What Dave Did Next
I’ve been fairly quiet on the blog for a couple of weks, as I get to grips with my new job, and start decompressing from writing the Ajax in Action book and consider what comes next.
The great thing about Ajax is that it’s such an old technology! Although the buzzword is new, people hve been doing it for several years, including intrepid pioneers like Brent Ashley, Eric Costello and Erik Hatcher. And these are just the more public-facing ones too. I’d been involved in Ajax for the last two years at Smartstream, and my new employer Historic Futures have been doing this for a few years too, using client-side XSLT to generate responsive, adaptive web apps. It’s been a really interesting process getting to grips with their codebase, and applying what I know of other Ajax techniques to it. I’ve hit another rich seam of experience, something one doesn’t find with many ‘brand-new’ technologies.
On other fronts, I’m busy developing the training course that I’m going to be delivering in London throughout next year, and look forward to helping more people get up to speed on this Ajax thing. My original motive for writing a couple of articles that ended up being a book was to communicate the pitfalls that I’d encountered along the way while doing Ajax, and to help others to find the shortcuts. So a training course seemed like a natural way to go, and an opportunity to get further into some of the things that I didn’t have time to discuss in the book, like testing strategies and in-depth examinations of some of the better toolkits out there.