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The Current State of Ajax
Dion Hinchcliffe writes "Ajax hasn't even been big a year yet and already open source development tools by the dozen are pouring out. Not to mention big names like TIBCO and Microsoft already have previews on the way of full-fledged IDEs for developing Ajax applications. Ajax may be the biggest software development story of 2005. Dion Hinchcliffe has a detailed article about how Ajax has evolved over the last six months and assesses the current state of tools, libraries, and mindshare. He also points out that Ajax will inadvertently end up being a driving force for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for many organizations since it requires high performance back-end XML services."
"Ajax hasn't even been around a year yet"
Which is strange, because in 1999 I was making web applications that utilised hidden frames to post information to the server and return JavaScript arrays which I would then use to modify the limited parts of the DOM I had access to at that time. It worked in Netscape 3, Netscape 4, and IE 3 and IE 4.
So the techniques in question have been around for ages, and the use of Xml and the XmlHttp objects appeared several years ago with Outlook Web Access.
The ONLY thing that has been around for approx' a year is the utterly stupid name for it, "AJAX".
I'm glad other people are picking up on it and using it, it's very powerful, but let's not credit Adaptive Path with creating a technology or method that many people have been using for a long time.
If you have to use a name, then RIA (Rich Interactive Applications) is far more suitable and doesn't restrict the developer to asynchronous work only for it to be included in that.
...here's an article by Curt Hibbs on Ajax with Rails. He's got an "Ajax in 60 seconds" history lesson at the top of the article...
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Ajax is a buzz-word for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It generally refers to web based applications that feel more responsive than traditional pages because they don't refresh the whole page every time the user does an action. There's plenty more on Wikipedia.
Once you get down to the brass tacks of writing an app, here's a good way to deal with implementation problems people run in to.
more of the same on Twitter.
"Ajax hasn't even been around a year yet"
excuse me?
ajax the functionality has been around for 6 years or more
the buzzword "ajax" and the google maps implementation that skyrocketed the word to buzzword status has only been around for less than a year
i'm usually not one to champion geek snobbery
but when geek snobbery is pitted against cattle herds of phbs spouting buzzwords with little understanding of the buzzword itself, geek snobbery is more appealing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I just finished about 4 months of work writing two AJAX apps using PHP with javascript and while the end result is what we were hoping for and the app runs beautifully, it took me a tremendous amount of time to code it as compared to a standard fat-GUI-app that runs on the client machine.
I basically did a port of the functionality I had in two Perl/TK apps, but I wanted portability and easy updates of code and I had just done a stress test of AJAX in Firefox and IE and they both seemed to handle the load OK so I started developing.
I did not use any tools aside from a text editor and the browsers to test in. The tools like SAJAX just created bloated code that crashed the browsers once things got too complex for them so I decided just to hand-code it from there on. I built in some session security and user authentication both of which ended up working rather well.
These apps are querying other pages to get updates on phone system extensions statuses(from Asterisk) and other bits of information and updating DHTML elements constantly, so they do generate a lot of HTTP requests and use at least three times of the bandwidth that the fat-client perl/Tk app used to, but the database and web server seem to take the traffic OK and we thought that both of the browsers did too until we did some time tests.
We were able to leave the AJAX app running in the same Firefox session for over 2 weeks before we had to reboot the machine for other reasons which was wonderful and much longer than we thought. But, Internet Explorer never lasted a day. It seems that in the ActiveX element that handles XML requests(IE itself doesn't do it internally like Firefox does) there is a memory leak and within 2 hours our app was chewing up over 120MB of RAM and was getting slower. We tried several fixes and the only way to get the memory back was to kill the iexplore.exe process(This was on IE5.0 through 6.1). And that is the reason we recommend only Firefox for intensive AJAX apps.
In case anyone has read this far, the apps are GPLd and available on sourceforge. They are apps that extend the functionality of Asterisk PBX phone system extensions. You need to have Asterisk and the astGUIclient suite installed in order to test them:
astGUIclient project page
MATT---
I can speak as someone who has in fact done just that and would have killed for an XMLHttpRequest object back in 2001.
MS added XMLHttpRequest to IE4 around 1998-1999. You wouldn't have had to kill anyone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."