"For Software as a Service (SaaS) and Financial Services applications, AJAX-enhanced UIs are a proven way to improve bottom-line performance," said Paul Giurata, managing partner, Catalyst Resources, who runs a 30-45 day program to help clients successfully AJAX-enable their web-based applications. "The challenge with AJAX," he continued, "is finding the optimum balance between business needs, technology potential, and enhanced user experience."

"Selecting the right AJAX toolkit or framework is critical," said Giurata. "There are many different open source and commercial toolkits such as Backbase, GWT, YUI, and EXTJS."

Catalyst Resources accordingly has created a 30-45 day program that combines user-validation testing, UI architecture, visual design, AJAX best practices, and clickable code prototypes that can be rapidly extended to production applications. The result is a full implementation plan for optimizing an application’s UI and adding AJAX where it can solve real world business problems and offer the best return on investment.

The AJAX Fast Track service, Giurata added, is a way for companies  to minimize ramp-up time and adoption risk when AJAX-enabling their applications."

It leverages Catalyst Resources proven process for optimizing application UI, he said, but focuses on an accelerated and highly targeted result.

In 30-45 days, Catalyst provides:

1. Assessment of application to determine where AJAX would provide meaningful impact,

2. Refined UI architecture based on high-value scenarios and user-validation,

3. New visual design for key screens with AJAX components,

4. Identification and specification of optimal AJAX UI libraries (open source and commercial),

5. Code clickable model of essential key screens to validate AJAX UI, and

6. Detailed implementation plan and 4-12 month roadmap.

AJAX Fast Track addresses a wide range business initiatives including SaaS, financial services, enterprise portals, and ISV applications.

Submit Your March '08 Proposal Here - AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East

It is a great time to be a front-end engineer! But is it easy yet to make AJAX applications that easily go offline? Are developers better off using an AJAX framework, a toolkit or just coding their own AJAX/JavaScript? Will JavaScript 2.0 be a success, or a dud? How can AJAX apps be made secure? When will AJAX development finally be easy?

Submissions on these and dozens of other topics have already begun streaming in to AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City on March 18-20, 2008.     

The Call for Papers is as always a 100% online process, found here. You will find details of tracks at that link too.
 
There will be another iPhone Track this year, chaired by Kevin Hoffman editor-in-chief of iPhone Developer's Journal. (Remember to select iPhone Track in the pull-down menu on the submissions page.)

Some other particularly hot topics on which the Conference Advisory Board invites submissions include:

• Enterprise-Grade AJAX
• Building RIAs on the iPhone SDK vs using AJAX
• HTML 5.0, XHTML 5.0, Web Forms 2.0
• Standardization plans for the top 4 browsers (Safari, IE, Firefox, Opera)
• Performance assessment for AJAX apps
• Unit/stress testing on an AJAX Application
• Writing complex UIs in JavaScript
• AJAX Security
• "MetaAjax"
• Enterprise Mashups
• AJAX tools for ASP.NET
• AJAX & JAVA
• What's next in Rich Internet Applications
• Adobe AIR vs AJAX vs Gears vs Flash vs Silverlight vs JavaFX vs GWT
• Beyond AJAX
• Open Source vs Proprietary apps
• AJAX push/Reverse AJAX/Comet
• The Event-Driven Web
• Ruby on Rails
• Web 2.0/Socia Applications
• Mobile AJAX
• AHAH / AJAH
• User Interface Patterns
• Risk and Best Practices
• The OpenAjax Hub
• Server-push communications using AJAX (Comet)
• JavaScript Object Oriented programming and design
• AJAX vs JavaFX vs Silverlight
• JavaScript 2.0
• Offline AJAX
• JavaScript libraries
• Using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) in AJAX
• Rails with AJAX
• Google Web Toolkit
• Open source AJAX frameworks
• YUI - Yahoo! User Interface Library
• AJAX tookits and frameworks
• Client/server framework for AJAX: jMaki 1.0
• AJAX .NET/Java/PHP frameworks
• Eclipse Rich AJAX Platform (RAP) 1.0
• AJAX Design Patterns
• Google AJAX APIs
• "User-Proofing" AJAX
• AJAX development with jQuery
• Silverlight & AJAX
• Performance tuning AJAX apps
• AJAX widgets
• Solving the broken browser problem
• Mobile AJAX
• Building RIAs beyond AJAX
  
• Submit Your March '08 Proposal Here