Now a tech lead in the Developer API Evangelism group at Google, Chris Schalk is also one of the original members of the OpenAjax Alliance and later this month he will be giving a session at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East in New York City on "Building AJAX Social Applications Using OpenSocial" - the set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications developed by Google and released last November.

"I will cover all aspects of building social applications using the OpenSocial APIs," says Schalk, a popular past AJAXWorld speaker.

He will be giving a high level introduction of the social graph, Shclak says, followed by a detailed review of OpenSocial's APIs followed by demonstrations of practical examples.

"At the end of the session I will also review Shindig, which is an open source project that serves as a full server implementation 'in-a-box' for anyone wishing to host OpenSocial applications."

With the advent of the "Social Graph", AJAX developer's must in Schalk's view have a solid understanding of how to build social applications that operate within the context of a social environment. To this end, he says, OpenSocial provides a set of open APIs for building applications that can run on any environment supporting OpenSocial.

His session is just of the 90+ sessions, presentations, discussion panels, and keynotes that together make up the 3-day conference program of this month's 5th International AJAXWorld.

The March event features six content-rich tracks:

Last Chance to Register for AJAXWorld 2008 East and Save $100 !

AJAXWorld 2008 West Call for Papers Is Open! Submissions deadline: May 31, 2008 Next October's Conference is already receiving higher-caliber submissions from all over the Rich Internet Applications ecosphere. The theme of this October's AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 West is 'Beyond AJAX to the RIA Era' and the Call for Papers, which is now open, specifically encourages submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases of the fast-emerging RIA alternatives. Submissions featuring such use cases as well as on dozens of other RIA topics have already begun streaming in to AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 West, being held in San Jose, CA, on October 20-22, 2008. Click here to submit your speaking proposal today !