Kevin Hakman Presenting today, 9/18 at 12PST

Kevin Hakman, Director of Product Marketing, Aptana, will be presenting at the monthly Visual Ajax user group meeting on The End-to-End Open Web: Combining Cloud Computing and Open Source App Engines. Aptana has been a leader in making serious JavaScript development possible both on the client and on the server with their Jaxer product. This should be a great session!

If you want to join via webinar or in person, please send an email to: info@visualajax.org

As always, a write-up of the presentation will be available on visualajax.org afterwards.

Aptana Enters The Cloud

Ajaxian has a good first look at the Aptana Cloud product. The nifty feature here is the ability to deploy an application into a cloud computing environment as easily as publishing it locally. From Ajaxian:

When you click on the project under the cloud menu you are taken through a (very easy to use) wizard for configuration. This runs your through a few steps, setting up a site name, picking a payment plan (the beta is free), payment details and so on.

With some luck, we may be able to lure Kevin Hakman to present the Aptana Cloud to the Visual Ajax user group!

[UPDATE: Kevin will be talking to the Visual Ajax User Group on September 18!]

Getting Started

This is the first posting for the Visual Ajax blog. I look forward to inviting various Ajax thought leaders to present at our monthly user group meetings in San Francisco as well as post to this blog!

The goal of this blog is to promote the use of AJAX tools to build rich internet applications (RIA). We are looking for ways to make AJAX programming as easy (and as ubiquitous) as VB programming.

If you want to know more about me, check out my "day blog" at www.keeneview.com or my "day job" at www.wavemaker.com.

Some other resources to check out include:

• Adobe owns the domain, www.visualajax.com, which is a bit sinister when you think about it ;-)
  
• Ajax Webshop, a visual IDE for AJAX
• Ajaxian is a great resource for information, such as surveys on AJAX usage
• Ajax.dzone.com is another good resource
  
• Aptana, a web IDE for for building AJAX applications
• Backbase is another visual AJAX IDE
  
• Visual AJAX toolkits listing, and another one on Ajaxian
  
• Coghead is a hosted environment for building visual AJAX applications
  
• Teqlo is another hosted environment for building mash-up AJAX applications
• Tersus, an open source tool for building AJAX web applications without coding or scripting
• WaveMaker is an open source framework for visual AJAX web development