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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.'"
No, Ajax is also an excuse for ad placement.
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
Web Two Point Oh
Get your AJAX-enabled startup right there!
This Like That - fun with words!
It has been almost a week without an AJAX story on the frontpage, it almost became something only old people in Korea use.
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.
There is nothing special about this other than the incredible amount of sheer dependencies that exist. You cross browser incompatibilities you have inexact everything. This is not a good solution people.
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.
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.
JUST BECAUSE AJAX NOW FINALLY WORKS DOESN'T MEAN IT IS A GOOD SOLUTION.
I've been doing AJAX for three years... before that we called it "remote scripting."
This is nothing new. Calling AJAX "new" is like calling email "new", when it's over 25 years old... AJAX-like techniques being about eight years old.
I'd have written more cool "AJAX" interfaces if only my damn managers knew what in the hell I was talking about back then.
Desktop.com had this stuff in 1999, but unfortunately the browsers of the day (IE4 and Netscape 4) weren't really capable of staying up long enough to make it worthwhile. There was even a company that had a nice little web-based spreahsheet app.
Still, I haven't seen a good, platform-independant, integrated sever- and client-side solution yet. Back at Desktop in was *all* client side except the actual persistence of objects so it wasn't really an issue.
Ah, well.
Ajax has got to be the biggest buzzword of the year. Thank god nobody has figured out how to use Ajax to enable the community and synergize their collaborative efforts towards successification.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
I'm watching the flash-based Zimbra demo right now, and they're bragging about innovations like "conversation view" and "tags" on messages. Which gmail has had for a long time. Yes, I know gmail is essentialy AJAX, but this is the demo for the Zimbra collaboration suite.
Why would anyone think Zimbra was innovative based on this demo?
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
AJAX is just buzz. Yes, it's a great tool for making better use of the web. Yes, it's relatively simple. Yes, it's flashy.
But it's still just a tool - and it can be used for good (see any of 37signal's apps) or evil (sites that use AJAX for navigation and break the back/forwards buttons). It won't make a badly designed web app better - in fact, incorrectly used, it can make things worse.
The Web 2.0 is about more than just flashy technologies like AJAX: it's about open architectures, semantic code, separation of content, presentation, and now behavior, and better user experiences. AJAX can enable any of those, but it can also destroy any of those. In fact, it's probably made web designers lives harder: now designers need to be familiar with separating not only content from presentation, but behavior from content and presentation as well. That can be very tricky, and it's tempting just to slap on some onclick handlers to your links rather than using the DOM and separating behavior from content. Furthermore, it's very tempting to have AJAX-enabled sites to that don't gracefully degrade in browsers without JavaScript - which defeats the point of the accessible web.
AJAX is a great technique, but it's not a panacea, and it's not a replacement for sound design and UI architecture.
All the hype seems to be around slick consumer apps, but as an employee at a law firm that just switched over to a third-party web-based app for handling all case documents and communications, I would dance for joy if the interface were updated to use Ajax. 10% of the time I spend using the system is lost waiting for a response to my clicks as I navigate around in the system. Everything goes through https, which is a good thing, but only makes the response time slower. Each pause is just long enough to contemplate how long it's been since I checked /.
;)
Yeah Google maps is great, but as more and more companies move to 'web-based solutions', the use of ajax could have really improve productivity. I mean isn't that why Microsoft created it in the first place
Whoa.. venture-capital firms investing in web related stuff? Have we fallen into a worm hole and are back in 1999/2000? I need to get myself some of that dotcom stock and sell it right after.
Joking aside, isn't it interesting/sad that it takes a lot of hype backed up by a big name like Google for a old technology tricks to get serious attention from investors? "They are doing it, so it must be good" type of reasoning. Hopefully this bubble won't burst into flames because hype aside, doing what ajax does has been pretty useful and it would be a shame for 'ajax' to be associated with failure.
[alk]
Ajax, or 'Asynchronous JavaScript and XML,' is allowing webpages to update as quickly as desktop software
Wow, and with the XML you can make it automatically talk to any system!!!!
e-Business has reached a new plateau! Synergy abounds! Am I e-dreaming or what! Woohoo!!
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Though I'm reading /. I should be working on my AJAX app for medical billing. AJAX allows us to send the structure of a complex billing system to the client, then update the data at the speed of clientside Javascript. Even allows us to pull scanned medical images ina fraction of the time it used to take because we are only loading the image selected, not all the thumbnails and other wrapper data.
But I don't get why Google Maps gets the credit for this. Microsoft (yuck!) developed this concept for web based Outlook years ago, and it has been implemented by many smaller developers since then.
Perhaps all this press will get Javascript behaving between browsers and platforms. That is the worst part of AJAX coding!!!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
This will be a case study in IP law. How many patents will appear covering each and every aspect of Ajax as developers reinvent techniques long since commonplace in pre-web software? I'm usually not pessimistic but given recent evidence (Blackberry, Eolas, etc) it's pretty clear that patenting trivial techniques, regardless of prior art, is effective.
How will a new platform emerge when its components are owned by multiple licensors? The answer is obvious; Microsoft (or Google, Canopy, etc) will buy them all and own the whole enchilada. Don't count on any Open Source implementations escaping the IP lawyers this time around.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Soon to be met by stiff competition from
Content Oriented Markup Elements: Traditional
and
Server Oriented Funneling Transmission
Streaming Concurrent Rational Units Bidirectionally
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
WELCOME to Zimbra-com. This is... Zimbra-com!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
If we split OpenOffice along its presentation/processing tiers, turning those APIs into XML/HTTP, we can have pools of OpenOffice servers accessed by AJAX clients. Let's see MS WebOffice compete with that.
Please don't.
So far, I haven't seen anyone manage a proper, pixel-perfect page layout or drawing program with AJAX - people seem to pee themselves with excitement when they manage to get Javascript to draw basic lines and circles.
I'd like to see someone implement, say, Google Earth (not Maps) in AJAX, or Adobe Photoshop. If you desperately needed network transparency then the prehistoric X11 and GLX wouldn't break a sweat running such kinds of programs remotely, whereas AJAX wouldn't know where to begin.
This AJAX thing is a buzzword for an interesting and useful technique for making existing web applications a bit more dynamic and responsive (it's ideal for email or database-type tasks) - it's not some glorious new application framework which will revolutionise the whole computing world. Computers can do far more, and it seems ridiculous to have to limit new software to the tiny little niche it provides.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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.
AJAX Special Hazard Precautions
Anyone who tries to tell you that AJAX is a " new approach to web applications" is just rebranding old technology and hyping buzzwords, not engineering software in the real world. Because of browser and DHTML incompatibilities and limitiations, AJAX is like cocaine: it seems glamorous until you actually start using it, then the unintended consequences totally fuck you up.
Special Hazard Precautions for AJAX:
INGESTION: NAUSEA, VOMITING, AND DIARRHEA. EYES: EYE IRRITANT UPON DIRECT CONTACT. SKIN: MAY CAUSE SKIN IRRITATION UPON PROLONGED CONTACT. INHALATION: NONE UNDER NORMAL USE. PROLONGED INHALATION BY UNORTHODOX USE (NON-WETTED) OR ABUSE (SNIFFING) COULD PRODUCE LUNG DISEASE (SILICOSIS). N/K
Emergency/First Aid Proc: INGEST: IF EATEN/DRUNK--YOU MAY THROW UP. DRINK SIPS OF WATER/MILK. IF VOMIT CONTINUES, CALL POISON CTR/DR. EYES: IRRIT. FLUSH W/WATER 15 MIN. IF IRRIT PERSISTS, CALL POISON CTR/DR. SKIN: IRRIT. REMOVE WET CLOTHES. FLUSH W/WARM WATER 15 MIN. IF IRRIT PERSISTS, CALL DR/POISON CTR. INHAL: IF INHALED, MAY COUGH. TAKE SLOW DEEP BREATHS OF FRESH AIR, SIP WATER. IF COUGH PERSISTS, CALL DR/POISON CTR.
Here's the entire Ajax information sheet, with more warnings and hazard precautions.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
My complaint with Ajax is that it makes scripting the web much more difficult. I write scripts that grab content from the web and do things with it as well as scripts that post content to the web. I was trying to write one of these the other day for a site that used Ajax for the login form. If I still felt like it was worth writing, my script just became ten times more complex.
How do you link to content that is behind or otherwise encrusted with Ajax? How do crawlers find it? Without Ajax, you can look at the source of a page and get a good idea of what it's doing. With Ajax, you basically have to reverse engineer it (for an example, go look at the Gmail code).
The web should continue to stay one URL leads to one document which is a self-contained chunk of plain text containing everything you need to view its contents.
Ajax breaks the transparency and simplicity of the web for no good reason. It offers only increased responsiveness, which unless you are on a modem or something is minimal and mostly imagined by the user.
Anyway, what I see is that AJAX will allow me to push all of the controller (MVC) logic onto the server. And I can hide script logic as needed (though can be done with jsp's or servlets/JSF). Aside from making remote scripting easier (i.e. don't need to rewrite functions), it will allow me to write code that looks more procedural and manageable than straight HTML. So it's another tool to add to the arsenal--hence the article sounds like more hype than new tech.
The weird thing is ESR thinks that more javascript than html-content is a train wreck waiting to happen. I would disagree here with something like AJAX in the mix.
Then again, AJAX is old tech and DHTML will likely have a greater impact.
Look, I know some people are unhappy with the name Ajax. I understand that. I am not a huge fan of the word as used, myself.
But we need to get over it. That's the name we're using. There is no other word for it now. We can rant and rave all we want about how it should be called DHTML or DXHTML, or Dynamic Web Pages, or whatever. Truth be told, the word we use is almost entirely irrelevant so long as we are on the same page as everyone else.
In any case, we did need a need a new word. DHTML has been used for a long time, and describes such a huge variety of techniques that it's not terribly useful when we want to talk about the use of XMLHttpRequest usage and the recent movement towards more complex Javascript effects that abandon the dark-age IE5.5 and other early browsers.
Ajax is as good a word as any, and it's better that web developers have an identifiable term for that kind of tech, so that customers can refer to that general level of interactivity easily. Even if you don't use the exact "AJAX" model as described, when someone says "Ajax" we all know that we think about Prototype, Dojo, Google Maps and other apps along that vein.
Seriously, if you have enough spare energy to rant and rave about the terminology used in the web hype, then you need to find a better outlet for your energy.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
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
I just skimmed through most of the irate postings to this thread and can't help but shake my head... seriously, I'm not being facitious. When are geeks going to learn that it is 'hype' that is partly responsible for a healthy chunk of a company's profit margins. Hype is also what drove the dotcom gold rush, but the reasons for the final bursting of the bubble in 2000/2001 are a lot more complicated (read some of Paul Graham's musings on the subject matter) and should not be simply attributed to 'irrational exuberance.' ;-) - no wonder we're all getting outsourced, we're simply too clever for our own good! I personally prefer to lose a few IQ points for a mansion on a lake, a bitch red Ferrari, and some more digits in my bank account...
The same people lamenting about this 'undeserved' hype are the first ones complaining that we're all being outsourced and that it's almost impossible to raise funding for an IT startup these days. So, here's a company that somehow coaxed a VC out of $16 Million (which in turn will create jobs for people like YOU!) and you're bitching and moaning acrimoniously about how you guys did that 4 years ago. If you are really sooooo smart, then go out there and grab a piece of the action! VCs are sitting on huge portfolio funds right now and have no clue what to do with them (well, almost
Just a thought: automated webpage translation services like Babelfish and Google's language tools can translate arbitrary webpages yet preserve images and navigation. This only works because the web works via hyperlinked text documents. But if you want to read a website that uses AJAX for navigation, these systems will break -- they can't intercept your XmlHTTPRequests. And even if there was a browser extension that could do that, it would be unclear what text needed to be translated and when. So here's one example of a useful tool that depends on HTML transparency, broken by more programmatic clientside techniques.
-Brendan
Exactly! Counldn't have said it better myself. As someone who works with network protocols a lot HTTP is a BAD protocol. It was fine back in 1993 when we had simple static pages with some text a few links. But for real applications with tables and list controls the stateless model is horrible. We need a cross platform application that provides sophisticated UIs that can be represented using a simple definition language but can hold state and only need to communicate with the server when the UI needs to load or store that state. I was hoping Java would effectively do this but it's UI is pathetically simple (AWT) or pathetically slow (Swing), it doesn't have very good control over the document and just getting the plugin to run in all browsers is a crap shoot.
First of all HTML, JavaScript and XML are not failures. They may not be ideal for whatever it is you think they should be doing, but as technologies they are incredibly successful. Secondly, AJAX requiring a 1 ghz processor is complete bullshit. I use google maps on my 400mhz G4 all the time, and I'll tell you that the operating system slowness itself is more of a source of frustration than javascript.
Oh wait, except if you use a decent toolkit you can write AJAX apps that work in 99.99% of new computers running any operating system, right out of the box. Shit, I guess we better go write some Java Applets or DirectX because AJAX is so horrible.
Okay, that's just outta left field. There's a huge market in between monolithic business applications and pure content documents. Using something like Java to do lightweight web development might satisfy your pedantic idea of proper coding practices, but it wouldn't make anybody more productive. Not to mention assuming that a specific language would somehow make people better software engineers.
Oh boohoo! You didn't perchance work on one of these superior technologies did you?
Well it makes it a good solution if you want to:
Unfortunately it doesn't do anything to:
DHTML has been around for a good long while now. But most mainstream sites haven't been using it because older browsers support for it was too varied and inconsistent to make developing cross platform DHTML viable. And they didn't have access to AJAX (which is newer then DHTML and only just became supported by the default Mac OS X browser when Apple released Safari).
What is new, is that big sites like Google and Yahoo! are willing to stop supporting older browsers. And when two big sites like that stop supporting older browsers, it allows everyone else to start ignoring them as well.
DHTML is nice, but without the AJAX part of the equation, you don't get the 'desktop app' feel that everyone wants.
Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun -Troy McClure
Many of the Java applets I've come across simply either won't load at all, or slow down the browser's loading of the page by five seconds or more while the little Java icon in my system tray loads and pops up with its "welcome to Java" callout. This is on a 3.06 GHz laptop with 512 MB RAM.
Flash won because it did what most people wanted to do (animation and games) faster and more efficiently than Java applets.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Actually while I agree that HTTP is not the best protocol anyone could imagine it is several orders of magnitude better than some RPC (or RMI for those of you knowing nothing but Java) protocol exchanging actual function calls in a much less language-agnostic way. Implementing a basic HTTP client is a trivial task of a few hours in any modern programming language. This is the most important feature of the protocol one could imagine.
Linux is not Windows
I've been doing all my recent development in OpenLaszlo and honestly, I have never seen any UI technology that can compare. And I'm doing more than just playing with it, I'm developing a full blown enterprise app with it at work.
For those who are looking for really impressive web based UI technology, I can't recommend it enough.
Here are some of the strong points:
-open source
-tag/xml based language - very declarative, instead of tons of scripting, you can just define "states" of your views and bind those states to an attribute
-Object orientation that *really* works and is helpful - not like AS2 in flash
-"Serverless deployment" - this is one of the coolest things - your entire app can (optionally) compile to a single SWF that can be redistributed by your method of choice. I should point out that you can also run it in "server" mode where you can edit the
-Animation. Every attribute is animatable... via script or declarative animators. It is hard to describe just how cool this is until you see it in action - to make a view fade out, for example, I can just do this:either way gets you a nice fade out over 500ms. It couldn't be easier.
Anyway, sorry to drone on so long, but this is by far the most impressive UI tech I've seen. I know it has been mentioned on slashdot before, but I'm constantly surprised at how few people seem to know about it.
-Clay
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
True, but unlike other de-facto standards it has open source implementations that work every bit as well at the proprietary versions.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
Java failed on the desktop because:
1) You had two different browsers each with their own JVM plus a third JVM that you could download and they all behaved slightly inconsistently.
2) The Java applications were painfully slow
Now, go to google maps and tell me that it's slow. It doesn't matter what the software uses, it matters what you perceive. If you perceive waiting, sluggishness, etc, then it's a problem. This is common sense programming. You target a platform and you develop software that works well on that platform.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Actually I didn't make my point very well. HTTP alone isn't the problem. It still sucks but it's the poor data management between HTTP and the rendered UI that is the just rediculous.
Think about what's happening in an AJAX application:
Text defining the display (HTML) is downloaded (HTTP) within which a script is embedded (JavaScript) that requests more data be returned as but in a slightly different form of text (XML) that needs to be unmarshalled and interpreted in an application specific way to extract document manipulation operations (DOM). That is *completely* and *utterly* rediculous.
I didn't know ANY javascript before 48 hours ago, right now I am writing ajax for production use. You dont need to use/understand XML to use ajax, and javascript is simple as fuck to use. I assume you already know html, so really, stop bitching, start reading.
http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
It works and it is far easier than you suggest. Also, the code is VERY VERY small compared to any other type of language. In my case 200KB for everything HTML,JS,PHP (goes into mysql). Compare that to our 28MB of vb src.
I'm just finishing deployment of a web based app that does some complex data rule enforcement and rating calculation server side, the gui is client side, the server handles logic and stores the application. By designing your apps the correct way, you minimize data transition, data changes up... only changes down (enforced by counters), leave the GUI code as exposed JS. My project is for private company with 600 agent groups, in 8 states, providing 5 different insurance applications. So realisitically 1800 daily users.
The code to provide the same functioning application with JS is a fraction of all other languages we have and do write apps in. JS contains the data -> through JS code logic -> updates the DOM. Yes it's almost that simple. For most business apps, it doesn't get much more difficult for any traditional data processing.
Plus, no more distribution, to 8 states.... no more making sure that the software they use is up to date, and has the latest fixes/corrections/rate adjustments. It's lightweight, fast, and centralized, not to mention, easy to code/maintain and the only tricky part is handling js client side bugs, but you keep that code very siple and well tested, and have it try to communicate with you if it gets errors that it is able to report, so you can fix them sooner rather than later.