Jeremy Keith
Bio
Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer now living in Brighton, where he works with the web consultancy firm Clearleft. By day, he makes websites. By night, he plays bouzouki in the alt.country band Salter Cane. His online home is adactio.com.
Jeremy is a member of the Web Standards Project where he serves as joint leader of the DOM Scripting Task Force. He wrote the book DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model.
When he's not sitting in front of his computer, Jeremy spreads the good word of web standards at events like South by Southwest in Austin, @media in London, and Web Directions in Sydney.
Jeremy likes good food, traditional Irish music, and writing about himself in the third person.
Session
Ajax: Flash killer?
Ajax allows developers to build rich applications in the browser that can communicate with the server without a complete page refresh. So what else is new? Flash has been able to do this for years. With the introduction of the Flex framework, developers have a great environment for building these kinds of applications. Yet Ajax is getting all the hype. What makes it seem so revolutionary to so many people?
Ajax and Flash have a lot in common but they also have their own individual strengths and weaknesses. Ajax is very well suited to making enhancements to existing websites - enhancements that can degrade gracefully if JavaScript is disabled. The Flex framework, on the other hand, is ideal for situations where a complete interface is required.
But when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. There are Ajax applications out there that should be delivered in Flash. And there are Flash applications that would be better suited to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Instead of choosing the right tool for the job, developers are often unwilling to step outside their own personal comfort zones.
In this presentation, you'll learn the ins and outs of Ajax, its power and its shortcomings. Find out how it compares to Flash as a delivery platform. Most of all, learn when to use Ajax and when to stick to Flex.