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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."
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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:
The funniest thing for me about Ajax is it basically is just doing what Java Applets can do, only Java is better. WTF?!?!
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In mythology, Atlas and the Titans revolted against the Olympians, lost, had his brothers betray him, and was punished to carry the world. Is this some sort of metaphor for the IE development cycle?
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
ASP.NET 2.0 has a lot more options, including XHTML.
1. You shouldn't be testing for a UA, but for object support.
2. You can build accessibility into an AJAXified application, but it will take more work. I find that the people who care enough about accessibility on normal websites are the people who are also willing to put in the extra work making applications accessible.
3. Another attack vector? Sure, but introducing any technology introduces new risks. That doesn't mean you should dismiss it entirely. Bad code is bad code - no matter whether it's AJAX or PHP or Ruby.
4. This goes back to accessibility. If a client doesn't have Javascript at all, you need to account for that. If you're writing an app that absolutely requires Javascript, then you need to accept that some users won't be able to use the site.
5. This is the crux of your argument, I think. Some applications are dependent upon Javascript for a good reason - they aren't normal websites. The example I use is of a university that has thirty or so platform and browser combinations to support. Deploying an internal desktop app is expensive, difficult to support, etc. But a web app can be brought up on all of the supported environments - which means you can build for those and ignore anything that's unsupported (like Lynx). We're talking about interfaces which replace a desktop app - but still need comparable functionality, speed, and interfaces.
The web has always been a quickly changing landscape. AJAX is a feature on that landscape, not the future of it. Like anything else it has its valid uses and invalid uses, can be abused, and can be done poorly. But so far, none of this is a reason to dismiss it entirely.
*shrug*
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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.