The Future of AJAX and the Rich Web

jg21 writes "This AJAXWorld Magazine article indicates how far AJAX has come since devs complained here two years ago that it sucked all the time. Eight experts were asked what questions we should now all be asking about where AJAX is headed next. The suggested questions are refreshingly hard-headed, including: 'How are we to fix the web?'; 'When will AJAX development finally be easy?'; and 'Do we really need JavaScript 2.0? Won't it be somewhat irrelevant by the time it becomes commonplace and thus usable?' One of the most interesting questions came from Kevin Hakman, co-founder of TIBCO's General Interface: 'On what timeline will AJAX skills become commoditized like HTML skills became?'"

Comments

Reduce the Quirks and Exceptions to HTML/CSS

[JoeCommodore]

Probably the biggest thing I see is that we live with a 'quirky' web where you write an HTML/CSS document and have to adjust for problems with one browser or another (or not support some because of such things), while the use of standard libraries and tools have provided automatic solutions for much of the quirks they still limit the possibilities.

HTML skills are a commodity?

[Bogtha]

On what timeline will AJAX skills become commoditized like HTML skills became?

It seems to me that developers that can write decent HTML are still an extreme minority. I still see href="javascript:", "<div> s are better than tables for layout", a chronic amount of invalid code, and all kinds of other idiocy all the time. Sure, if you want monkeys to throw tag soup all over the place it's not hard to find them, but that doesn't mean they know what they are doing or that it's easy to find people who actually understand HTML.

Re:HTML skills are a commodity?

[Frosty Piss]

Repeat after me: tables are not intended, nor suited, for layout.

What a particular tag was meant for when it was first implemented is entirely irrelevant as to if it can be effectively used to do something.

Re:HTML skills are a commodity?

[Bogtha]

How else would you like people to make clickable text that executes a JavaScript method, and how would it be better than that approach?

Add an event handler to a normal <a> element with a proper href attribute. It works when JavaScript is switched off, it works when your event handler has an error, it works when you try to open something in a new tab or window, it works when the browser doesn't support whatever it is you are trying to do in your event handler, it just plain works.

DIVs are better than tables for layout.

No, they aren't. They are absolutely useless for layout.

They let the designer create more elaborate layouts more efficiently than tables, but they also make even simple layouts much more consistent and easy to implement.

You have confused the <div> element type with CSS. They are totally different things.

This is not pedantry. If you are thinking that layout is somehow achieved with <div> elements, then you are looking at things completely upside-down. You use the most appropriate element type for the information at hand, whether that's a table, a list, a paragraph, or whatever. You then arrange those elements with CSS. The particular element types you've used are not relevant to the layout. If you think <div> elements are in any way interesting for layout purposes, then you don't understand how the whole picture fits together.

Re:HTML skills are a commodity?

[hobo sapiens]

Ah, the old divs vs tables flamewar.

I used to be on the side of using semantically neutral elements like divs and css to specify layout.

Most layouts work fine with semantically neutral elements (divs). Some don't. I have used tables for layout in one or two cases, but not before trying VERY hard to make a purely CSS driven solution. To approximate it using no tables, I'd have to put javascript in my CSS expressions to make IE simulate min-width and min-height, among other things. Since that's a clever but ultimately sucky solution, tables won out. We're talking very specific layouts here. Usually you shouldn't need tables.

I said it in another nearby post, but I'll say it again here: being a professional is knowing the rules. Another part of being a professional is knowing when to break them. Yes, using tables for layout is a semantic faux-pas. But sometimes it makes the most sense.

If you find yourself having to cobble together a collections of hacks to make a certain layout work without tables, then you either need to abandon the layout, or if you cannot, use tables. Semantically incorrect, but it's better than some of the hacks that you have to use to work around browser (IE) flakiness. I am not talking about wrapping floating divs in a container with negative margins. That's a pretty elegant solution. I am talking about several layers of nested divs with wacky CSS tricks and IE hacks on top of Javascript magic. That stuff is ridiculous. In short, use the best tool for the job and get over your prejudices about a certain design methodology being "bad".

Let's see

[smittyoneeach]

In the beginning, there was client server.
Then, there was n-tier with the thin client.
Now, the client seems past the bout of anorexia, we've gone back to client/server, and AJAX has fattened it right up.
Next (mis)step? N-tier, repackaged as "federated", with an emphasis on thin, mobile clients. But you knew that. The real question is, what will AJAX for the hand-held be called? I say: BORAXO.
I will confess some guilt that this has not been reduced to a Burma Shave troll, but I'm still slightly under the weather.

marchitecture alert

[anomalous cohort]

I claim first serious post.

Most of these questions appear to me to be either leading questions, whose intent is to foment desire in the questioners product(s) and/or service(s), or marketing questions.

Some of the questions are legit, however. For example, those questions concerning security, performance, unit testing, and analytics.

With regards to the question about which framework to choose, I have posted my favorites here.

Re:will AJAX development finally be easy?

[Larry Lightbulb]

Ok, point me to a place where I can pick up all the knowledge I need to use it, I've got a free afternoon. And I mean that seriously.

Re:will AJAX development finally be easy?

[jma05]

The challenge is not technical. Devs need to change their mindsets while about thinking about web applications. I am not talking about putting an occasional AJAX widget. The change is from synchronous to asynchronous web applications. That's about as big a change as writing distributed applications for someone who mostly wrote 1-tier applications. Design is different as is debugging.

when will AJAX skills become commoditized?

[Ralph Spoilsport]

'On what timeline will AJAX skills become commoditized like HTML skills became?'"

Easy: when a WYSIWYG editor, a la Dreamweaver, can accomplish all basic AJAX functionality without having to mess with much, if any, code.

Yeah - sure - Dreamweaver is suboptimal, but for 95% of what you need in a site (and if your site is fairly simple, 100%) it does the job, just fine, and you don't need to mess with that messy HTML and javascripty goopety glop. you just treat it like InDesign or Quark, and design your page - no muss, no fuss, nothing too fancy.

When Dreamweaver (or some similar app yet-to-be-developed) can do Exactly That - let me do AJAX without touching code, then you know AJAX coding skills will commoditise and disappear. How many hear can read PostScript, raise your hands! Not too many. I figured as much... FreeHand, Fontographer, and Illustrator removed the need to know how to program a page description in PostScript. Dreamweaver ate HTML and trivial Javascript. AJAX is next... I'd say, give it 2 years. Tops. I'm sure the programmers at Adobe are hard at work mulling over how to do just that.

RS

how far HAVE we come?

[vsync64]

It does suck.

As for the "refreshing[] hard-headed" questions, all I see are questions about performance and silly flitting about with their own buzzwords and pipe dreams about getting rid of real applications in favor of their toys.

Here are some questions:

• Whatever happened to degrading gracefully? If you look at the apps produced by Google, the poster child for "AJAX", you'll see that they took the time to make most or all of the functionality work without JavaScript, without images, without CSS, or with a deranged hodgepodge of those. I don't see others making the same efforts.
• How about semantics, and security? We're getting back into the mess of data intermingled with code. I'm seeing more and more sites out there have a blank page that loads, and then JavaScript that loads the content. Now you have to have scripting enabled for every site you visit. MS Office macros all over again. And forget trying to spider the content without having some sort of bizarre Turing machine debugger to try to get at the real content.
• Yeah, how about mobile devices? If you were doing it right (see above) you wouldn't have to worry about the iPhone or about a special mobile AJAX. It would work fine within the constraints of any device. Google does.
• How do you plan to interact with the local filesystem? Java has an effective sandbox, signed codebases, and granular user permissions (although the latter are kind of sucky). Are users not allowed to retain control over their own data?
• How are users supposed to have any confidence about what you're doing to them? The previous model was good. Users knew when they were sending anything to the server, and if the UA vendors would do their jobs they would also know when they were affecting data. What are users supposed to do now, have wireshark running all the time? Not acceptable.

I'm implementing Web-based applications as of this writing, and I plan to have some dynamic features to simplify some of the UI (such as cascading follow-up questions during user signup). But these will be an optional extra.

These jokers forget that the World Wide Web is a repository for mutual citation of academic-style documents. New stuff is good, just don't break the old stuff.

Every improvement on the Internet has been in the direction of better user controls, decentralization, caching, peer-to-peer, transport tunnels, etc. The AJAX people are swimming against the tide and they need to realize it and shape up.

Do you also welcome AJAX hosts holding your data?

[compumike]

Lots of people seem to welcome AJAX, and it does provide a huge step in the interactivity of web interfaces without sacrificing platform compatibility or development time.

However, one thing that continues to surprise me is how willing most people are to having a third party store all of their data. All AJAX apps essentially require that you do not hold your own data -- it's held by the application provider. A big reason is because Javascript can't touch your local filesystem, but another is that Javascript isn't powerful enough to really be useful for all of the processing, so back to the server-side scripting it goes.

In fact, one of the things that scared me today was how excited a friend was to discover that Google's chat application logged all of their Jabber conversations -- even if they had been made with a 3rd party GUI client (Pidgin). This, to me, would just be scary.

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Re:will AJAX development finally be easy?

[SharpFang]

It is not quite as easy.

Assuming you start from zero...

The beginnings are easy. Learn basics of HTML and CSS. A week and you're intermediate. You still don't know all the hacks and caveats but you know quite enough.

Learn basics of Javascript. Say, 3 days. Simple JS is easy. If you think all JS is easy, read some scripts by Douglas Crockford and see how wrong you were. But for a starter, you need simple JS.

Then learn using DOM. This isn't all that hard. There are some caveats like some browsers inserting whitespace text nodes between tags and such, but that's all doable. One evening to master it.

Learn some backend language. PHP probably. With some database too. Quite easy but the amount of knowledge you need to absorb is at least 2 weeks of learning.

Next you learn basics of using xmlHttpRequest. This is one evening and you know how it works and you know there's no sense using it as-is.

You spend the next afternoon picking an AJAX framework/library/toolbox and another day learning it.

They you spend another year writing AJAX and learning how to properly react to unreliable connections and handle all kinds of errors, corrupted data, browser incompatibilities, how to protect your apps from script injection attacks or exploiting your application server by someone "from outside", deal with load ballancing on the server side, sharing scripts between domains, making the code non-conflicting with other JS and self (2 instances of the same AJAX-based tool on one page? It's broken more often than you think!), creating javascript files dynamically using PHP to allow better flexiblity of your app, parsing, traversing, modifying and extracting data from style sheets, interacting with Flash, Java and APIs of a dozen external services, writing XUL based apps, optimizing data for transfer, porting large parts of business logic to JS to offload your application servers, then finally using the advanced javascript where modifying system methods and objects is not a taboo anymore.

Then you know AJAX.

Re:When did AJAX stop sucking?

[hobo sapiens]

Well too bad for you.

Developing for the web is about knowing your audience. If I were designing a site like ebay or amazon, in other words, trying to have the widest possible user base, or if I were working for some entity that had to abide by ADA requirements, then maybe avoiding AJAX would be advisable. For a site that is not a necessity, like, for example, youtube, slashdot, digg, flickr, etc AJAX is great. When done properly, AJAX makes more efficient applications that enhance the user experience.

Also, if you really want to, you can develop sites that use AJAX but also degrade nicely. Everyone here (at least, anyone who calls himself a serious web developer) is using web standards and writing good semantic markup, right? Well, that will make your site at least accessible. If you just use the noscript tag to handle non javascript user agents (where necessary, obviously not where there isn't ROI anyway) then your site should work pretty well.

As someone else who replied to you mentioned, we cannot develop web sites around people who for some crazy reason refuse to use new technologies (if you call javascript new, as if!). That, along with MSIE, are holding the web back.

I think people who hate AJAX just hate it because of all the bad AJAX sites. But that's like hating the web because there are bad non-ajax sites. AJAX, like other technologies, makes things better when used properly.

Re:Do you also welcome AJAX hosts holding your dat

[AKAImBatman]

Microsoft implemented Javascript with full DOM access at the time Netscape Navigator had rather limited and tedious Javascript support.

Correct. And what happened to Netscape's market share?

Now a bunch of folks came together and declared that Microsoft got it all wrong and has to re-implement its browser with 80% market share to conform to minority's opinion of how a web browser should behave.

I hardly think that a "minority" of the development community are the ones mad at Microsoft. Anyone who has used IE to any appreciable degree is mad at them. When 5.0 came out back in '99, it was incredible. The best browser, bar none. Microsoft released a fairly insignificant update called 6.0 in '01 and that was where the browser sat. For about 5 years. Then when everyone had almost given up hope that Microsoft would keep developing their browser, they announced 7.0. They also announced how they were going to meet W3C standards and make developer's lives better. 7.0 came out, and it turns out that Microsoft couldn't even be bothered to add support for simple things like DOM2 Events or SVG. (Things which they effectively already had support for, just in a proprietary-yet-not-quite-dislike manner.) In reality, they stamped out a few CSS bugs, screwed up the IE interface, then developed a new certificate scheme that was practically the same as the old one but made more money for all involved.

I say punish Microsoft for illegal use of its monopoly power, but otherwise let critics develop their own software and let the best program win.

The funny thing is, the only reason why IE hasn't died out is aforementioned monopoly power. I have met very few users who prefer IE over Firefox or Safari. However, I have met managers who force the use of IE (thus leaving themselves vulnerable to IE's massive security holes) for the purpose of 100% Microsoft "corporate standards". As a result, IE has lost market share in the home computer segment, but is not taking any losses in the B2B arena. And it's NOT because it's a good product.