Customized Onsite Ajax Training Courses

Looking for practical, hands-on training on Ajax and RIAs onsite at your organization? Look no further! These courses are personally developed and taught by leading Java EE and Ajax developer, speaker, and author Marty Hall. No contract instructor regurgitating someone else's materials! Marty has taught Ajax, GWT, and Java EE courses onsite for dozens of organizations in the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Japan, Puerto Rico, India, and the Philippines, all to rave reviews.

If you have a group of at least eight interested developers (10 for courses outside the US or Canada), contact Marty to arrange a course at your location. Onsite courses are easier administratively, are better for clients since the topics and pace can be customized, are more cost effective for students since no travel is required, and are more convenient (for companies in the Baltimore/Washington area) because the schedule is flexible (e.g. afternoons or evenings instead of n consecutive days). However, if you have too few developers for an onsite course, check out our upcoming Ajax training course in Maryland (co-sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals program). We also have a similar Ajax course in Oslo Norway in October 2010 (co-sponsored by Bouvet ASA).

Main Course Options

There are a variety of types of Ajax courses that we can present at your organization. All courses are in lecture/lab format with a heavy emphasis on best practices and pragmatic approaches. Email the instructor to inquire about a version onsite at your organization.

• General Ajax Programming. This course surveys a broad range of Ajax-related topics: foundational techniques, JavaScript, development and debugging tools, JSON and XML data handling, AjaxTags, and an introduction to several of the most popular Ajax/JavaScript toolkits (Prototype, Scriptaculous, jQuery, Dojo, and Ext-JS). GWT can be included or omitted, depending on your needs. For most clients, we present this in a 5-day lecture/lab course at your organization, but for clients in the Baltimore/Washington area, more flexible schedule options are also available. This is the most commonly requested version of our Ajax training.
• Ajax Programming with jQuery (or Ext-JS, Prototype/Scriptaculous, Dojo, or Google Closure). This version of the course picks one of the popular JavaScript libraries (jQuery, Ext-JS, Prototype/Scriptaculous, Dojo, or Google Closure), introduces it early in the course, and uses it for most of the main Ajax techniques (XML data, JSON data, JSON-RPC, etc.) Neither GWT nor the other JavaScript libraries are covered. This option is a good choice if your organization has already settled on one of the JavaScript libraries. Depending on your level of JavaScript experience, this can be a 3-5 day course. As always, for clients in the Baltimore/Washington area, more flexible schedule options are also available.
• GWT (Google Web Toolkit) Development. This course covers GWT only: it does not look at direct Ajax programming with JavaScript except briefly in the introduction and in the JSNI sections. Depending on your Java experience and what topics you want covered, this can be a 2-3 day course. As always, for clients in the Baltimore/Washington area, more flexible schedule options are also available. For details, see the GWT training course page.
• Ajax with JSF. We can also give training on JSF (1.x or 2.0), with a heavy emphasis on the Ajax components and libraries. For details on this, email Marty or see the JSF training pages. JSF 2.0 has well-integrated Ajax support, and many of the third-party component libraries for JSF 1.x also have extensive Ajax support.
• A Custom Combination of Topics. We can mix and match topics to fit your needs. For example, since you need both server-side code and client-side code to build Ajax apps, a number of clients want a quick introduction to server-side programming in Java (servlets and JSP) before diving into the Ajax-specific topics. Others may want to pick and choose among the Ajax/JavaScript libraries, depending on which they plan to use in their projects. Please just ask!

Topics

As discussed above, there are more topics listed here than can be covered in a five-day course, so we need to work with your management and developers to choose the topics that are most appropriate to your needs. One common option is to introduce jQuery early and use it in several sections throughout the course. The GWT topics can also be presented as a standalone three- or four-day course.

Review

• Installing and running Java-based Web applications, JSP scripting,
  using jsp:include, the MVC architecture

Foundational Topics

Note that these foundational topics are not all at the beginning, but are instead scattered throughout the course.

• Crash course on JavaScript: Part I (General JavaScript features)
• Crash course on JavaScript: Part II (XML-specific and browser-specific features)
• Crash course on XHTML
• Crash course on CSS

Ajax Basics

• Ajax basics: Part I
• Ajax development and debugging tools
• Ajax basics: Part II
• Ajax data handling: XML, JSON, and custom formats
• Handling variable-length Ajax data with JSTL

More with JSON

• Automatically building JSON from Java objects
• JSON-RPC

Abstracting Ajax with JSP Custom Tags

• Building JSP custom tag libraries: basics
• Building JSP custom tag libraries: advanced topics
• The AjaxTags library: basics
• The AjaxTags library: advanced topics

jQuery

• Ajax-specific support
• Selectors and DOM manipulation
• Rich GUIs

The Prototype JavaScript Framework

• Ajax-specific support
• General JavaScript support
• OOP support

Script.aculo.us

• Ajax-specific support
• Visual effects

Dojo

• Ajax-specific support
• Selectors and DOM manipulation
• Rich GUIs I
• Rich GUIs II

The Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

• Setup and basics
• Event handling
• Panels and page layout
• Widgets I
• Widgets II
• RPC: Part I
• RPC: Part II
• The JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI)

Using Ajax with JavaServer Faces (JSF)

• Setup and basics
• Page navigation
• Managed beans
• Integrated Ajax support in JSF 2.0
• Ajax4jsf (JBoss RichFaces)
• IceFaces