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?"

Comments

Slashdotted?

[gigne]

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.

I'd call it a Cognitive Avalanche

[smug_lisp_weenie]

AJAX is actually made up of a bunch of separate ideas from the last five years, each of them too small to penetrate the fog of internet... But the term AJAX just triggered all of these ideas as a group into a "Cognitive Avalanche" (to possibly coin a new term :-)
The ideas are as follows:

1. Javascript, despite what people used to think, is actually quite powerful and well designed
2. Google and their employees are super smart- Maybe if you look at their source code you can capture some of their magic
3. Humans are kind of primitive- If you make your program do something flashy while fetching its data (as opposed to just freezing up the browser for a few seconds as a page loads) the humans think your software isn't as slow as it actually is.
4. You know, browsers have this thing called DOM that allows for ultra-powerful tweaking of web pages
5. Standard web forms are slower and more tedious than you think
6. The web used to serve up documents- That is a bad idea: Serving up data would is a better idea
7. In an ideal world, all the world's software/data/operatingsystems/etc would just live on the web

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.

Re:not just a new fad

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Thank Goodness for NoScript

[stereoroid]

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?