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'?"

Comments

Re:Java app

[MyIS]

First of all, almost any PC will have a semi-recent IE installed (or Firefox for the more enlightened), and that is already enough to run Google's stuff.

Compare that to the Java plugin requirement, which, sad to say, is pretty far behind in availability on most PCs.

Also, Javascript-based stuff is easier to program, trust me on this. Layout of elements is much easier - and it can be done in any decent HTML editor. Finally, there's no thread-related insanity that AWT/Swing bring to the table.