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."

Comments

client side callbacks?

[drewfuss]

Is Atlas any different from Client-side CallBacks which is a long known feature of asp.net 2.0? I suspect it is not different. If not, it's interesting how Microsoft's marketing department got several news outlets (eWeek, InformationWeek) to report a long known feature as news.

Re:Embrace, extend, destroy ...

[ncmusic]

Except that MS invented the XMLHttpRequest object which makes AJAX possible.

Re:Embrace, extend, destroy ...

[jhurshman]

Except that you can do pretty much all the AJAX stuff using a hidden frame instead of XmlHttpRequest. In fact, the object that handles such things in my company's framework tries to do XmlHttpRequest first, then falls back on hidden IFRAME if it fails (e.g., if an IE user has ActiveX turned off).

So maybe you should have said "MS invented the XMLHttpRequest object which makes AJAX somewhat more convenient."

Re:Interesting

[kryptx]

Just look at it as distributed computing. The clients do the visual transformation so the server doesn't have to. The effects of this are two-fold:

First, reduced bandwidth. Not for you, though. Nobody (aside from you) cares how much bandwidth you have to use to view a single web page. People care how much bandwidth it takes to serve their own page thousands of times. Minimizing this figure saves money.

Second, server load. Again, thousands (or in some cases hundreds of thousands) of hits tends to put a strain on systems like this. If we offload visual transformations to the client, we save time on our server and our web pages are sent out faster.

Both of these result in reduced costs for website owners. It's what's going to make sure the internet stays as free as it can be.

Kumbaya.

Re:You know this is how it'll start

[neil.pearce]

Simple enough to bang in some workarounds with Greasemonkey I reckon?

function ActiveXObject(name) {
if (name == "Microsoft.XMLHTTP") {
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
return new window.XMLHttpRequest();
}
}
return undefined;
}