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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."
Does anyone here know of a good reference for balancing the "gee-whiz, nifty" aspects of ajax techniques with designing towards accessibility? I like the thought of, say, livesearch, but dislike the idea of breaking support for text-to-speech readers, assistive devices, et cetera.
In fact, the article in the story might have a terrific section about just this issue. But I wouldn't know, because the server fell over worse than I do after a gin-and-tonic bender.
AJAX = Asynchronous Javascript And Xml
It's a terrible name because it says nothing about what it is, only what it is made of. Even then it poorly describes what it is made of, as it can be made of other things too.
So from this CBL (Carbon Based Lifeform) to another, I say, "Goodnight".
The person who makes a technology popular receives technical fame for a good reason -- by making more of the world aware of a good technology, in a way that leads to deployment, the world becomes a better place. Sometimes, popularization adds more value than invention to an idea.
We need to write out business apps in Javascript now because this is the only standard browser vendors can agree on?
Javascript, it's non-standard browser-specific extension syntax and the restrictive, incomplete and non-standard HTML DOM is an awful environment to write apps in, and it illustrates clearly just how dysfunctional the modern software industry is today.
AJAX is a shit way to write apps, it's central concept revolves around badly hacking around a problem that shouldn't even exist in a language that was never intended for use in such a way, its like we've got the worst aspects of every major technology available today, grudgingly provided by browser vendors who are want to take their ball and go home since nobody wants to use their proprietary ActiveX or XUL - in an incompatible fashion and we're supposed to see this as a step forward?
It's stupid, AJAX is stupid, and browser based apps are crap.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long