Rich Internet Applications with Ajax

February 22-26 2010, San Francisco CA

June 7-11 2010, JHU Dorsey Center, Elkridge MD

This page describes the public (open enrollment) training courses on Ajax to be held February 22-26 at the Marakana Training Center in San Francisco, CA and June 7-11 at the Johns Hopkins Dorsey Center in Elkridge, MD (co-sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals program). The entire course is personally developed and taught by leading developer, speaker, and author Marty Hall. No contract instructor teaching 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, and the Philippines, all to rave reviews.

If you are looking for customized Ajax, GWT, or Java EE training courses taught on-site at your company, please see this page.

Register Early! Five of Marty's previous public short courses were full, so reserve your spot today. Registrations are taken in the order they are received.

Overview

"Ajax" designates the set of techniques that enable Web applications to asynchronously update small portions of the pages based on server-side data. First popularized by Google, these techniques are now being widely applied in Web applications, and increase the performance, flexibility, richness, and interactivity of Web sites and Web-based applications. However, Ajax programming is complex and poorly understood. This course gives a practical, hands-on introduction to the fundamentals of Ajax development. It covers foundational topics like JavaScript programming, core Ajax approaches, XML and JSON data handling, and Ajax development and debugging tools. It also covers more advanced topics like automatic JSON generation, JSON-RPC, and Ajax/JavaScript frameworks such as Prototype, jQuery, and Dojo. In each section, it gives details on the most important topics, surveys more advanced or lesser-used topics, stresses best practices, and gives plenty of working examples.

Marty normally runs on-site Ajax and Java EE training courses at customer locations. This is easier administratively, is better for clients since the topics can be customized, and is more cost effective for students since no travel is required. However, due to demand from those who do not have enough students for an on-site course, Marty will be running public (open enrollment) Ajax training courses February 22-26 in San Francisco CA and June 7-11 in Elkridge MD (by BWI airport).

The course is developed and taught by Marty Hall, an experienced developer, award-winning instructor, popular conference speaker (5 times at JavaOne), and author of several bestselling Java EE books.

Venues

The west coast version of the course will be held at the Marakana Training Center in San Francisco, California. This is a modern, comfortable venue with separate computers for each student, fast internet connections, and with coffee, snacks, and meals included. For northern California residents, the location is easily accessible by driving (free parking!) or mass transit. For out-of-town students, there are many nearby hotels and we provide free taxi vouchers for going between the hotel and the training center.

The east coast version of the course will be held at the Johns Hopkins Dorsey Center in Elkridge, Maryland. This is also a modern, comfortable venue with separate computers for each student, fast internet connections, and with coffee, snacks, and meals included. For Maryland residents, the location is centrally located 5 minutes from BWI airport and has plenty of free parking. For out-of-town students, there are many hotels within 1 mile.

Registration

The five-day course costs $2395 per student and includes an extensive course notebook, a commercial textbook, exercises, exercise solutions, breakfast, snacks, and lunch. Compare this price to courses from Sun, Learning Tree, GlobalKnowledge, and Oracle University that cost around $2400 for four-day courses and $3000 for five-day courses that do not include textbooks or meals. Besides, those courses almost always use an unknown instructor who did not develop the course materials and often lacks significant real-world development experience.

To register, fill out and send in the course registration form. Space is limited: five previous offerings of coreservlets.com courses were full. Bonus: Register at least a week in advance and get a $50 gift certificate from amazon.com.

Prerequisites

The course consists of an approximately equal mixture of lecture and hands-on lab time and assumes that all students have moderate-to-strong Java skills and at least a little bit of experience with Web apps in Java (servlets and/or JSP). The course does not assume any previous exposure to Ajax, nor does it presume JavaScript knowledge.

More Information

Syllabus

Please note that we are working with some of the attendees to finalize the topics, and there may still be some minor changes to this syllabus. There will be four topics per day, presented in lecture/lab format, with the time about evenly split between the lectures and the hands-on exercises. The topics are grouped below in general categories, not in chronological order. Also, please note the prerequisites above, where students are assumed to already have moderate-to-strong Java skills and preferably some experience with servlets and/or JSP.

Review

• Installing and running Web applications, JSP scripting,
  manipulating HTTP headers, the MVC architecture

Foundational Topics

• Ajax Basics: Part I
• Ajax Development and Debugging Tools
• Ajax Basics: Part II
• Crash course on JavaScript: Part I
• Crash course on JavaScript: Part II

Data-Centric Ajax

• Handling XML
• Handling JSON
• Handling variable-length Ajax data with JSTL
• JSON generation libraries
• JSON-RPC

Abstracting Ajax with JSP Custom Tags

• The AjaxTags library: basics
• The AjaxTags library: advanced topics

JavaScript/Ajax Toolkits

• Prototype (3 lectures)
• Scriptaculous (2 lectures)
• jQuery (3 lectures)