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Microsoft Releases Atlas
Jason Lind writes "Much earlier than anticipated, Microsoft announced the release of Atlas this afternoon at MIX 06. For those who don't know, Atlas is Microsoft's AJAX API for ASP.NET 2, which they claim will greatly reduce the effort in developing AJAX style applications on their platform."
ASP.NET 2.0 has a lot more options, including XHTML.
Well, the AJAX wars have started, and M$ maybe just got off the first shot. We'll see. With http://www.morfik.com/'s public beta just around the corner the RAD IDE AJAX tools are finally coming on scene. We'll see what people can do with these tools, and whether AJAX is REALLY as overrated as some are claiming. Personally I'll bet that once people can get their hands on tools that let them build web apps as easily as they can desktop apps (and unplug them, i.e. run them locally or over the 'net, as you can with Morfik) you'll see a huge increase in web applications.
The number of AJAX tools that are on their way is staggering. http://www.tersus.com/ is one designed for the absolute noob, and http://www.backbase.com/ is also a potential option.
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Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
I'm not really a fan of MS, but I recognize they have a lot going for them. I'm a PHP developer so please don't assume I'm defending it because I like ASP. Really, I don't.
I think a bunch of people commenting read the press release and made their judgements without actually investigating how incredible the technology is. There was even the flamebait who posted something about cross browser compatibility. Well, watch the freaking demo video before you go trolling. You can find their first of many such demos here:
mms://wm.microsoft.com/ms/uifx/asp_net_atlas.wmv
Maybe I find it amazing because I'm not that used to ASP development, but I'm thoroughly impressed how far MS has come in making developing for their platform easy. The demo I pasted above shows him making a pretty standard data grid. That part is cool, at best, to anybody familiar with ASP, and flat out amazing to anybody who's never seen ASP sites being developed. About 2/3 into the video he busts out the new Atlas code (so fast forward to there). It was maybe 3 additional ASP tags to implement full asynchronous functionality plus one more to setup a "updating..." dialog. Suddenly, a page that required refreshes on any action could add, edit, and *sort* paginated data without any refreshes.
And then he fires up the same code in Firefox and goes to show that it works exactly the same in both browsers. 3 ASP tags.
I'm sorry, but how can you blindly bash that? Sure there's equivalent technology in the works out there (such as rails), but it doesn't make this any less amazing. If there was a development platform as complete as MS's offering but based on Python/PHP, people would be pissing their pants. To ASP developers, this will make creating AJAX functionality unbelievably easy.
MS just scored major Hype 2.0 points today. But the hype isn't all unjustified. Again, go learn about this before you bash it.
see my other post http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=180 799&cid=14959879 it already exits it is called Echo2 it is a open source Java web framework. AJAX is integrated seamlessly into the component model. It is the most comprehensive toolkit I have found. I have been researching them for my new project for several months now and Echo2 is leaps and bounds ahead of the other competing projects.