Nate Schutta Ajax and the Enterprise

By now, you've used Google Maps, Tada List, or heck even ESPN.com. More importantly, your customers have experienced an "Ajaxified" application; ready or not, Ajax has started to infiltrate companies outside Silicon Valley and user expectations are rising. Many of us have been developing web applications for some time now and while we may not have liked the watered down interfaces, ease of maintenance won us over. Thanks to Ajax, we can now provide a user experience that is nearly indistinguishable from that of a thick client. This talk will give a brief overview of Ajax and look at the impact it is having on web applications. We'll explore some tools that can make developing JavaScript tolerable and discuss the gotchas of Ajax. Despite what some people think, Ajax isn't rocket science – virtually every application can benefit from these techniques. After this talk, you will have a good idea what it means to you.

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer at PTC in the Twin Cities area, with extensive experience developing Java Enterprise Edition–based Web applications. He graduated from St. John's University (MN) with a degree in Computer Science and has a master's of science degree in software engineering from the University of Minnesota. For the last several years, he has focused on user interface design. Nathaniel has contributed to corporate interface guidelines and consulted on a variety of Web-based applications. A long-time member of the Association for Computing Machinery Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group and a Sun-certified Web component developer, Nathaniel believes that if the user can't figure out your application, then you've done something wrong. Along with his user interface work, Nathaniel is the cocreator of the open-source Taconite framework, has contributed to two corporate Java frameworks, has developed training material, and has led several study groups. During the brief moments of warm weather found in his home state of Minnesota, he spends as much time on the golf course as his wife will tolerate. He's currently exploring Ruby, Rails, and (after recently making the switch) Mac OS X. Nathaniel is the coauthor of the bestselling book Foundations of Ajax.