brentashley

Although you will indeed see me at the Ajax Experience show in SFO at the end of the month, I’m afraid you won’t find me in Santa Clara in September.

Today I received yet another in a series of communications asking me to be a sponsor for the Ajax World conference hosted by Sys-Con Media.

I first had contact with Sys-Con when Jeremy Geelan asked me to participate in an expert survey in 2005 [addendum: Jeremy is no longer with Sys-Con, having left to found Social Computing Magazine][addendum2: Jeremy is back with Sys-Con - whether he actually left or not is unknown, but it's clear he's not been entirely frank with me]. I freely gave a bit of my time to come up with a series of responses which were quoted and which apparently were helpful in making it a successful article, ostensibly generating interest or revenue for them.

Based on the success of that interaction, Jeremy invited me to speak at Ajax World in Santa Clara, but it soon became clear I was expected to pay my own travel and accomodation and displace 3+travel=4 days of client business, altogether a significant cost to me – greater than $5000. I said that as an independent with no product to pitch, I would require travel, accomodation and compensation. I was told that expenses were my responsibility and all I could expect in return for speaking would be to get into the conference – a $1595 “value” to me.

Some time after declining this “generous” offer, I started receiving emails and even couriered packages filled with glossies and CD media from Carmen Gonzales, Sr. VP of Sales & Marketing, entreating me to pay big bucks to sponsor the show and get myself a speaking slot.

Jeremy later sent me an email inviting me to submit my presentation for the NYC show last fall. I did so, and reminded him of my requirements, wondering aloud whether his position had changed since he was asking me again. I never received a response.

After receiving further unsolicited emails [from Carmen] about sponsorship, I wrote to Carmen, copying Jeremy, to make it clear that not only had I no such interest, but that their continued efforts were beginning to wear on me.

Since that time I have received numerous messages and even packages via courier, entreating me to spend up to multiple tens of thousands of dollars to become a sponsor. It’s apparent that your business model consists of charging people to attend conferences to hear vendor representatives who have bought keynote and speaking slots and other speakers who have paid their own way and given their time for free, all sponsored by other companies who pay you handsomely for the privilege. It’s abundantly clear that any disinclination to budget for speakers has nothing to do with a lack of available funds.

Obviously there are many speakers whose situations differ from mine, and I salute you for your ability to maintain a cash cow with such a lopsided balance sheet, however, I’m not the least bit inclined to spend any of my own time and effort to further enrich your gain with no recompense to me, and your continued misdirected effort is doing nothing but alienating me from any desire to be supportive of your organization in any way.

For what it’s worth, I presented and participated on panels at both of the Ajax Experience shows last year with no such issues and was made to feel that my time and contribution were very much appreciated.

I was nearly knocked over when in response to my email direct to Carmen a customer service rep contacted me and I was offered a Gold Pass Badge to the NYC show.

Brent,

Our apologies for the oversight and mixup. We would love to invite you to AJAXWorld as our guest with a complimentary Gold Pass badge.

SYS-CON Events Customer Services Team

P.S. Jeremy and/or Carmen will reply to your email. Our apologies again!

In order to use this “complimentary” pass of course, I would have to fly from Toronto to NYC, pay for a hotel, taxi, etc, and of course jerk around my clients on short notice to realign my schedule.

I never received an email from either Carmen or Jeremy as promised by the Customer Service rep. I figured whatever, that’s the end of that.

So, today I start receiving the sponsorship emails [from Carmen] again.

Platinum Sponsorship: $30,000:
10×20 Exhibit Space & 50 minute vendor presentation

Gold Sponsorship: $20,000:
10×10 Exhibit Space & 30 minute vendor presentation

Silver Sponsorship: $15,000 8×10 Exhibit Space & power panel spot

Exhibitor Packages: Plus package $10,000 / standard $5,500

The entrance fee for the conference ranges from $1500 to $1900 depending on when you sign up.

It’s too bad they can’t afford to compensate their speakers or even pay their expenses.

It’s also a shame that their disinterest in stopping the mailings and their lack of response (even when promised) would lead me to moan publicly about it.

I like to think that Ron has me pegged when he describes what he calls a Jazz Programmer.

His post is all the more relevant to me since Jazz plays a not insignificant part in who I am, and the photo he uses is of one of my Jazz heroes, Jimmy Smith

Dion Almaer points us to a recently released paper [pdf] from Collin Jackson and Helen Wang introducing their research into a new method of Secure Cross-Domain Communication for Web Mashups.

The method is designed to provide secure cross-domain scripting using the tools that are available now, so we don’t have to wait for the next generation of browsers to provide purpose-built mechanisms.

Collin and Helen, along with some other Microsoft colleagues, have also authored another paper entitled MashupOS: Operating System Abstractions for Client Mashups [pdf] that is worth reading.

Recently my friend and business associate Noel was tired of meeting people that day who were content to rest on their laurels but had no vision or drive to do new things. His frustrated cry was:

Don’t tell me what you did yesterday!

I modified his mantra and we both liked the result:

Don’t tell me what you did yesterday unless it was at least two days ahead of its time!

IBM Developerworks has just published my new article “Shaping the Future of Ajax Mashups”, wherein I explain that browsers are still not well equipped to enable mashups that integrate input from multiple sources without falling prey to serious security and/or scaling issues. I then discuss some of the potential solutions to the problem and call for the development community to get involved.

I’m also interviewed by IBM’s Scott Laningham in a short podcast promoting the article.

One good way to get involved is to mix with the top people in the Ajax world – the browser manufacturers, the folks who create the libraries and APIs we use to build our Ajax apps, the big players in the industry. Ben and Dion at Ajaxian have just made a call for speakers for their Ajax Experience 2007 show slated for July 25-27 in San Francisco. Having established some great contacts and communication at the two previous Ajaxian shows, I can tell you without doubt that this is the one Ajax show of the year not to miss. It’s an opportunity to spend a couple of days rubbing shoulders with the people in the industry who can actually influence the future of the tools we use to build and use the interactive net.

Dave Johnson has posted a sample chapter from the upcoming book called Enterprise Ajax, written by Dave and his Nitobi colleagues Alexei White and Andre Charland.

I did the tech review on this book and I can tell you it’s filled with high quality writing and insight taken from some pretty serious experience – Andre and Dave started up EBusinessApps (which became Nitobi last year) at least 5 years ago doing Ajaxy stuff well before it was de rigeur.

The book should come out in early summer – you can pre-order a copy now.

In the post-demo schmooze at Toronto DemoCamp 12 last week, I was discussing Ajax-y things with a few people and I found myself articulating a notion that has been rolling around in my head unformed for a while – that of Javascript as Babelfish.

If you look some of the popular Javascript libraries and frameworks, an important aspect of their design is to make one’s Javascript code feel more like another environment that better suits the application or in which the designer (and ultimately user) is fluent.

• prototype => Ruby
• mochikit => Python
• JQuery => XPath
• GWT => Java

To be precise, GWT is actually written in Java, so it doesn’t fit exactly but continues to demonstrate the trend of people wanting to stay in the environment they understand but have Javascript do the work.

Javascript is remarkable in its flexibility of expression that allows you to apply it to various idiomatic styles. I can’t think of another language that would be quite so accomodating.

Is this trend indicative of Javascript’s power, or the ingenuity of developers who are stuck with using Javascript in the browser when it differs from their environment of choice?

My friend and mentor Greg Vincent (no link yet) sent me a link today to this article that explains how an upcoming Supreme Court case could make it extemely difficult in the future to invalidate patents due to obviousness.

The gist is that the test would be interpreted to require prior publication of discussion of the obvious feature to prove obviousness.

But opposing a patent on those grounds can be harder than it sounds. According to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the U.S. Patent Office or the challenger of a patent must produce written documentation that someone suggested the substance of the patent before it was filed. That test “forces litigants to search through reams of technical papers for a document in which someone, somewhere, bother to state the obvious”…

The quagmire thickens…