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Service-Oriented AJAX: Denver Book Release at Denver .NET User Group

Last night I talked about Service Oriented AJAX in Denver at the .NET User Group to a packed house of 121 people. An AJAX architecture based on a service-oriented API is new to most .NET developers, although it's something that's on the radar for a lot of developers. And it fits very nicely with all types of rich internet application technologies other than pure AJAX, such as Flash, Flex, Silverlight and more-- but AJAX is the most powerful user interface technology out there today, and is 100% compatible with all platforms and browsers.

(Well written) AJAX is all about the architecture... write an API based on Web Services, and never throw those web services away. The UI is then a lightweight layer written in JavaScript, HTML and XSLT which acts as a client to the Web Services. UIs come and UIs go, but the Web Services you write will last for the lifetime of your product, much longer than the release lifetime that user interface components will last. You might rev the UI many times, but if it's based on Web Services you don't need to rev much of the back-end architecture.

To compare the service-oriented AJAX architecture to a traditional ASP.NET server application architecture, here are 2 slides that compare the designs. The major benefit of the service based approach is that the services are reusable for various things like rich client applications (Mac, PC, Linux), RIA technologies including Flash, Flex and Silverlight, remote server applications, and of course multiple AJAX controls and mash-ups.

Here are some photos from the event-- we had a great turn-out, a fabulous crowd, and door prizes for at least half of the attendees, including 45 copies of Developing Service Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft Platform. If you haven't gotten it yet-- it's 30% off at SoftPro with this coupon, or use the Amazon link from my blog.

Big thanks to Microsoft Press/ Microsoft Learning for providing door prizes! We also gave away a few copies of Dino's new book, Architecting Applications for the Enterprise that I'm looking forward to reading.

Thanks to the Denver Microsoft developer community for coming out and showing your support! Denver *ROCKS* .NET!