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Microsoft Releases Atlas

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the another-technology-to-ignore dept.

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."

5 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Ajax is a flash in the pan by jimmyhat3939 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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?!?!

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    1. Re:Ajax is a flash in the pan by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
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    2. Re:Ajax is a flash in the pan by FecesFlingingRhesus · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Mythology, lol by tehshen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  3. Did you guys even read TFA??? by moochfish · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.