A Tale of Two Slippy Maps (Comparing AJAX and Flex)

“Continuity gives us roots; change gives us branches, letting us stretch and grow and reach new heights.” (Pauline R. Kezer)

HTML has been with us for nearly 15 years. Ajax is the clever, coordinated use of HTML with JavaScript and CSS that gives a dynamic tweak to a fundamentally static technology. Flex comes from a different evolutionary path – its roots in Flash (an animation toolset) brings a whole new set of possibilities to business applications. Neither Ajax nor Flex are a golden hammer, but both have matured enough to take a serious at how each fits into the modern web developer's toolkit.

In this talk, we look at the AJAX APIs for Yahoo! and Google maps, and compare them with the new Flex APIs. There are strengths and weaknesses to each approach: seeing them side by side will help you better evaluate the technology.

About Scott Davis

Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.

Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009, Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.

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