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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?'"
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
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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:
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.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
i know alot of people here hate microsoft (duh!)
but i believe silverlight will be a large part of the rich web
now this is my personal opinion and heres why:
*it was designed with web applications in mind (XAML) unlike the current html/css/javascript mess
*its more or less crossplatform
*it brings C# to the clients browser (see javascript mess above)
*has vector and hd video supprt of the box
*is designed to be easily updated
Once you understand it, Javascript is an awesome language. It's C/C++/Java-like syntax hides its fundamentally functional underpinnings. The core datastructure in Javascript is a method. Everything can be represented in terms of methods, even to the point of not using any variables. With that in mind, it's a very powerful language that is often maligned precisely because of what it is -- many people just don't "get" functional languages (why C/C++/Java/etc are so popular and Lisp/ML/Haskell/etc are not), though you can certainly write procedural or even OO code in Javascript. It's also very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with Javascript, depending on implementations (using anonymous methods is a good way to leak memory in IE if you're not careful, for example).
As a scripting language, Javascript has a lot too offer. Too bad it's been forever tied to HTML and web stuff.
People like Flash because it gives you lots of pretty, shiney bits for very little work. It's also vector-based, so you can build a pixel-perfect layout like so many bad web designers want ("Our web site must look exactly like our magazine"). Too many people associate "AJAX" with flashy Web 2.0-y visual effects (fading highlights, rounded corners, wet reflections, large fonts, etc), when AJAX is really about communication. If all you care about is glitz, go ahead and use Flash. If you want to build something that actually works well, I'd go with javascript+HTML.
You may not want to hear it, but Microsoft has much of that with ASP.Net AJAX, as have others like Script#. In each case, you're writing most (or all, in the case of Script#) of your code in a .NET langauge and the compiler handles generating the javascript appropriate for your target browser(s). These work with at least Firefox and IE, and should also work with Safari, Opera, and others with minor tweaking.
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.
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A div is just a non-semantic block (just like a span is a non-semantic inline bit, though of course either of those could be changed by CSS). A table is very specific. Semantically, only tabular data should go into a table, and thus tables are completely wrong for layout. Divs, on the other hand, do make sense. For example, you're building a page with two columns, perhaps for a nav sidebar and a main content area. You have two separate components to your page, but they don't have any semantic meaning other than being blocks to put stuff (that is, they're not tabular data, list data, paragraphs, headings, etc). In that case, a div (short for "division", as in "page division" or something logically separate from other bits on the page) is absolutely correct to use. So now you have two divs on your page, one for the sidebar and one for the content. Using CSS, you can make these look however you like. Put the sidebar on the left or right, it doesn't matter (can't do that with a table without editing content). Put the "sidebar" along the top or bottom of the content area (can't do that with a table without editing content, either). Obviously that's CSS's doing, but you need something to work with in order to style appropriately. Within the sidebar, you have semantic data, as nav data can be considered a list. Within the content division, you have semantic data consisting of paragraphs, headings, etc. If you modelled your page as a table with a single row, with the sidebar being one cell and the content being another cell, your page is not semantic. Modelling it with divs, it is.
Divs can definitely be over-used. There are a lot of specific layouts that require wrappers and such, which usually means using divs. While you can avoid much of that, there's still some tag soup required if you want specific layouts with today's browsers, and you just have to deal with the fact that reality is intruding on your perfect little world. For my part, I would much rather have two divs wrapped in a third in order to do a two-column page layout than have a single table with columns as cells in the table.
You just can't say it any better than that.
From a lot of the comments I get the impression that most people really don't get it. AJAX is incredibly useful, but it's mostly a really clever hack. The need for dynamically updating elements on the web page is definitely there, and AJAX manages to fill that need somewhat. But Javascript/DOM + XML/HTML is a terrible set of tools to build GUI widgets with.
AJAX works by sweeping the nitty-gritty details under the rug, but scratch the surface, and you realize how filthy the whole thing is. The first time you try to use a cool feature of your favorite GUI widget, and expect it to work the way your favorite desktop widget does, the cool-factor quickly degrades into frustration. Even with some of the best libraries out there, they still don't seem to have the problem licked.
It's amazing how far we have gotten with the tools available, but there really is a threshold forming due to these weaknesses. I'm not smart enough to envision how to get there, but there really needs to be a fundamental change that better integrates these technologies. Otherwise we're gonna be in spaghetti-code hell for a quite some time to come.