Zazzle Case Study: Ajax in Mission Critical Consumer Applications
The Ajax Experience
Boston · October 23 - 25, 2006
About this Presentation
Chris Van Rensburg and Jan Borgersen joined Zazzle in early 2005 with the mandate to build revolutionary Ajax applications that are critical to the success of the company. This talk is a case study of several of these applications, including the Zazzle Product Design Tool, which first launched in July 2005 for designing custom US postage stamps.
We will discuss our own toolkit (the Uize library), the common technical hurdles we faced, the experience benefits past along to our community, and the personal experience of growing an engineering team around Ajax technologies.
TBA
Zazzle UI Engineering Lead, UIze JavaScript API contributor
Jan prefers to work in that space where art and technology intersect. He found a fabulous home to do this at Zazzle.com, where he is building Zazzle's mission critical AJAX applications enabling artists to unleash their creativity with custom printing technologies. Jan has approximately ten years of software engineering experience, and he spent most of the Web 1.0 years as a Razorfish consultant. His varied projects have seen him lead development of the presentation-tier of www.cisco.com, build parts of the Attributes and Catalogs subsystem at eBay, and design the 20th Anniversary website for the MIDI Manufacturers Association (www.midi.org). He has run seminars at Cisco Systems on publishing accessible web content, and he has appeared on a panel at the Game Developers Conference discussing interactive audio technologies for the web. For the Web 2.0 era, Jan is now a key contributor to Chris Van Rensburg's UIZE JavaScript API.