Thursday, June 15th, 2006
Ajax anti-patterns
In this blog entry from Ed Burnette, he voices some opinions about what he calls “Ajax anti-patterns”, things that Ajax sites need to watch out for as they’re developing their sites.
Microsoft recently rolled out live.com, a beta Ajax home page, to mixed reviews. The interesting part to me in all this are the lessons that can be learned, not just for improving live.com, but for all Ajax enabled applications. In a candid article, team member Scott Isaacs dissects the problems they have identified so far. I’ll summarize the basic points here. Consider these Ajax anti-patterns, though you’ll find they are equally applicable to Java, .NET, and other runtime environments.
The five issues he lists are:
- Chatty communication - lots of “chatter” back and forth between the server
- Too much XML parsing - libraries to parse XML in the browser are still relatively slow
- Loading everything before displaying something - don’t make the user wait if things are slow. give them something.
- Rendering on the server - make good decisions as to where to render various page content
- Over thinking the design - don’t use the old mentality of just a few releases, update often and in bits
4.5 rating from 36 votes
Ok I haven’t read the article yet.. so at the risk of being flamed..
I would dispute the comment about XML parsing. Dave Johnson did some benchmarking of XSLT versus other parsing techniques (JSON) and found that XML offers incredible performance boosts that you just couldnt achieve any other way. I’m not sure how Ed did his benchmarking, but this is definately not what we have seen. I think this should be examined by others before we reach a conclusion. Here is Dave’s take:
http://blogs.ebusiness-apps.com/dave/?p=45
[...] I caught a post on ajaxian today talking about ajax ‘anti-patterns’, and the term caught my eye. Apparently Ed Burnette has coined the term referring to anti-patterns as things to watch out for while developing your ajax app. Chris Cornutt from ajaxian summed it up with this short list. [...]
Absolutely hilarious to read there issues with IE’s image caching. Be sure to read a comment by Eric van der Meer on why Microsoft thinks this is not a bug.
I just hate companies that through sheer market presence force all developers to work around the bugs in their products.
asd
Good article. I like what he says about showing the page and background loading. I can see how that would help.
Yes, I agree. Live.com kinda of over-did it. Google’s stuff just seems to have enough ajax to not be overdone.
- Bryan
http://www.BryanCFleming.com
“Over thinking the design - don’t use the old mentality of just a few releases, update often and in bits”
Right!
This has ever been my idea and it’s the (il)logical way to think in these times
:)
nice anti-patterns. :)
a question to 1.) “…and batch multiple requests…”
is there any ajax_”framework” out there that can batch multiple requests? (except my one ;) ) ?
tecM0