AJAX Buzzword Reinvigorates Javascript

samuel4242 writes "Javascript may have been with us since the beginning of the browser, but it's going through a renaissance as companies like Google create Javascript-enabled tools like Google Maps . There's even a nice, newly coined acronym , AJAX for "Asynchronous Javascript and XML". A nice survey article from Infoworld interviews Javascript creator, Brendan Eich, who says that this is what he and Marc Andreessen planned from the beginning. Perhaps AJAX will finally deliver what Java promised. Perhaps it will really provide a solid way to distribute software seamlessly."

Comments

Thoughts on code security

[Minute Work]

Not too offend the open source community, but how exactly do you secure your codebase if your web-applications functionality is downloaded to the client (browser)? One of the features of server side applications that are so common on the web is the fact that only your presentation layer is presented to the end-user and your applications business processes is handled on the server.

Is it the same paradigm as applets in that your applet can still communicate with the server from whence it came to allow the server to handle business logic processing?

Speaking of applets, I still prefer their structured code format. I never liked working with javascript because there were so many different ways to do the exact same thing in javascript and it made getting all the developers on the same page, so that you are writing consistently formatted code, a bit more difficult... which leads to hard to maintain code... which, of course, leads to the dark side.

I looked at the generated Javascript for Google Maps and was completely daunted. Time to dust off the text books.