Kevin Hakman is the product director for TIBCO General Interface, the award winning AJAX and Rich Internet Application framework and toolkit.

Kevin pioneered AJAX in the enterprise co-founding General Interface in 2001. Since that time General Interface (aka “GI”) has been powering Web applications that look, feel and perform like desktop applications, but run in the browser at Fortune 500 and US Government organizations. General Interface was also the first to use its own toolkit to provide full visual tooling for AJAX when it released it’s 2.0 Version in 2003. TIBCO acquired General Interface in 2004 to extend its vision for service oriented applications to the end user.

Kevin is a contributor to the Web Services Journal and the AJAX Developers Journal.

Presentation
The Four Quantum States of AJAX
To purists, AJAX is about communicating asynchronously from the browser using JavaScript and XML, nothing more. To others, through their experiences with Google Maps and Yahoo!’s new email offering, AJAX represents a desktop-like GUI that leverages the pre-existing HTML, DHTML, and vector-based rendering capabilities of the browser. Accordingly, it’s likely that developers will continue to use it for a broad spectrum of uses. So, it’s important to understand the “quantum states” the term has taken on.

Kevin Hakman, Co-founder of TIBCO General Interface, and leading expert on AJAX technologies in the enterprise, will examine four quantum states of AJAX in an effort to tease apart and classify the plethora of AJAX technologies available today:

• Communication libraries
• User Interface Components
• Rich Internet Application frameworks
• RIA Frameworks with robust visual tooling

Though deconstructing AJAX, Kevin will help participants determine which of the above AJAX incarnations makes the most sense for them.

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