Justin spent the majority of the presentation showing uncluttered examples of various Rails/Ajax/Prototype capabilities. Auto-complete search, drag-drop, and the like. These were delivered in a "if you haven't played with this yet" sort of way but he also managed to keep it quick enough – and drop in enough 'even if you've done this before you may not know about this' tidbits to keep the more experienced portion of the audience interested.

There was some talk on RJS and he spent some time on the always requested ajax topics… How do you deal with JavaScript disabled? What if a user has an old browser? How do you handle the introduction of new idioms?

The presentation ended with a bang as he demo'd creating an application with the soon to be released Streamlined. Streamlined is an open source framework, developed by Relevance LLC, to bring the simplicity of ActiveRecord to the view layer (coincidentally, this is #2 of the "3 Unsolved Problems" posed in Dave Thomas keynote yesterday). This is really slick – a lot of functionality – good looking (although they are looking for a designer to contribute some improvements) – and best of all: _very_ quick and powerful. I'm definitely looking forward to this being released at OSCON.

I've learned my lesson on looking for help and examples. Always look for help in the following order:

1. Rails Recipes
2. Agile Web Development with Rails (now 2nd ed. with a skateboarder on the front, I see)
3. Others

So, let's see how that ordering works for me… open recipes… "Recipe 6: Update Multiple Page Elements With One Ajax Request". Nice.

The recommended strategy involves RJS (which I've been wanting to check out anyway). Go figure, this is really really simple to implement. Actually, the hardest part of my first RJS Template (Javascript Generator Template) experience was finding the available helpers.

Now that I've found my resources: it took about 10 minutes to get things working the way I want.