Wednesday, February 15th, 2006
Two kinds of AJAX: HTML++ vs Client / SOA
Category: Ajax, Programming
On the SitePoint PHP Blog, Harry Fuecks discusses what he sees as the two types of Ajax applications out there – “HTML++” and the standard “Client/SOA” model.
Think this needs stating clearly, following the comment from Bill Edney on of technicalpursuit (Tibet), and because I think it reflects experiences people are having with AJAX.
In short think there’s going to be two kinds of AJAX application, one I’ll dub “HTML++â€? and the other being the Client / SOA Bill mentions. To describe them roughly…
The “HTML++” types of applications are those that still use the normal HTML/backend techniques for most of their functionality, but only see Ajax as a method of adding user interaction enhancements (i.e. HTML form enhancements). He briefly mentions one of the more popular PHP PEAR pakcages that follows this method, HTML_AJAX.
The other side of things, the “Client/SOA” approach is seen on sites where a reload is very rare and a large part of the functionality is performed with the help of Ajax and associated technologies. There are few out there that really rely heavily on this type of development yet (Ajax desktops?), but the next year will be telling as to which way this type of development goes…
GenInterface nailed this several years ago but got scooped up by Tibco. I think their stuff now resides here:
http://www.tibco.com/software/business_optimization/gi_resource_center.jsp
They enable very robust browser-based, single window interfaces. And they were able to pull down large blocks of data for local manipulation like sorting and filtering.
If you need to pull data/xml from another domain, do it serverside and then feed it to the page using Ajax, for crying out loud..
I don’t want to do it server side. That’s the point. For crying out loud.
[…] The other day, we linked to Harry Fuecks’ distinction between HTML++ (regular web app with a bit of Ajax thrown in) and Client/SOA (full-blown rich Ajax app). As I’d been discussing a similar idea (Ajax-Lite versus Ajax-Deluxe), I posted a followup. […]
[…] The service is ideal for Client-SOA apps, where the browser runs the entire UI and makes REST or RPC calls to the server, which responds with raw data. The app itself could presumably load from another URL, your local hard drive, a bookmarklet, or a plugin/extension/GM script (with varying levels of security risk involved). […]
[…] This is one approach to combining AJAX-based applications with a service oriented architecture. It implies web service invocations from a browser and has gotten quite a bit of coverage, including a mention on Ajaxian.com […]