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

Weblication?

[Neil Blender]

No more cutesy terms, please.

Re:Weblication?

[stupidfoo]

I thought JSON was the new hotness?

Re:Weblication?

[PopeAlien]

.. aw c'mon. you're just jealenvious that you didnt inventrify such a fabutabulous e-term.

right?

think of the infotainment value!

Re:Weblication?

[sqlgeek]

Is that you President Bush?

Compatibility?

[nizo]

Is Ajax compatible with the Odysseus web security tool or will it just cause Ajax to die a horrible death?

new acronym

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Wow

[aristus]

an "oldskool" web developer grumbling about newskool kids who don't know what it was like back in the Real Days. Why, all we had were radio buttons! And they could only tune in AM! And we liked it that way!

Re:Wow

[theshowmecanuck]

Old Developer: ...and we could only use ones and zero's!
Dilbert: You had ones? We had to use lower case L's.

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

[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.

Re:Java app

[TedTschopp]

I bet someone else will post the exact same thing, but instead they will replace Java with Flash...

I think the point is that you don't need to insert an object or rely on a 3rd party enviroment. You can do it in Javascript.

Also, the reason this is so very cool is that it doesn't tie your applicaiton into a backend of any kind, you can scale your backend as long as it spits out XML. I think this is the reason so many of the big companies are going to it. They require a bit more flexibility on that end.

Re:Java app

[Hamfist]

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.

Re:Java app

[temojen]

function getDataDOM(url){
data = (!window.XMLHttpRequest)? (new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")):(new XMLHttpRequest());
data.onreadystatechange = readyStateChangeFunction;
data.open("GET",url,true);
data.send(null);
return data;
};

You were saying?

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

Sounds a lot like JPSpan

[misleb]

Does anyone know how Ajax compares with JPSpan? I've been using JPSpan in a Firefox plugin that I am working on and it is really nice. Basically it takes a PHP class and presents it to your JavaScript as a JavaScript object (after you create an isntance of it). As far as your web application is concerned, the object exists in the local context, but actually, the code is running on a remote server. JPSpan takes care of the XmlRequest stuff for you.

-matthew

Re:Is this the rise of

[sfjoe]

I think what we need is an RFC on buzzwords to introduce some standards to the whole marketing process. Of course, then the new hyp could be labeled as buzzword-compliant.

web content developer toting new web design?

[iamhassi]

" "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications" (from Adaptive Path..."

Adaptive Path Services: "We evaluate your site and offer detailed recommendations."

wait wait, this is rich, let me get this straight: a web design company wrote a article saying what you're using now is the "old" sucky way and their new stuff is the way to go??

hold on! this is revolutionary! ;)

Not that AJAX isn't great, i'm sure it is, but this is like reading a article on how great a new car is that was written by the manufacture. Perhaps a more unbiased article needs to be submitted before I believe it.

oh and mod me +5 flamebait cuz i have so much karma i'm sniffing clouds.

Re:JavaScript ? I'm out.

[cabra771]

Dude. Seriously. It's 2005. Time to put down the Netscape 4.7 and walk away.

Re:AJAX?

[Adhemar]

Isn't that a cleaning powder?

Yes, it is

• a cleaning powder

It is also

• an ancient Greek king in Homer's Iliad. Well actually two:
  • Ajax the lesser of Locrian Ajax, son of Oileus, king of Locris
  • Ajax the Great or Telamonian Ajax, son of Telamon, king of Salamis
• a Dutch football (in the soccer sense) team of Amsterdam, already mentioned
• several ships of the Royal Navy
• as already mentioned, a place in Ontario, Canada, named after one ot these ships
• a character on the animated televion series Duckman
• a car (actually several models)
• several companies: a Californian boiler company, a Dutch fire security company.
• a buzzword for a combination of technologies, see this Slashdot story.

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.

XmlHttpRequest The Easy Way

[coldcanofbeer]

For an easy to understand tutorial of XmlHttpRequest, check out http://www.webpasties.com/xmlHttpRequest/

There you will be guided with baby steps on how to implement a city, state lookup based on zip.