From what I could tell this year's AjaxWorld was a great success. Seemed like a lot of people there, the rooms were packed. Many sessions were standing room only if you could get in. Mind you I'm not sure if this due to popularity or if the rooms booked were just too small. At any rate the folks who were there seemed very keen and were lining up early to register and to get into the rooms.

A little background on AjaxWorld, it's put on twice a year by Sys-Con Media. In the spring on the east coast in New York and once the fall in Santa Cara. Of course by Sys-Con I mostly mean Jeremy Geelan who manages to coordinate all this and still MC the event, I don't think the man sleeps:)

I noticed that Flex and Flash are starting to be talked about a lot more. I attended one session on Flex and .Net which was interesting, it touched on a wide range of topics and technologies including WebOrb which was interesting, unfortunately it wasn't that detailed in any one specific area. On the Flash side of the house there was a presentation on using a single pixel Flash movie (.swf) to do things like offline storage, push (using sockets) and file uploading, which is great because I love combining technologies like. Use the best tool for the job!

Although I didn't attend a specific session on performance, that was what I talked with most people about. It seems a lot of big industrial weight development teams are moving or considering moving to Ajax and are very concerned about performance. It seems like Ajax adoption is moving past the early adopter crowd and into masses so tooling, performance, framework selection and best practices are being sought more than ever.

I gave a talk on using Ajax development in Dreamweaver. I gave an overview of the current features in Dreamweaver for Ajax developers and which Ajax toolkits were included. I showed a couple code samples of using Spry and Nitobi Dreamweaver extensions. I think a lot of the audience were interested in figuring out how they could get developers and designers working together more effectively.

Here are my slides:

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I think the overall vibe is that many developers interested in Ajax are looking for mature tools and frameworks that work well, have good performance and they can get support for.

If you were there and had a different experience please leave a comment so others get a feel for this event.

I'm off to join the Adobe On Air Tour in Europe next week starting in Madrid, Spain on Monday so posting may be light until then. I'll be trying blog as much as possible so let me know what you'd like to hear about.

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