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: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