Here’s one of the things that bothers me about AJAX. Some of it makes sense. Add a bit of XMLHttpRequest here and you can build a CSS compliant popup that subscribes to an item without reloading the page. No brainer.
Some of the other stuff really makes me scratch my head. The way gmail uses a hidden iframe to get around the history and back button issue. These are hacks.
Now we have toolkits which ship based on these hacks. These toolkits will be deployed on production sites which people depend on. Next the browsers will be updated and might not work with the hacks anymore and your nice webapp will break before its time.
We still have people running Apache 1.x. People run production sites on Linux 2.2 and love it. Stable code. I suspect we’ll have perfectly good apps that just cease to function because the developers have moved on or the site can’t afford to pay new developers to work around the problem.
I think the interesting part of Ajax moving forward is the Zen of the ideal solution. Finding the right amount of Ajax to add to your site and staying away from the risky areas.
Of course one good thing about some of the “house of cards” AJAX hacks is that this pushes the browser vendors forward. Microsoft, of course, being the biggest culprit of resting on their laurels.
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October 27, 2005 at 6:37 pm
Why would Microsoft suffer if there were more sites that use
XMLHTTPRequest? They invented the thing, after all.
October 27, 2005 at 6:51 pm
Needing to keep updating clients and servers
reminds me of the pattern with co-evolutionary software like spam, viruses, and filesharing networks.
October 27, 2005 at 7:47 pm
Yeah, but the effeciency of Ajax vs. basic hypertext programming is unmatched. The internet has changed to the new era of, “My web application is faster than your’s.” I’m a proud programmer, and I’m sorry, but Ajax isn’t any problem at all. Might be hacks, but guess what? My effeciency is ten times faster than that of mainstream companies. It isn’t hard to learn the techniques of this fast paced industry. It isn’t a lack of money, it’s a lack of developer motivation.
October 27, 2005 at 8:00 pm
Anthony,
What? I haven’t yet heard anyone claim that they have increased developer efficiency due to Ajax? I can’t imagine why this is. Could you enlighten us?
That is unless you claim that Rails is part of your Ajax suite. Then maybe you’re right. I just can’t imagine how javascript would change the equation.
Kevin
October 27, 2005 at 9:13 pm
Is Ajax unique in dependencies on “glitches” or “quirks” of the browser? Isn’t some of the lock in tied to, for instance, MS IE the fact that it offers cute non-standards support that sites depend on?
Yes, it would be very interesting if MS debugged Ajax support out of IE. Is there a redevelopment of Outlook Windows Access taking place?
October 27, 2005 at 9:20 pm
Not ‘developer effeciency’ Kevin. Website effeciency. By using standardized methods involving Ajax, you can turn even the slowest of loading web applications (ie. forums with high database query counts) into a “speeding bullet”. Let’s take for instance vBulletin, a product of Jelsoft Ent. Ltd., the largest community solutions software ever. In former versions about a year ago, vBulletin parsed their post replies via PHP and MySQL with the basic HTML form passing it through a standard PHP handler and entering the data in to a given table in the DB. Then the software would refresh the entire page when passing the form causing multiple “re-queries” of the same information that was there four of five seconds ago. Using Ajax now, it cuts the time of posting by almost a 1/5. And that’s just a small example. Look what Google did with Gmail? You think someone will use Hotmail over Gmail? Are you kidding me? Face the facts Kevin, Ajax is the next step in the web development industry. Most developers already know how to program JavaScript, it’s a basic language. Explain how you would lose profit if you increased site effeciency? It makes no sense.
October 27, 2005 at 9:25 pm
Hey Kevin — we met on Monday night (briefly) outside talking with Gilmore / Scoble.
The complexity of AJAX regarding browser-dependency is non-trivial. Efficient applications? Maybe, but efficient development? No way.
Microsoft is trying to solve this problem with “Atlas” — AJAX like development using VS2005. I don’t yet know if this is browser independent (I certainly hope so, otherwise it kind of misses the point).
October 27, 2005 at 11:06 pm
> Not ‘developer effeciency’ Kevin. Website effeciency. By using standardized
> methods involving Ajax, you can turn even the slowest of loading web
> applications (ie. forums with high database query counts) into a “speeding
> bullet”.
Some application.. A lot of applications. TailRank and most search engines
wouldn’t benefit a great deal. TailRank has a subscription widget which both
prevents the entire page from reloading and makes thing seem faster and less
“shock” whhen the page is redrawn.
Of course this isn’t as much ajax as it is XHR…
> Let’s take for instance vBulletin, a product of Jelsoft Ent. Ltd., the
> largest community solutions software ever.
ev4r!! :)
> In former versions about a year ago, vBulletin parsed their post replies via
> PHP and MySQL with the basic HTML form passing it through a standard PHP
> handler and entering the data in to a given table in the DB. Then the software
> would refresh the entire page when passing the form causing multiple
> “re-queries” of the same information that was there four of five seconds
> ago.
Yes.. but this is just replacing a round trip with XHR. I wasn’t saying that
this was the problem with Ajax just that some of the hacks that people are using
with Ajax are a bit brittle.
> Face the facts Kevin, Ajax is the next step in the web development
> industry. Most developers already know how to program JavaScript, it’s a basic
> language. Explain how you would lose profit if you increased site effeciency?
> It makes no sense.
I’m not arguing against XHR. I’m making the assertion that most of the crazy
Ajax hacks are dangerous. It’s all about balance. Trying to figure out the right
amount of ajax without going over.
October 29, 2005 at 12:18 pm
Robert, I was recently at an MSDN event on VS2005, and they demoed their AJAX stuff working with Firefox. People questioned why they would want that to work, and the presenter said, “Look, if we want people to use our tools we can’t deny reality.”