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."

Comments

If it's anything like the rest of ASP.net...

[CastrTroy]

If it's anything like the rest of ASP.net, It will require that you use Microsoft's wonderful web technology, with __viewstates, and other wonderful features. You won't be able to customize it nearly enough to do a professional job, and will only work for really quick and sloppy applications that don't really need AJAX anyway. I use ASP.Net on a daily basis. We've found the best thing to do is to ignore all the form/component stuff that microsoft has built, and just use tools we have built ourselves, which although they do many of the same features, are much more extensible and easier to use.

Ajax is a flash in the pan

[jimmyhat3939]

Personally I think the whole Ajax thing is overblown and will die down in the next year or two.

Are there good uses for Ajax? Sure. Google Maps is probably the single best example out there at the moment, and I would expect some more to show up soon.

BUT, will Ajax supplant the client app as the workhorse of productivity applications? Not a chance:

• Ajax requires all communication be serialized using a Javascript callback scheme that requires extensible but ultimately limiting xml communication between client and server.
• To get good performance, Ajax forces you to code a front-end application using JAVASCRIPT. Now I've coded some pretty complicated Javascript stuff, but it's just not the right language for writing full-featured applications. It's barely even object oriented, weak typed, etc. And debugging it is a disaster.
• If instead you decide to have the server make all the UI decisions for you ("put this text here, that box there"), that's fine except you'll see lag anytime you do anything. Imagine trying to update an entire column of data in Ajax Spreadsheet. The server has to send down exactly what to put in each cell and do all the computations for you before you see anything. Google Maps has this problem - I often see white boxes, unrefreshed boxes, etc. and I'm using the latest Firefox!

The funniest thing for me about Ajax is it basically is just doing what Java Applets can do, only Java is better. WTF?!?!

Re:Ajax is a flash in the pan

[AKAImBatman]

My thoughts exactly. I cringe to think to what it would be like to maintain an entire Unix application that did everything in X11. Even with a development environment that was built to support X11, I think it would still be a nightmare. X11 is good for little apps like calculators and graphical terminals, but is not the best way to do the entire application.

Or, on the other hand, maybe we could make widget libraries that do all the heavy lifting of X11 for us? Then we could program to the widget libraries rather than the uber-complex X11 drawing library! Genius!

The same is true of AJAX. Right now, everyone is programming at the lowest level. What AJAX needs is a higher level set of widgets that can accelerate development. Mozilla took the XUL path, but that won't work for cross-browser applications. We need a general-purpose widget library written using the standard HTML DOM. Then AJAX will become a quick and easy option.

Unfortunately, Atlas isn't it. This is just a collection of custom tags to simplify and standardize ASP programming.