RIAs offer the potential to fundamentally change the user experience and in doing so, yield significant business benefits. The theme of this October's AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 West is 'Beyond AJAX to the RIA Era' and the Call for Papers, which is currently still open, specifically encourages submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases of the fast-emerging RIA alternatives.

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

A round-up of the overall themes and topics being presented at the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA, October 20-22, 2008 - including AIR & Flex, AJAX, ASP.NET, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), iPhone Development, JavaScript, Mashups, Mobile RIAs, Open APIs & Toolkits, SaaS, Security, Silverlight, Social Software, and User Interface & User eXperience Issues.

IBM claims to have created new species of custom-built, industry-standard, Linux-based rack server for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing companies with massive data centers and tens of thousands of servers, like online gaming, social networks, search and Internet firms. A relatively limited marketplace of maybe a thousand companies with fat wallets capable of shelling out tens of millions for such system. IBM means to replace the white boxes they use now or build themselves like Google does.

4D announced the release of 4D Web 2.0 Pack v11 Release 2. The new version, a combination of two products - 4D AJAX Framework and 4D for Flex - brings a powerful set of tools, plug-ins, and components that allow 4D developers to harness the power of Web 2.0 technologies, and deliver live web and rich internet applications to browsers, desktops, and portable devices such as the iPhone.

In ASP.NET 2.0, we introduced a very powerful set of application services in ASP.NET (Membership, Roles and profile). In 3.5 we created a client library for accessing them from Ajax and .NET Clients and exposed them via WCF web services. For more information on the base level ASP.NET appservices that this walk through is based on, please see Stefan Schackow's excellent book Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Security, Membership, and Role Management.

WaveMaker announced a strategic partnership with on-demand financial Web services provider Xignite. Together, Xignite and WaveMaker will simplify the process by which financial services organizations integrate key financial information into the processes and applications their employees and clients use every day. By combining Xignite's Web services and WaveMaker's Visual AJAX Studio development environment, customers can easily create and deploy a mashup to an existing Web page or dashboard in a matter of minutes.

NetSuite announced new capabilities for its flagship CRM product, NetSuite CRM+, featuring AJAX-powered workflows that enhance ease-of-use of marketing automation and knowledge management functionality used in customer support and customer service. These new workflows center around step-wise, dynamic user interaction and are now also supported in the new Firefox 3 web browser, along with other unique industry-leading capabilities of NetSuite such as eXtreme list editing, rich-text editing, drag-and-drop and quick-add portlets.

SnapLogic announced the SugarCRM Solution Pack, an extension to the SnapLogic open source data integration framework. SnapLogic enables enterprises to integrate data on both sides of the enterprise firewall and to create custom integration solutions, including application integrations, enterprise mashups, and rich Internet applications (RIAs). The SugarCRM Solution Pack enables integration of SugarCRM with other SaaS applications, behind-the-firewall enterprise applications, Web sites, and other data sources. The Solution Pack supports both standard SugarCRM deployments, as well as Sugar On-Demand implementations. SnapLogic also announced that it has joined SugarCRM's SugarExchange program.

It is said that by 2013, 31 percent of all mobile phones will be smart phones, and by then, a smart phone might be almost like a full blown PC. Meanwhile it seems like everyone is trying to push their feet into the blooming mobile phone market. We've seen a lot of ups and downs in this area, lots of promises that haven't been fulfilled. In fact only since the arrival of the iPhone, has surfing the web become reasonable on a mobile phone.

Sybase iAnywhere announced immediate support for the new iPhone 3G model to extend wireless email from Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange email systems. Sybase iAnywhere was early to market in offering iPhone users wireless email access to Lotus Domino with its product release in Q1 2008, and continues to innovate with support of the new iPhone 3G.

Ajax specialists, Nitobi Inc., releases Complete UI 2008 Q3 with enhancements to two of the suite's Ajax components, support for JavaServer Faces (JSF), and support for Firefox 3. Nitobi's Complete UI integrated platform for building web user interfaces includes 10 Ajax-powered components that improve user experiences for any Web 2.0 application.

The move from native, OS-specific applications to web applications continues to be one of the biggest 'disruptions' in the software industry today, said Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch recently in an interview with the Wharton Business School. 'We're a leader in enabling that transition to happen with things like AIR,' Lynch noted, adding: 'We're focused on taking advantage of that shift, not only with our enabling technologies, but also our applications like Premiere Express, Photoshop Express and BuzzWord.'

In the world of Rich Internet Applications, there is no shortage of technology choices to compose a user interface. But what tools will give us the best bang for our buck? Here is a look at some heavy hitters and newcomers in the RIA market, including: HTML & AJAX, Rails and Grails, Flex, Silverlight, Curl, GWT, OpenLaszlo, and Appcelerator.

The pressure is on to keep pace with Web 2.0 entrants into the marketplace. Rewriting is expensive; adding AJAX widgets results in a complex, unmaintainable application. Both require you to hire scarce JavaScript developers. Google Web Toolkit -- the SDK that allows you to write AJAX interfaces in Java -- enables your Java developers to layer a desktop-like interface on top of your Web app. Learn to analyze the service profile of your application, to change HTML views into XML or JSON services, and to resist opening security holes by putting state and control flow logic into the client.

Gizmox announced the release of a fully functional beta version of its Visual WebGui (VWG) with support for Microsoft Silverlight. For the first time, VWG enables Silverlight for enterprise applications by providing a RAD like Windows Forms development experience with drag & drop design that cuts development cycles by as much as 90%.

The Web has evolved into a structured data space of loosely connected databases, enabling granular data access-by-reference to Web-accessible entities, courtesy of HTTP. This evolution and the emergence of AJAX-based RIA technologies lay the foundation for a new generation of libraries, widgets, and frameworks, that together embrace and extend enterprise data access practices of yore. This session will cover access and exploitation of Web-accessible Linked Data using AJAX- and AJAR-based technologies (Asynchronous JavaScript and RDF).

SaaS based applications continue to grow at a staggering rate. According to software market analysts, SaaS represented approximately 5% of business software revenue in 2005 and, by 2011, 25% of new business software will be delivered as SaaS and will grow at a 21% % annual growth rate (CAGR) during the next four years. As the acceptance and popularity of SaaS applications has continued to rise dramatically, traditional enterprise integration software has become the Achilles heel of the SaaS industry. Additionally, the wide variety of SaaS vendors specializing in different areas has resulted in companies attempting to stitch together information from a number of different places. Traditional integration software products are inconsistent with the values of SaaS in terms of cost, complexity and time to implement. SOA and XML driven application integrations are very well suited for this purpose. But demand will continue to grow for easy to use, manageable, highly scalable on-demand integration.

'We're dedicated to building the largest open-source community dedicated to RIAs, breaking down the barriers between traditional preferred languages, programming models and solutions,' says the co-founder & CEO of Appcelerator, Jeff Haynie, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan. To date Appcelerator has seen the strongest amount of interest from Java and PHP developers, Haynie notes, but he says the company has continued to see steady growth across Ruby, Python, Perl and .NET programmers as well.

As Web-based applications are pushing the 'Rich User Experience' envelope, AJAX is quickly becoming a standard front-end for any PHP application. But unfortunately as PHP applications that utilize AJAX are being forced to morph from two-tier to three-tier architectures, pushing code to the client adds inherent issues with security and code maintenance. New techniques are being developed which focuses on server-side generated AJAX, allowing developers to code AJAX applications in PHP instead of JavaScript. This session will discuss and demo many of these new techniques which will allow for the development of rich, AJAX user experiences without needing to code any JavaScript whatsoever.

Come see a no-slides, code-only presentation that starts with a blank directory and builds a data-driven, AJAX enabled, ASP.NET web application from scratch that implements common AJAX patterns with the rich set of AJAX Control Toolkit, accesses data with LINQ, and implements standards-based styling and layout using CSS and clean HTML. Learn the new features of ASP.NET 3.5 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and how they integrate together to provide the world's most productive Web development experience. This talk uses the 100% free .NET Framework and Visual Studio tools and the resulting application will work with all browsers, Safari, Firefox and of course IE.

Not only enterprise portals integrators are using AJAX at the portal level but now they can also use it for the development of more user-friendly JSR-168 portlets. With the arrival of new standards, AJAXified JSF Components like IceFaces ot RichFaces became a reality that can be portable across the many JSR-168 portlet containers implementations, in the commercial or open source worlds. During his presentation, we will explain how this has been made possible and how one can write such portlets.

The industry has been debating the meaning of 'Enterprise 2.0' (how to bring Web 2.0 technology to the enterprise). Andrew McAfee has talked about the SLATES mnemonic (search, linking, tagging, authoring, extensions, and signals). Many companies have developed Wikis, Blogs, Tag clouds, Mashups, but the ROI is unclear. Jnan Dash, Chief Strategy Officer of Curl, Inc., feels the low hanging fruit for Web 2.0 deployment in the enterprise is called 'RIA' - 'Improve the user interface of old client-server applications and delight your users while reducing the TCO,' says Dash.

What does the AJAX community want from future browsers? How are these different requests prioritized? Web developers have done amazing things with AJAX for both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 applications, but what barriers need to be removed to enable the next generation of browser-based innovations? The future of AJAX runtime environments matters more than ever today.

Today, there is a wealth of technologies to take advantage of to add AJAX behaviors to your Spring-based Java Web applications. This session will assume you know the basics of AJAX and Spring, and will dive straight into evaluating the leading AJAX technologies, and how to integrate them with Spring to take full advantage of an existing Spring infrastructure. Attendees will emerge with an understanding of which tools to use when, and how they work in a Spring environment to create enterprise class rich Web applications.

RIAs provide the promise of an excellent User eXperience, but the ultimate success of the UX is driven more by the skill of the developer than the tool selection itself. This session will discuss the foundation and importance of the application of cognitive science techniques to the process of designing and building a rich Web application. The presentation will provide: Overview of Human Factors/Usability and how these techniques have been applied to the Web, Basic concepts (heuristics) that should be met in any web application, and Resources so that attendees can perform this sort of work independently.

Optaros has launched DoCASU 1.0, a user interface framework for Alfresco deployments as an open source project. The project will drive open source adoption rates and help users assimilate Alfresco's enterprise content management systems. DoCASU 1.0 leverages the understanding gained from corporate user requirements and utilizes Rich Internet Application technologies such as the ExtJS AJAX framework.

Microsoft introduced Silverlight as cross-platform, cross-browser next generation RIA solution. This session will use real world implementations to show you how to build a Silverlight application from start to finish, as well overall strategy why we should or shouldn't use Silverlight. No matter whether you have LAMP, ASP.NET or Java Web application, you can take advantage of Silverlight to impress your user with the 'Wow' effects.

JavaScript is one of the most interesting and misunderstood programming languages in common use today. Most developers will go their entire careers without realizing its full potential. It's not often that you get a language that supports the feature set that JavaScript does, while still being as widely deployed. This talk will spotlight some patterns surrounding JavaScript's most elegant features such as closures, lambdas, object and array literals, object prototypes, private members and dynamic scope resolution -- all without boring you to tears.

WaveMaker announced that Mavirroco Consulting has successfully built and deployed an open source web directory and content management system for the Medical College of Tarijas using WaveMaker Visual AJAX Studio. The new internal Web application, called 'ColMed,' allows doctors to securely share contact information, schedules, events and collect payments.

SL Corporation announced the availability of RTView version 5.0. This latest release allows users to mix and match a variety of Web 2.0 technologies - including AJAX and Flash - to deliver the most efficient real-time visibility applications for their needs, without requiring any technical knowledge of the Web 2.0 technologies.

As the mobile Web matures, we see more and more people running around airports with their mobile devices in hand, searching for hotel rooms, reading the news, or just playing video games. People are more connected with their mobile phone today than any other electronic device they use. What was once a nice-to-have is now the norm, and is quickly becoming an integral part of our culture and society. But how do you connect with users through mobile web sites and create exceptional experiences that are both functional and captivating?

The Networked Application is an emerging design pattern in rich Internet application development. The crux of the pattern is to push all user interface code to the client. The client 'downloads' the application, and the application then communicates to one or more servers. This session will explain the motivations of the pattern and look at how it can be implemented using specific AJAX toolkits such as Google Web Toolkit, Yahoo User Interface Library, and Dojo. We will also talk about how the pattern can be implemented using AJAX alternatives such as Flex and Silverlight.

Apple has introduced a number of extensions to the JavaScript programming language to assist iPhone Web developers. Including new fast lookup functions, native SVG graphics processing, CSS effects, database storage and full screen mode. These new functions will transform the way Web and AJAX developers look at the iPhone for application development. This session introduces the JavaScript extensions, and shows practical examples of their usage.

Many new model mobile devices allow the 'Web Runtime' (i.e., the browser engine) to invoke device capabilities from JavaScript, such as access to current location (e.g., via GPS), phone dialer, camera, address book, calendar, email, and SMS, whereas previously these services were only available to compiled programming languages, such as C++ and Java. By giving Web developers using HTML and JavaScript the same power as C++ and Java, we will see a large wave of next-generation consumer and Enterprise Web 2.0 applications that take innovation and productivity to new levels. These new Mobile AJAX applications run not only in the browser, but also as AJAX-powered mobile widgets and AJAX-powered installed applications. Two challenges, however, are interoperability (because different devices support different APIs), and security (along with the new feature, we also have new vulnerabilities). OpenAjax Alliance is addressing the two challenges through its open standards, open source, and security initiatives.

This session will provide an in-depth look into the use of HTML 5 WebSocket and the techniques and technologies required to build Comet applications with it. Additionally, the speakers will discuss the trade-offs between emerging de jure standards (such as HTML 5's WebSocket) and de facto standards such as the Bayeux protocol. Furthermore, the session will cover the server and network architecture that powers an event-driven Web application. Attendees will be introduced to the technologies and requirements for delivering scalable, real-time Comet Web applications, and, most importantly, to the pitfalls they may face in the process.

SL Corporation, a provider of real-time monitoring, analytics, and visualization software, today announced the availability of RTView version 5.0. This latest release allows users to mix and match a variety of Web 2.0 technologies ? including AJAX and Flash ? to deliver the most efficient real-time visibility applications for their needs, without requiring any technical knowledge of the Web 2.0 technologies.

Build stunning animated applications that do amazing things that will knock your users socks off. Drawing on the content of his book on Core Animation, Dudney will take you through the concepts crucial to building beautiful native apps for the iPhone.

Often called the Semantic or Pervasive Web, Web 3.0 brings a level of artificial intelligence to transform the Internet from a searchable catalog to a personal guide that can reason in a human-like fashion and provide users with more services and options for social networks. This session will map out the world of Web 3.0, exploring the unique benefits for end users, as well as opportunities for businesses. Using specific examples, Jon Doyle will demonstrate how Web 3.0 will change the way users interact with the Web - from planning and booking an entire vacation to automatically scheduling doctor's appointments based on personal preferences.

The Co-Web, the collaborative, media converged Web, is upon us. The Co-Web is interpersonal; it is about getting work done together. It is much more than surfing a YouTube/Google Map mashup while Twittering with co-workers. Showtime uses those same technologies to build a Co-Web page where we all interact on the same data at the same time, see the same context and make better decisions as a result. A Showtime Co-Web application uses the same standards as a normal mashup - OpenAJAX plus XMPP, RTP/RTSP and H.264 - yet remakes the mashup as the Co-Web. For the Co-Web - It's Showtime!