Preface
It was early 2006, and I was spending many frustrating hours testing and learning many of the frameworks and libraries on the internet. Seemingly, out of nowhere, I stumbled upon an extension to YUI or YUI-ext, developed by an unknown at the time, Jack Slocum.
At last! An Ajax library that was easy to use and well-documented. All of this work was for a small web application that I was developing during a six-month contract. Keep in mind that Enterprise Web 2.0 apps were nonexistent, so I knew I was venturing into uncharted territory.
By late 2006, the project had come to a close, as did the contract, forcing me to reassess my career goals. I had a strong feeling that the Enterprise Rich Intranet Application was going to be very popular, so I decided to become as active as I could in the YUI-ext community, focusing my efforts on learning, implementing, and extending the framework. You could say that I became an evangelist of sorts.
Flash forward to the summer of 2008, when Michael Stephens at Manning Publications contacted me regarding the development of a book for their In Action series. Becoming an author of a book was something that I had never dreamed of.