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What's Spreading "the AJAX Wildfire"?
An anonymous reader writes "AJAXWorld Magazine is running an article entitled "What's So Special About AJAX?" in which the majority of the contributors agree among themselves that AJAX "heralds a new, global sense of what the web can be and what the web can do, in ways that are so different but so much better than what we have been used to." While many of those the magazine consulted adduced technical reasons for the spread what one of them, Rich Internet Application pioneer Coach Wei, calls "the AJAX wildfire," only two mention how human nature — including that of software developers — is, well, notoriously susceptible to the latest fad. Which side would you agree with?"
It would appear to be slashdotted already.
They should have invested in some more bandwidth and better servers to cope with all that AJAX overhead.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
The ideas are as follows:
None of these ideas were really important enough to push through to the web developer consiousness and have just kind of quietly developing while no one was noticing- Then some dude calls this stuff AJAX and BAM! the web 2-dot-whatever avalanche begins in earnest.
This is not an "insightful" comment, because it's wrong on at least two counts.
But I'll not toss away a mod point to say so, only to have it trashed by some Ajax fanboi in metamod.
1. Ajax does NOT eliminate the round trip between client and server. It just lends the ILLUSION of doing so. Sure it looks cool and wonderful, but requests still have to go to the server, and responses still have to come back over the wire. It only *looks* seamless if you've a broadband connection, which lots of folks still don't.
2. Ajax is NOT new. The technology has been around for a while now. For that matter, it's not even really dependent on XmlHttpRequest - you could do much the same thing with IFRAME elements, at least on your own site.
And Ajax has at least two potential problems in common with frames - poorly-implemented apps don't provide a way to bookmark results - if you use content from another provider, then you're dependent on that being available, and you need to provide a fallback in case they aren't.
I don't object to Ajax, I actually think it's pretty cool. But it's not new, and it doesn't change the way the Web actually works.
(And for anybody who thinks I'm just miffed by the parent's cheap shot at Ruby - I personally don't use or care about Ruby. But it was a cheap shot.)
The XML thing makes it easier in that you don't have to program in the data encoder/decoder. It handles being able to put any text in it with proper escaping, and have the data be easily read on the other side. Plus if you use a simple XML schema, it's not that much heavier than using key/value pairs. I mean, you could use something really complicated, but you don't have to, and your probably better off using a simple schema for many reasons. I don't think it is any different than what you are doing, especially since that what everybody does mostly isn't ajax, and is often just something that's very similar, but leaves out the xml part, in exchange for what's easier depending on your application. I've found it easier to just send back JS wrapped in an XML container so that there doesn't have to be a large library of code on the client to handle every little situation that they may encounter. Most of the stuff that ends up happening as the result of the AJAX call (showing a message, updating a couple of HTML elements, or removing a few) only take 2 or 3 lines anyway, especially with a very small library of helper functions on the client side. Plus you don't have to put up with building a complicated XML parsing engine in JS on the client side.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The linked to site seems dead. Here's a coral cache version: http://ajax.sys-con.com.nyud.net:8090/read/256389. htm
(posted anonymously to prevent karma whoring)
The other problem is that you don't always get to use the browser you want. Many businesses are still IE only, and if that is where people are accessing your site from, they are going to be a little unhappy that they aren't getting the full experience, because your website doesn't run on the #1 browser (based on install base) in the world. There's a lot of other places such as web cafes where people don't really have a choice of what software they are running Although I would hate to run a web cafe with windows software, you'd have to reimage the computers every night. It would probably just be easier to run a Linux Live CD. Anyway, I think that AJAX provides a lot of the functionality that XUL does, while still allowing it to run on all modern browsers. Even among the geek community there's a lot of people who refuse to run anything but Opera, or even swear by IE. Some people are just stuck in their old ways.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's pretty simple, the two dominant browsers now are no longer broken and can actually do this! I remember trying to make nice tabbed pages, and all kinds of other widgets without using applets or activex. But alas ie and netscape differed a hell of a lot and netscape was extremely broken in many areas of this kind of rendering. Now ie and firefox are the top dogs and they both work.
Don't forget about AJAX's ability to SAVE you bandwidth. If all you do is strap AJAX on then yeah, it increases bandwidth. If you use it cleverly to say, change the table and only the table instead of reloading all the sidebars as well as teh button to update the table, you can SAVE bandwidth. Or if you use a drop down to avoid wildcard searches, you can save unnecessary queryies from ever being ran. Precious long running wildcarded queries at at.
A problem with it being all new is that developers want to slather it all over themselves and talk about how Ajaxified their site is. Used correctly it can provide a benefit. Otherwise, it's like reloading your page every 3 seconds. Just because it seems so doesn't mean it's no longer a distributed app.
Ever done a `man` on `top` ?
These AJAX sites expect you to have JavsScript enabled, before they will work at all, and this is where they sneak in tracking crap like Google Analytics, Tacoda, etc. NoScript lets me see the sources of the scripts in each page, and whitelist only the ones required to get the site to work. I regularly see tracking scripts that are not declared, that have nothing to do with the service provided by the site.
Slashdot is embedding Tacoda scripts in every page: have a read of their privacy policy for details of what they admit to collecting and selling back to OSTG. If you examine the source code of a Slashdot page, get the script URL and open it, you can how see the script is obfuscated, it generates another script as it runs. Why are they hiding what they do? Why does Slashdot collaborate with these bloodsucking bottomfeeders? How much are Slashdot reader eyeballs worth?
(this is not a