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Ajax Is the Buzz of Silicon Valley
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Ajax, or 'Asynchronous JavaScript and XML,' is allowing webpages to update as quickly as desktop software, powering applications like Google Maps and attracting money from Silicon Valley investors, including for a collaboration-software company called Zimbra. The Wall Street Journal reports: 'Zimbra's chief executive, Satish Dhamaraj, says that when he started his company in December 2003, "I really thought that Ajax was just a bathroom cleaner." Now his San Mateo, Calif., business has amassed $16 million in funding from venture-capital firms including Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Benchmark Capital, the firm that famously funded eBay Inc. Peter Fenton, an Accel partner, says Ajax "has the chance to change the face of how we look at Web applications" and could boost technology spending by corporations, because Ajax is also being used to develop software for big companies, not just for consumers.'"
Shouldn't it be AJAX, not Ajax? Ajax is the Greek warrior.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Seriously you build upon the failures that DHTML, HTML, Javascript, XML, XMLHTTRequest and you form a system which requires at least a 1 ghz processor just run a very simple GUI.
AJAX-enabled applications like Google Maps and GMail run fine on my G3 iBook with Safari and OS X 10.4. I don't think they necessarily have to have additional processor requirements on the client side.
Saying DHTML, HTML, Javascript, XML, and XMLHTTRequest are all failures is a little extreme. Saying each fails at being everything is 100% correct and 200% redundant - nothing is everything. I applaud the use of XML and Javascript to place more processing on the client side. It's not without its problems, but then nothing is everything.
This is also a good example of how bad Java and Sun has failed. If Sun would've opened up Java, let people distribute it, as well as from day 1 enabled easy RMI over HTTP we wouldn't be up to our necks in a horrible mixture of presentation logic and business logic.
I agree with this - this was Sun's sweetspot about 10 years ago, wasn't it? Client's connecting to applications so our experience was built upon thin clients instead of desktop applications.
So here we are, requiring gargantuan browser which are brought to a halt with this AJAX technology when we had many other technologies which did so much better but failed for various other reasons.
Again - this is just not true, at least in my experience. If my 800 mhz iBook with OS 10.4 and Safari can run Gmail as fast as Mail.app then I'm sold on the usability of quality engineered AJAX-enabled applications.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
no one cares about what you care about
i'm being serious here: 99.9999% of web users don't really care if your screen scraper program is harder to write now
you are speaking from an idealistic point of view that doesn't really drive the web
the web is all about, and i mean all about as in the first issue and last issue under consideration, end user experience
everything else is trivial
i'm not in any way joking or trying to be flippant
if web users go "cool, you can drag the google map around, that's so much easier to use than mapquest" then every single thing you just said goes right out the window
end users rule with an iron fist for all development efforts, period, end of story
never forget that
realism trumps idealism
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it