WebWork at The Ajax Experience

I’ll be speaking at “The Ajax Experience”: http://www.theajaxexperience.com next month (just before JavaOne). This is a pretty exciting conference and presentation for me, mostly because I consider myself “an ajax idiot”. That is, I often have no idea how to do the low level AJAX stuff that all the other presenters know about. Instead, I hope my perspective is a little unique and even interesting, especially to Java web developers.

What we are doing in WebWork (and now Struts Action Framework 2.0) is wrapping up various complicated AJAX techniques and libraries, and making them as simple as using a JSP tag. Want to have AJAX-based validation in your forms? Easy, just add validate=true to your ww:form tag. Need a reloading chunk of HTML? Simply drop in a ww:div tag and specify a URL and refresh time.

My presentation will be all about how we’ve wrapped up much of complexity and JavaScript-ness of AJAX and rolled it in to a nice set of libraries that are readily familiar to WebWork users and other Java web developers. We hope that this perspective can not only teach other “ajax idiots” how to quickly add AJAX to their application, but also perhaps show other AJAX framework authors (Dojo, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Rico, etc) what is appealing to novice users.

Anyway, I hope to see some of my readers at the conference. If you’re going to be in town for it, or for JavaOne, let me know!