A great conference is over! The Ajax Experience took place from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 2008 in Boston and was packed with great talks – sometimes four of them in parallel! So it was very hard to decide between learning about security (beyond XSS and SQL injection!), the newest Ajax frameworks (i.e. Cappuccino – check out 280Slides, it’s worth it!) or performance improvements (Steve Souders had great stuff again!).

So it’s really hard to give a recap of what happened – so much things have been going on. One item I take for me as programmer is about how to improve my designs – it’s all about CRAP.

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

A lot of different effects can be achieved by just focusing on these four items and that’s one of the reasons why this Website is now a bit lighter than it was before the conference

Another interesting session has been “Top 10 browser issues” with quirksmode.org creator ppk. On stage with him the persons behind the four major JavaScript frameworks Prototype (Andrew Dupont), Dojo, YUI and jQuery (John Resig).
This session was a pretty good overview about where the projects will be heading and what you can expect from them in the future – because in the end it depends on a single person…

Regarding performance improvements I want to highlight SmushIT.com, a new Web application (and a Firefox plugin) that automatically optimizes images for Web sites. Great, simple and just working. It’s good to see new tools coming up that simplify tasks which had to be performed manually a year ago – another great sample is Hammerhead. Also note that Yahoo added 20 additional rules to their existing 14 “golden” performance rules.

Finally I wanna restate the sentence from the beginning of this post – “A great conference is over!“. It gave a great overview about what is happening in the Web 2.0 world and fostered networking with other developers outside of the own company!