Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith of Ajaxian told us about Ajax tools and frameworks, and the direction they see Ajax going. Their talk was really well done, and very interesting. Google taped all the talks and said they will post them sometime, probably on code.google.com, so you’ll be able to see for yourselves.
Highlights I took down:
There are lots of Ajax frameworks and toolkits, which were created to do different kinds of things. But over time, the leaders all evolved to cover similar broad spectra of functionality. The four families that really matter now are Prototype, Dojo, jQuery, and GWT. (I wonder if including GWT is partly just an acknowledgment of the conference sponsor.)
Future directions are to make the browser as capable as your PC, and will eventually be strong competition for native GUI applications. Tools for that include Fluid (which I hadn’t heard of), Adobe Air, Mozilla Prism, and Google Gears.
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