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Microsoft to Release AJAX Framework
An anonymous reader writes "News.com is announcing that Microsoft has announced plans to release a JavaScript client framework library for use with ASP.NET 2.0 that makes AJAX style browser clients easier to code. Developers who attend Microsoft's PDC conference in September have been promised an early release of the code."
It only really works well with IE...
This is a transparent attempt on Microsoft's part to avoid being crushed by the rising juggernaut of web app development that is Ruby On Rails. If RoR has an AJAX framework, then ASP.NET has no choice but to follow in its footsteps in hopes of eking out some meager semblance of survival on David Hansson's waste products.
Bow, Microsoft, bow before your Ruby masters!
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get your war on
Pfft. AJAX is easy. It's cross-platform AJAX that's brutally hard. You expect us to trust Microsoft to create a framework that will allow perfect portability between Opera, Safari, Mozilla and MSIE? Uh huh.
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They've had the ability to "innovate" and make their browser into a "rich client" for years. Now that folks like google and amazon have figured how to make DHTML work, Microsoft is playing catch up
Funny.
About 5 years ago I was writing extremely rich web applications, using XMLHttpRequest to make client side side-band requests back to the web app, using XML data islands and client side XML document manipulations. Examples include a web timesheet, where the user could manipulate entries (adding new ones, changing them, and deleting them), upon which it would sideband the changes back via XMLHttpRequest, on success changing the client XML document by manipulating it via the DOM, retransforming it with the XML. I created power generation control systems that were entirely atomically updating values (no whole page refresh bullshit).
Of course all of this required Internet Explorer. None of the competitors had anything marginally similar.
AJAX, that extroardinarily lame acronym, isn't "new" kids, except that it only relatively recently became a feature that could be used more generally across many browsers. They finally caught up to Microsoft to some degree.
Oh, and before anyone accuses me of being a Microsoft astroturfer because they're delusional and like revising history, VS.NET 2005 will most likely turn into VS.NET 2006, given Microsoft's extraordinary, embarrassing inability to deliver in recent history.
servlets !~ ActiveX
applets ~ ActiveX
If you ever saw the book called "A first look at ASP.NET 2.0", it had some demos of the new technologies that would be in ASP.NET 2.0. Once of them was an AJAX style client-side callback.
People act like AJAX is some magical new technology, when in reality, it's been used for years. Microsoft is just one of the companies who offered a "framework" to make it easier to develop. If they end up integrating it into their controls, it will be huge.
And for reference, I believe their demo worked in Firefox as well.
If anything, the AJAX popularity will just give them a little kick in the ass to move more quickly.
First, Amazon has nothing to do with Ajax. Their sites don't even take good advantage of it (except in a limited way, in the 'search inside the book' feature). Google yes (Gmail/Google Suggest), Amazon, no.
/. crowd would rather tear their teeth out than say IE 'innovated' or Microsoft led the way in any way.
> Microsoft is playing catch up.
And given that Microsoft created a very rich version of Outlook Web Access as far back as 1998, it's quite revealing that no one 'figured' out how to make DHTML work on a web app used by lots of people until Gmail came out. Actually, the reason for this is of course that Netscape/Mozilla didn't support it until recently-- although I'm sure the
If it helps you get over it, Adam Bosworth, who was on the IE team then and one of the creators of IE4's comprehensive, script-accessible DOM (which made 'DHTML' possible) now works at Google.
And regarding this toolkit-- it's interesting to see so many people reflexively bash it when Ajax today is a _bad_ mishmash of XML, javascript and HTML. RoR helps but RoR has its own set of problems-- chiefly maturity and applicability to a wide variety of projects. Ballmer got a lot of stick for dancing around shouting 'Developers! Developers! Developers!' but trust me that's how Microsoft earns its living: easy-to-use platforms + easy-to-use development tools.
Go somewhere random
You forgot some notable others:
.NET? no... mono
* Microsoft Office? no... OpenOffice.org
* Outlook? no... Thunderbird/Sunbird
* Windows? no... WINE
*
Anyhoo, I understand your point about compatibility but Microsoft's goal isn't to be compatible, rather to ensure their own profit.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
AJAX may be the acronym du jour, but these techniques have been around for YEARS, ever since IE5. AJAX is just a simplified way of doing it, just like every programmer in the world creates their own little libraries of routines for handling db connections and the like. AJAX doesn't do anything new, it just repackages it for those who never heard of it.
When I first learned about XmlHttpRequest in the IE5 days, I thought it was going to revolutionize the web. All the problems of session state maintenance would disappear and web pages would become little client-server apps. MS had this capability first with the ActiveX control. They could have hyped this capability and taken the lead with it back in 1999. ASP.Net would have been another great opportunity to showcase this feature and create standards. Instead the ASP.Net philosophy seemed to be to make as many trips to the server as possible. For a while MS virtually abandoned the idea of out-of-band requests. So now, years after introducing this feature, somebody at Microsoft finally realizes what they had going and decides to jump on the bandwagon. Good job guys, but a little late.
This is a good point, and it's a wonderful example of why dogmatic restricting yourself to standards is bad for the industry.
If Microsoft had not done this, and shown the utility of the technology, it is doubtful that Mozilla and others would have the technology now, reducing our choices as developers.