Comments on: Ajaxium 2.0: ASP.NET Ajax Container

By: Ramik Apasan

Ramik Apasan — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 00:59:19 +0000

I’ve tried free components like Atlas and a lot of callback panels from different vendors. Finally I paid $349 for this tool.
.
I just want to say that it saved me from many hours of coding/reading forums for tricks and workarounds.

By: John

John — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 12:34:30 +0000

B, you’re missing something, $2999 is the mass-distribution price. With that license you can sell the library as a part of your own _branded_product_ meant for _mass_distribution_. Most of vendors in same situation take some %% from each copy sold, some vendors have just fixed special price. We’re working with different vendors – telerik, infragistics, c1, and mass distribution price for all of them is not equal to the per-developer price.

As I wrote yesterday — we’re using this library, and you can turn hyperlinks navigation off, believe me. And it is good idea to turn it off if you’re developing just another blog or portal. In this case you will have a bunch of AJAX-ed pages, each like an empowered UpdatePanel. So it’s a question of flexibility, not the question of library-specific limitations. With Atlas’ UpdatePanel – there is nothing to turn off, but nothing to turn on as well. UpdatePanel is cool for simple samples and demos, but as soon as you start using it in real projects – you start wasting your time on tricky separation of the UI among dynamically loaded controls. Following changing customers’ requirements your web designers will start placing something outside of UpdatePanels producing bugs – finally – wasting money.

By: B

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 04:32:08 +0000

John: navigation should be done with *links* (it’s *navigation*). This way, it can be in the browser history, it can be bookmarked and refresh and back work as expected, without crazy hacks.
Plus, ASP.NET did that years ago too, it was called SmartNavigation… Not a good idea, now deprecated.
UpdatePanel degrades to ordinary postbacks on browsers that don’t support it.
If an update fails because of a timeout or server error, you can handler the error yourself and/or display the server error message.
Here’s the page with the $3K price, but you can keep your dollar:
http://www.ajaxium.com/buy-ajax-solution.aspx
It says redistributable: $2999 and (brace yourself) “unbeatable price”.
By the way, to get the url for this page, I had to right click and copy shortcut from the link on the home page instead of just copying it from the address bar because of this stupid AJAX navigation idea. Navigation should be done with LINKS, this is proof enough.
If you want to pay that price for an inferior solution, fine, it’s your money.

By: John

John — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 17:15:45 +0000

Well, you have’t used it, right? :)
We’re using this library about a year. Atlas, with UpdatePanel, still does nothing comparable. How you can navigate from one ASPX to another with Atlas? What about old browsers? What will you do if UpdatePanel will fail to display update? That’s notification message can be disabled or replaced with your custom actions, and more, and more…

P.S. If someone will show me the page with $3K bucks price — I’ll give him/her a dollar :)

By: Marc

Marc — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 23:07:39 +0000

On their main page I keep getting “Request timed out. AJAX disabled for this page.” when trying to go to any page.

Sure, I’ll pay $2999 so my users can see an error too.

By: Alan Le

Alan Le — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:29:07 +0000

$3000 for UpdatePanel functionality??

Ajaxian has a post today about Ajaxium, “an ASP.NET Ajax container to ajax-enable your existing ASP.NET…

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:09:46 +0000

what the heck just happened. I dont think the 5 minutes count if you just increase the speed of the video….

By: B

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:10:29 +0000

Well, $3000 for an Atlas UpdatePanel (which is free as in beer) that forces all your pages to inherit from their base class is /a little/ overpriced.

By: Gonzalo

Gonzalo — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 17:58:07 +0000

The Real-Time Demo… after a dozen cups of coffee.

By: Scott Schiller

Scott Schiller — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 17:05:09 +0000

Sounds like an item in the table of elements!

“.. and here we have Ajaxium, which is a rather unstable entry alongside Lithium..” ;) (Sorry, early Monday AM humour.)

By: jft

jft — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:11:05 +0000

How is this any different/better than Atlas?

By: naterkane

naterkane — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:06:52 +0000

in their forward text do they actually use the word “ajax” as a verb?
does that make ajax the new google?

“hey man, i’m totally going to ajax this site up”

By: Nicolas BUI

Nicolas BUI — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:29:12 +0000

Well … the man behind the demo is quite as fast as the 3 Millions dollars man …