The folks at Hinchcliffe & Company conducted an all day Ajax Bootcamp at Web Design World today. The posted pre-conference materials state:

Using a concept-to-completion format, you’ll learn how to leverage the full power of the browser to build effective RIAs in this day-long course. We’ll cover the basics of Ajax including asynchronous server communication, Dynamic HTML, and Javascript with a focus on the most popular open-source Ajax libraries and frameworks. The latest techniques and best practices for building RIAs are explored including Ajax design patterns and user interface strategies for building elegant, “user addictive” Web sites and applications.

Other than the “user addictive” nonsense, the bootcamp was quite good. It became clear the practice of hand-coding Ajax-driven web content is quickly going by the wayside. There are enough quality libraries and frameworks available in the open-source market to accomplish most tasks. Most of the discussion at the bootcamp revolved around implementing the Dojo Javascript framework. Frameworks have a tremendous amount of power and seeing this presentation has prompted me to further investigate Dreamweaver CS3 and the Spry framework.

In the end, there was a little too much emphasis on web-standards (the Dojo framework creates non-standards code anyway) and not enough time spent on best practices.

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