Comments on: Rails Ajaxians hit out at Microsoft Atlas

By: GHJ

GHJ — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 16:41:48 +0000

I agree with Sam in the fact that many MS programmers seem to be completely unaware of how JavaScript can be leveraged to give the client a better experience.

In my experience, the problem with most 3rd party OR MS components is that rather than embedding their JS in an external script file so it gets cached locally they insist on rendering the script inline on the page, which is both messy and performs worse. In addition, most of their web components I’ve seen appear to generate 3 times more HTML than is actually required.

Prototype.js et al in my opinion are good tools for people who know little about JS scripting, but for those of us that do, we can normally come up with a shared library in a file about 1/100 of the size!

By: Drew Marsh

Drew Marsh — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

RE: CSS Styling

Maybe the drop down demo implementation didn’t have CSS styling, but Atlas is definitely 100% capable of using CSS styling, so no worries there.

RE: $()

It’s not like they were claiming they invented it. In fact, anyone in the sessions could tell you, they barely even talked about the core JavaScript APIs at all. In fact, I only saw $() in one piece of code and was kinda baffled that in most of the samples they were still using the explicit document.getElementById. Mostly they were just showing how to leverage the type system they’ve put together as well as the XML scripting language.

By: M. Schopman

M. Schopman — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The comments from the prototype and scriptlicious crowd reflect amateurism and a lack of deeper knowledge. But what would you expect from a mostly non Microsoft set of people, who again have the privilege to open up a can of childish Microsoft bashing.

I wonder who is amazed with scriptlicious. Not only is the code awfull and slow, not to mention this stuff is so old. These types of effects were abandoned to DynamicDrive for those with strong affection.

By: Michael Appelmans

Michael Appelmans — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

That’s pretty harsh given these “mostly non Microsoft set of people” pioneered and released open source functionality to make our lives a little bit better, a little bit easier, for free, while Microsoft, late as usual, attempts yet another buggy, proprietary and ultimately commercial solution. You can “nice job Brownie” MS to your hearts content but the fact is we reboot MS products on a regular basis and know better.

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Drew, I have serious doubts you’ve ever even looked at prototype.js or the script.aculo.us libraries. Slow and “awful code” are not exactly labels I’ve ever seen applied before. In fact, I seriously doubt there are very many programmers working with MS products (including myself) who really have a deep enough understanding of javascript as a prototype based language (not referencing the library of the same name) to even come close to their work.

I’ve certainly never seen it anyways.

I would be _very_ curious to see what you might consider “good”.