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

Java app

[dfj225]

Maybe I'm missing the point somewhere, but if you really want something on the web to feel like an app, why not make it a Java app that runs in the browser? With all the different browsers and how they each handle Javascript differently, I much rather write something in Java and know it will almost always work on different platforms. Anytime I have to do something in Javascript, it almost always feels like a hack. I can't imagine writing something like the stuff Google does in Javascript. Is there really an advantage to doing stuff this way over the Java way?

Re:Java app

[misleb]

Java GUIs are traditionally slow and ugly. Also there are often problems with Java runtime versions. It is difficult to write a non-trivial Java application that will run on various different version of the Java runtime. Some people are going to have 1.2, some 1.3, some 1.4, etc. Using standard DHTML or even Mozilla's XUL provides a much more elegant application that looks and feels better than most Java GUI's. DHTML and XUL also integrate with the browser better.

-matthew

Re:Java app

[GeckoX]

We finally managed to officially drop NS4 and pre IE5 support about a year and a half ago or so on our worst hanger-on clients. We did replace all of our web applications with standards compliant support only close to 4 years ago now. We also left the old NS4/preIE5 supported web applications online to meet our requirements. It wasn't until we could show our clients the logs for the legacy sites, that were pretty much entirely empty, that it'd be acceptable to drop that support.

Our stance with new contracts is that we write to standards only for web apps. We will NOT enter into ANY contracts that specify explicitly what browsers will be supported. Pick a standard or pick someone else is our current motto ;)

Re:Also Check out Bits of News

[pe1rxq]

Ajax isn't a technology... its a cute name for a bunch of existing technologies.

Basicly they found that you could make webpages update themself without completly reloading if you trow a lot of buzzwords at it.

You could do this a long time ago without xml....
I did it a while ago for a database app.. The page contained a piece of javascript that was started when a input field changed. This triggered the loading of a external .js file that just happened to be a cgi script. This cgi script would do some database queries and generated some javascript code that would update all the other fields on the client.

Jeroen

Outperforming Desktop apps

[davetrainer]

Here is an article by John Udell that I found fascinating when it was published a few months ago. It discusses the quasi-rich-client architecture that Google cobbled together to bring us GMail. The really incredible part is that interfaces built on this architecture, consumed in the browser, outperform commercial desktop apps:

"One of my favorite acid tests is address completion. When you begin typing an e-mail address, your mail program should immediately show you the matching addresses and then dynamically constrain the list as you continue to type. Outlook does poorly on this test; you have to type CTRL-K to invoke the address book in a separate window. OS X's Mail does address completion in situ, just as I expect. So does Gmail. And here's the shocker: Gmail does it faster."

I appreciate AP's efforts to assign some greater precision and clarity to this architecture. Up until now, realistically, I figured I had to be tethered to .net/XAML, Mozilla/XUL, or something like Macromedia Flex.

bad photos

[clmensch]

Why do tech writers feel the narcissistic need to display photos of themselves next to their writings? That is probably the largest photo I've ever seen on one of these articles...and it's an awful photo at that. They obviously cut the baldness of his head off for a reason, and half the photo is of his black on black outfit.

Their whole site reeks of late 90's marketspeak. Slightly interesting article, though.