(Santa Clara, CA) - Imbibing AJAX cheek-by-jowl with Yahoo!, Sun, Intel, Nortel Networks, McAfee, and a host of other major headquarters buildings is an uplifting experience. It is as if the AJAX approach, which got itself a shiny new name in San Francisco in February of 2005 but is based on technologies spawned in the Valley and elsewhere (including Redmond) long before that, has come "home."

What leads me to so fanciful a conclusion? Well, for one thing the world's first-ever AJAXWorld Conference & Expo [disclaimer - I am Conference Chair] is taking place, from tomorrow, here and not anywhere else in the USA. Since the sponsorships of this 3-day event sold out within a few weeks of announcing the show, and since 750+ delegates are expected to be in attendance, the choice of location must have resonated with a very broad spectrum of attendees.

Rightly so. Because Santa Clara is, after all, the home of Java...and, for all that Java and JavaScript have nothing whatsoever in common, my personal view is that AJAX owes its astonishingly rapidly-achieved prominence in part because it provies the "facing" - the presentation layer - that the Internet world had been waiting for, after 13 years of a network largely undergirded, at the enterprise level anyway, by Java and Linux but without any UI eye-candy such as AJAX now offers to all-comers.

Sun seems certainly to sense this happy sense of completion and, its own Swing initiative notwithstanding, has embraced AJAX with open arms. Just look at the sessions that Sun is giving at AJAXWorld, where with 6 speakers it has the largest presence of any single company at the event.

For example Greg Murray - former Servlet 2.5 specification lead and now the AJAX architect for Sun - will in his session address using Java technologies such as servlets, JavaServer Pages, and JavaServer Faces to create interactive AJAX applications.

Craig R. McClanahan, original author of the Apache Struts framework for building Web applications, is giving a session entitled "Encapsulating AJAX Functionality in JavaServer Faces Components." He was part of the expert group that defined the servlet 2.2, 2.3 and JSP 1.1, 1.2 specifications and is also the architect of Tomcat's servlet container Catalina.

Inderjeet Singh, a senior staff engineer with Sun where he is the architect for the Java BluePrints program, is giving a session discussing how Java EE 5 technologies can be used to create next-generation Web 2.0 applications. The session will cover how rich interactive GUIs similar to traditional desktops can be designed with AJAX, enabling features such as mashups, tagging, and user participation.

A happy attendee celebrates his arrival AJAXWorld Conference & Expo.
The 3-day event kicks off tomorrow, Oct 2, with an all-dat "AJAX University Bootcamp".

Santa Clara Convention Center by night.
The sign outside the show hotel, the Hyatt Regency, heralding three days of intensive AJAX