I had a really nice time in Wiesbaden, Germany at JAX 2006. Apart from being in a gorgeous city, the conference had some interesting content. Most of it was about Java technologies and I won't bore you (and myself) with too much of that, but I also attended sessions on Ruby on Rails, Groovy and AJAX.

It was interesting to get a sense of where the industry is moving. Dynamic languages are becoming much more important, although I find "real" developers are hesitant to move in that direction. Personally, I love the concepts behind Groovy and Ruby. They speed up development and take away much of the painful grunt work involved in regular programming. They might be slower, but in the future as servers get faster, I don't think this will be such a problem.

Another striking trend was an overwhelming buzz and a sense of confusion and mystery around AJAX. Remember, this was a Java conference so many of the participants don't work directly on the web. Some only heard of AJAX for their first time at JAX. There seems to be a big divide between programmers and designers, and neither seems to understand advanced JavaScript programming. Programmers have avoided JavaScript, considering it a simple scripting language. Designers have avoided it for being a programming language. Now that some really sophisticated user interfaces are possible on the web, both sides are starting to get really excited.

Until now, I've totally hated the term AJAX. It's just a buzzword slapped on to something that JavaScript developers have been doing for years, and you know how much I hate buzzwords. Now, I see that it has helped to create awareness and get people excited about the possibilities in the browser. I don't think we will be using the term AJAX for many years, but at the moment it has gotten many people to take web applications more seriously and to start thinking about how they can improve the web. This is always a good thing.

From Tuesday (May 9th) until Thursday (May 11th), I'll be attending JAX 2006, a Java conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. Not only will I learn all about what's new in the Java world, I'll be able to really test out my knowledge of German. (Eek!)

If any of you are going to be there by some freak chance, let me know so we can meet up. For the rest of you, I'll be sure to write about anything that relates to web development and the future of the web.

There is a new charity drive web site Flip Cancer The Bird that will donate $0.50 for each picture sent in. The catch: the picture must have you giving the finger to Cancer.

I think this is a fun idea. I'll have to send in my photo next. :)

I just submitted my first article to EzineArticles.com. I just heard about this site a couple of days ago so I thought I'd try it out. Basically, it's a way to get articles read by a new audience. I won't get paid for it or anything, but ideally people will discover this blog and my writing if my articles get republished in various e-zines or newsletters, etc.

If you do some writing and want to try spreading your articles a bit further, it might be worth looking in to. I'll post again on here if anything incredible comes out of it (though I don't except much yet).

I really hate phishing emails for two reasons. First, they're just more annoying spam in my inbox. Second, I know that some innocent people out there are going to be frauded because of these emails.

Thanks to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, there's something we can do to help stop phishing. And it's really easy too.

The next time you get an email asking you to log in to a banking or credit card site, even if it's from a bank you've never heard of, please report it. You only need to:

1. Create a new email to [email protected]
2. Drag and drop the phishing email, so that it gets sent as an attachment. (Don't just forward the email or some of the headers will get lost.)

Even if you forget all this, at least remember that you can always search "report phishing" on Google to find the Anti-Phishing Working Group — right now it's the first result.

Phishing will never go away completely, but the more people that report it, the less victims there will be.