chasing in rich experience aps.
Raymond – is in favor of standards, despite the difficult and fraught process. (Describes his instruction process.) Another pointed question about catching students before they get locked in to proprietary methods.
Cognitive lock-in vs other lock-in.
Nikunj: Persistence (off line browsing, off line use of web tools) technology from Oracle. (This would compete with gears, the Adobe solution.)
More witnessing to Google’s process for sinking lots of resorces into the standards development before offering to the standards community. Not enough to propose a standard; implementation demonstrations need to be there, plus open source.
Jon again, but cut off by David. This is no good! Everyone is agreeing.”
Persistence + AJAX: this is a challenge as AJAX presumes connection.
HTML5 spec has standard browser behavior for AJAX – but may just work with html & css….
Nikunj advocates for a “transparent” way to store on the local machine. That the synchronization is hard work: hard for users & developers.
Chris “done with caching.” Dojo
backed by Sun & IBM with DIFFICULT problems being solved. Looking at grids, sorting, paging, internationalization robustness.
Jon, status of hard problems: hottest ajax tooling & mashups. SecurityHub1 & interoperability. Mobile initiative. Device apis to get to local & hosted PIM. “Old enough to remember unix” ?! “Unix got fragmented & Microsoft took off.”
Raymond asks, Jon answers: it is a challenge to choose a toolkit for AJAX. How do you choose from the competing things, whereas if you choose flash or silverlight, questions about IDE and libraries are all resolved.
Security: Jon: papers & techniques. Read the OPEN AJAX papers for good technique. Chris: it’s not AJAX, but the whole stack/system. Client & server issues.
Wavemaker has dojo client, spring server.
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Tags: mashupcamp, mashupcamp2008
November 19th, 2008 at 9:21 am
[...] spoke on a panel at Mashup Camp this week on why Ajax Standards matter. I was quoted by Doug Henschen of Intelligent Enterprise as saying that we are locked in a struggle [...]
November 19th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
[...] spoke on a panel at Mashup Camp this week on why Ajax Standards matter. I was quoted by Doug Henschen of Intelligent Enterprise as saying that we are locked in a struggle [...]