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Building Richly Interactive Web Apps with Ajax
FalsePositives writes "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications (from Adaptive Path and via Jeffery Veen) introduces their experiences with what they are calling 'Ajax' as in 'Asynchronous JavaScript + XML' aka the XmlHttpRequest Object. It is used by Google (Google Maps, Google Suggest, Gmail), in Amazon's A9, and a few others (like the map of Switzerland spotted by Simon Willison). ... Is this 'The rise of the Weblication'?"
This site also has a lot of news. Ajax seems to me to be a realy good technology, if google uses it it has to be at least of some use. XML itself it realy good if you use it the right way.
Bits of News Giving you the latest bits.
old technology, noob developers
remote scripting has been around since 1998 with Dan Steinmans DynAPI, then Brent Ashley published his remote scripting and a plethora of remote scripting projects popped up on sourceforge
the only thing new here are the developers/kids calling it Ajax when its nothing new or original at all, not to mention MS has had remote data binding on elemnts since IE4 !
sheesh
I thought JSON was the new hotness?
I RTFA (I know, I should burn my /. membership card), but I got the feeling that the entire article could be summarised in a paragraph or two. There was a lot of handwaving, and not enough nuts-and-bolts stuff. I was looking for simple examples, etc. but other than links to Google's myriad offerings, there wasn't much else.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Our company is arriving a bit late to the 'intranet' party, and I'm developing our Intranet in this style. Where you really notice the difference is:
1. Speed - It f'ing fast
2. Startup time - Instant
3. Footprint - small
4. Browser support - surprisingly consistent. Event models need some work, including Firefox.
Did I mention that it's fast? Check out google suggest, realize that there's a round trip to the server going on in the background, and you'll get the picture.
It also maintains suprisingly light code. You just register an event handler of some DOM element, and let the teensy bits of javascript pull up some fresh XHTML. This technique fits very well with simple event driven programming.
Another nice thing is that you can use most whatever as a callback. I'm using good old PHP, as PHP snippets are fast and lightweight.
I suspect we will be seeing alot much more of this.
This article describes an architectural concept NOT an actual technology. AJAX, is similar to Client-Server in that it implies a mode of development for a given network topology and NOT an actual toolset. The richer interaction of remote scripting techniques will provide a significant challenge to XFORMS as it will be unable to compete with the functionality. XFORMS is what web driven apps should have been in '97, the new class of techniques using Javascript,CSS,xmlhttprequest and other DHTML tools are the way forward.
- a cleaning powder
It is alsoThere you will be guided with baby steps on how to implement a city, state lookup based on zip.
Adaptive Path is not a web design company. They provide user experience (information architecture, interaction design, etc) expertise and help people plan sites. The implementation is almost always done by someone else.
Garret is a user experience guru - He's writing about this framework from the perspective of a user advocate, not a developer or a designer.
The point of his article is that the user experience is improved with Ajax. He's not trying to sell you a new car, he's suggesting that end users (customers) will be better server with this approach in many cases.
But maybe you want to continue to write huge java applets or flash sites that take 30+ seconds to load. Don't expect to feed your family though.
You mean after this point of fact they mention?
Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax.
Your're using a synchronous requests - Firefox/Mozilla have appalling performance on sync calls (10+ seconds). Its a interesting contrast with IE
I (and my business partner) used this technique 5 years ago to develop the budgeting system used by all Idaho state agencies. It uses IE5 with a few ActiveX controls (grid, custom combo boxes) bound to an XML data source. The result is a rich application-like experience within the browser.
The back end is IIS + SQL Server. The server runs in Boise. Hundreds of users from dozens of agencies around the state manage their complex budgeting process with this app.
XMLHTTP was a key technology in Microsoft's plan to use IE as the business app environment. Databinding to native HTML controls was pretty cool - 5 years ago.
If you want links, try this, this, or this. It's even taught in vocational programming courses.
data.open("GET",url,true);
The "true" as the third argument sets it to async according to this page.
B
Hi, try http://nevow.com and take a look at livepage and canvas. This isn't magic, people.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.