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

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.

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.