Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
at 5:30PM

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) has become very popular for building web applications. AJAX basically proposes to move part of the application to the browser without requiring a JRE-plugin. In order to do so, the application needs to be written in JavaScript since JavaScript is the lowest common denominator across different web browsers in terms of technical prerequisites. Writing portable JavaScript is a daunting and tedious task. In this presentation I will demonstrate how AJAX can be written in Java or C# which is then cross-compiled to portable JavaScript. Just like a C++-compiler shields the programmer from the assembly language, the framework introduced in this presentation shields the web-developer from the intrinsic complexities of writing cross-browser portable JavaScript code. Our approach is based on a byte-code level cross-compiler that also supports use cases outside the domain of AJAX.

Arno Puder, currently and assistant professor at San Francisco State University, received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Frankfurt, Germany. Before joining the faculty at SFSU, he also worked with AT&T Labs and Deutsche Telekom. The founder and maintainer of the Open Source CORBA implementation MICO has special interests including distributed systems, middleware architectures, and ubiquitous computing environments.