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

Re:What's so special about AJAX?

[Osty]

Nothing! The tech for it has been around forever, they just slapped a new name on it.

To be fair, while Microsoft introduced the XMLHTTP object in 1999, other browsers didn't implement a similar interface until 2002 or later (2002 being the first implementation of XMLHttpRequest in Mozilla). So if your definition is of "forever" is "the last four years" then this has been aroud forever. (Note: I'm ignoring hidden iframe solutions that really have been around "forever", where "forever" is defined as "since rich web browsers have been around, such as IE4 and Netscape 4".)

I do agree that "AJAX" is just a flashy name for an already-existing technology, and any good web developer would've already been using the technology in appropriate places prior to the name change. However, "AJAX" does put a fancy name on the technology, and while it certainly can be overused it's not really a bad thing for the technique to get more publicity. "AJAX" as a fad will eventually die down just like "enterprise", "push", etc have in the past. The technology behind it won't, and will continue to be used where appropriate long after the Web 2.0 bubble has burst.

What ever happened to XUL?

[pschmied]

It seems like XUL has/had so much potential to provide rich user interfaces via the web. Apart from Firefox extensions that may use bits of XUL, what are people doing with it? I remember an example of a XUL interface to Amazon.com that was quite impressive. I kept expecting web sites to start having XUL versions with very rich UIs. I seem to recall that Oracle was even interested in XUL for a while.

How is this on topic? Well, it seems like AJAX is delivering a lot of the rich UI stuff that XUL was supposed to, but in a slightly less elegant way (from my peripheral understanding of both technologies). Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here, or is AJAX a popular but pale immitation of what XUL was supposed to be?

-Peter

Re:What ever happened to XUL?

[Alfred, Lord Tennyso]

Ajax runs on IE; XUL doesn't. That's going to increase its "installed base" by an order of magnitude.

Ajax also lacks an installation step. As far as I can tell you always had to download and approve XUL code before it could run, and sometime requires you to reboot your browser.

Availability is always going to trump elegance when it comes to environments.

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:I'd call it a Cognitive Avalanche

[cperciva]

You missed the really secret message, which was hidden in the italics, not the boldface. Unfortunately the punctuation was lost, but here's the secret message (including punctuation):

Separate each of them, too. Small humans are kind of primitive; slower, tedious documents -- better idea. BAM!

I think he's conveying instructions on how to teach children: One-on-one teaching, using simple and straightforward teaching materials.

AJAX/Remote Scripting Hype

[y5]

The AJAX hype is like the DHTML craze all over again. IMO if you can't create a site using remote scripting without suppressing the urge to advertise to the world that you're doing so, chances are you're abusing the technology. Why should your user base care what the hell technology you're using? It should just work.

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.)

Isn't it obvious?

[noidentity]

Dirty countertops everywhere are the number one cause.

If it's a wildfire then, get me some matches, stat

[JoeShmoe]

I'll admit that the concepts behind AJAX excite the hell out of me. It's really something when you think about the fact that...it's really nothing new so much as, a theory that finally has some real practical applications and examples. Everyone I think has always known that...the worst thing about the web is the idea that you'll be in the middle of a process, like filling out a financial form, or managing a shopping cart of items, whatever and then be interrupted by a need to click a link. How many of us will be filling something out, not understand it, and see a Help link and for a brief second worry that when you click it, you won't get a nice friendly popup but get whisked away to some help page and have to start the whole damn thing over? (raises hand) That's the kind of ugliness that breaks things like webmail or shopping carts or financial forms. I can't tell you how many times I cussed a blue streak because I accidentally lost focus from the mail field in Hotmail, hit backspace meaning to erase a word and ended up back in the inbox where, thank you dynamic pages, pressing forward takes me to a new empty compose mail window.

Now obviously, that's the programmers fault...webmail should never throw anything away regardless of the user clicking Back and Forward on their browser. And I think that's the theory behind the AJAX effect. Really, back and forward are supposed to be the last things I'll ever hit. In fact, Google Maps I believe has to go through considerable kludges to even have entries show up in the Back and Forward browser list...and I can tell you there are plenty of times I wish I could go "Back" to my previous map location but instead, got taken back to the original empty Direction page I started at. So, if AJAX is done right...everything I ever need to click is right there. And that's what have been valuable since Windows was born. A poorly written web application/interface is like having to use Calc.exe Notepad.exe Paint.exe and CharMap.exe to make a document instead of WinWord.exe doing it all in one place.

In fact, I'm a little upset the whole stampede behind AJAX apparently caught so many developers and programmers napping. I've been hiring PHP/MySQL programmer for years now but, I start asking questions like... can't we have it so when someone clicks this header it just drops down a propigated list of choices instead of having to pop them up in a window or regenerate the page? And they stare at me like I'm asking for the moon or wanting an entire database of 400 items preloaded on the page before it renders. The guys with "AJAX" on their resume are...well they apparently know what that buzzword is worth and have their hands full writing the next Flicr or Digg or whatever.

And I'm one of them. I've had an idea for a web-based application but...because it involves just so darn much data, I've been having it developed as a template/macroset in Word because I can piggyback on the already present features like AutoText and Toolbars to provide an interface and packaged output. Now, I'm excited that I can have something just as dynamic and immediately accessible, but available on any platform and any location and without relying on software I don't control (I've already found two critical bugs in AutoText that Microsoft has admitted are bugs present since Word 2000, cannot be fixed by any option/registry setting, and will hopefully be fixed in the next version but possibly the one after that...oh gee thanks). So I want to start my own wildfire by creating something that would make a wonderful application, but have ability to distribute that application to thousands and tens of thousands of users as easily as sharing a link. That's amazing. That's why it's a wildfire. I just wish the store wasn't sold out of all the matches.

- JoeShmoe
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