San Mateo, California - November 22th, 2007 - Backbase, The Ajax Company™, today introduced Enterprise Ajax 4.1, a new version of the industry leading Ajax framework. Enterprise Ajax is a unique Client based Ajax framework that works like an application server in a browser. The 4.1 version focuses on ease-of-use and brings new functionality with new sample applications, a new redesigned Ajax feature explorer, and enhanced documentation.

The Spring Experience is the conference for the global Spring community. This one-of-a-kind event is for application developers, solution architects, and project managers who develop business applications with Spring and the technologies Spring integrates with.

2007 will be our third year, and our biggest show yet. This year's agenda features five concurrent tracks and over 60 technical sessions delivering new and exclusive Spring content.

http://www.thespringexperience.com/conference/hollywood/2007/12/index.html

eValid is offering a limited number of no-cost evaluations of its Rich Internet Application (RIA) monitoring services.  

San Mateo, CA, November, 2007 ­ Catalyst Resources, a recognized leader in user interface design for web applications, today announced a new service to help clients successfully AJAX-enable their web-based applications.  AJAX Fast Track is a 30-45 day program that combines user-validation testing, UI architecture, visual design, AJAX best practices,  and clickable code prototypes that can be rapidly extended to production applications. The result is a full implementation plan for optimizing an application's UI and adding AJAX where it can solve real world business problems and offer the best return on investment.

Google Web Toolkit enables developers to use their favorite Java tools to build AJAX applications without having to tackle the steep learning curve and quirks of JavaScript and CSS. The Voices That Matter: Google Web Toolkit Conference will insure you understand why this is so and how you can leverage the power and functionality of GWT for your applications.

From the people who are publishing the definitive books on Google Web Toolkit, this conference will be a forum of the Google engineers, the open source community of contributors and developers like you.

http://www.voicesthatmatter.com/gwt2007/index.html

Web 2.0 applications developed using standard Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE)-based approaches face serious performance and scalability problems. The reason is that many principles that underlie the Java EE platform's design — especially, the use of synchronous APIs — don't apply to the requirements of Web 2.0 solutions. This article explains the disparity between the Java EE and Web 2.0 approaches, explores the benefits of asynchronous designs, and evaluates some solutions for developing asynchronous Web applications with the Java platform.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - November 07, 2007 - WaveMaker™, formerly known as ActiveGrid, today announced a new corporate brand and product strategy that will address the growing demand for technology that simplifies the assembly of Web applications, while meeting the architectural, security and data policies of CIOs. WaveMaker will bring to market software enabling the visual assembly and rapid deployment of scalable, enterprise Web 2.0 applications that are both Web Fast and CIO Safe™.

San Francisco, California, November 7th, 2007 - Isomorphic Software today announced that the SmartClient Ajax platform is being made available, for free, under the open source LGPL license. 

Hakano, Inc., an Atlanta-based Web 2.0 and rich Internet application (RIA) development company, announced it has re-named the company Appcelerator, Inc. The new company name marks a shift in company strategy, from custom Web 2.0 development to providing an open source RIA development platform for developing, integrating and managing rich Internet applications (RIAs) and SOA-based Web services.

The usability perspective in RIA-based service consumer design. The Web is evolving as an open platform with rich user interface capabilities of desktop clients. This has triggered user-driven management of service consumer ecosystems, expanding the reach of SOA with rich interactive controls and Web 2.0 tools to access the Web content and services. However the usability dimension of these Web 2.0-based service consumer ecosystems is often ignored, leaving doubt about whether present usability testing techniques in Web-based systems are capable enough to guarantee a usable experience in RIA-based service consumer systems.

http://soa.sys-con.com/read/453080.htm 

SAN MATEO, CALIF., — October 30, 2007 — Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), the global leader in on-demand mobile and Internet test & measurement solutions for continuously improving the online experience, today reinforced the company’s leadership position with the introduction of the industry’s most advanced and accurate Internet testing environment for recording and measuring the performance of Web 2.0 applications at all stages of the lifecycle. Keynote’s Internet Testing Environment (KITE) is a desktop-based console that enables developers and testing professionals, from their own desktop, to test and measure the end-user experience of next generation Web applications including AJAX-based applications and asynchronously downloaded content. All transactions recorded via KITE can also be deployed on the new Transaction Perspective® 8.0 and Application Perspective 5.0 measurement computers which utilize Keynote’s global test & measurement network.

Cambridge, Mass. — October 30, 2007 — Curl®, Inc. today announced its plans to release a significant body of code for the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform to the open source community. As the first step in its open source strategy, Curl will broaden its development platform and empower the Curl developer community by establishing a common repository of open source component libraries. As a result, developers will have all of the components required to support rapid development of enterprise-class RIAs. Curl's Open Source projects are provided under the Apache V2.0 License and hosted by SourceForge.

n 2004, I started the Exceptional Performance group at Yahoo!. We're a small team chartered to measure and improve the performance of Yahoo!'s products. Having worked as a back-end engineer most of my career, I approached this as I would a code optimization project - I profiled web performance to identify where there was the greatest opportunity for improvement. Since our goal is to improve the end-user experience, I measured response times in a browser over various bandwidth speeds.

It's a cool collection of technologies, but there's downside to those slick UIs. Here's how to be best prepared.

With Ajax still one of the industry's hottest buzzwords, more and more applications are being built with Ajax technologies. However, it's not always easy to build a good application. This article focuses on how to build intuitive, easy-to-use Ajax-driven applications.