Monday, December 26, 2005

AJAX Experience...Yet another boondoggle

A colleague of mine upon hearing of the Spring experience, said "what a boondoggle". That captured exactly how I felt about it.

Now, I don't object to one man's opinion of enterprise. I know Jay Zimmerman and I applaud him for putting up a fabulous show time and time again with his No Fluff Just Stuff series. However a symposium just on Spring? C'mon. If you are new to Spring, a symposium isn't a way to learn to use it. If you already using Spring, you may get something out of 10-20% of the sessions. How do I figure? Due to many level 101 sessions, and others that you can't attend due to conflicts.

Hard on its heels comes the AJAX experience. A symposium essentially on one Javascript API call! Do we really need a conference on AJAX? Aren't there enough online articles, blogs, and books (don't get me started) on the subject?

My prediction: Coming soon shall be a Ruby Experience -- which actually is a topic worthy of an "experience". I guess what I really envy is Jay's entrepreneurial spirit. You go Jay!

3 comments:

  1. Did you attend the Spring Experience?

    If you didn't, you should be somewhat ashamed for condemning another person's work without any actual experience or evidence. How would you feel if your boss/peer/co-worker/customer never looked at what you coded or wrote and said it was junk?

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  2. To "anonymous":

    A: It was not a condemnation, but a criticism.
    B: To get a feel for whether or not a conference will be useful, one need only look at the session titles and descriptions in the brochure. How else do you decide whether or not to go?

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  3. Hi,

    I am running the conference with Jay (ajaxian.com).

    The conference is not 3 days on the XHR object, but is rather a gathering of leading developers that are building amazing web applications so we can all learn from eachother.

    Ajax != XHR. Ajax is about the fact that we finally have a web architecture in which we can build rich internet apps that don't need page refreshes, and use standards.

    If you build web applications, I would hope that you would get value out of the conference.

    Cheers,

    Dion Almaer
    Founder, Ajaxian.com
    http://ajaxian.com
    Cleaning up the web with Ajax

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