Thursday, September 7th, 2006
Why Ajax?
Ajax has changed the web. There’s no doubt about that. It’s made the internet a happier place to be (well, when it’s used well) and has helped fuel the Web 2.0 movement to make it what it is today.
But what I’m left wondering is - why?
No, I’m not saying that Ajax is overrated or that it’s not really useful (I wouldn’t be writing for this site if I were). What I’m going for is more of why Ajax is as popular as it is and what it is about the way we use the web that makes it such a perfect fit.
When it first came on the scene, it was a neat toy. Don’t deny it, you tried it out to make something like a auto-completion search box or pulling in content from a server-side text file. You were happy that there was something as cool as this that had the possibility to update content on command. Unfortunately, this is where some stopped. They saw it as this “toy” and dropped it like any other web-based feature, thinking it probably wouldn’t catch on. Good thing they were wrong.
Other developers, ones fascinated by the potential Ajax had, took things even further. They saw what was really at the core of what made Ajax special. They saw that, with Ajax, they could break free. Browsers had limited them to the “request a page and let it load” philosophy for so long they’d thought it was all there was. Jesse James Garrett showed them different - he cracked the door open and showed a sliver of light to these hard-working souls and told them that there was another way.
Javascript was the path to enlightenment, and through it, the ability to make their pages more than what they were. This is what the “Ajax difference” really is - a way to break free of the oppression of the normal page load, a simple path to more advanced functionality, and the one thing that anyone that uses a computer wants at all times - a fast, responsive application that “just works”.
Ajax has changed the face of the web forever. Save for some of the browser enhancements and a few other technologies, I dare to say that it’s had the most significant impact on the way we use the internet in it’s short life (well, the life as Ajax as coined by J.J.G. back in February 18th of 2005).
It allows us to realize our web-based dreams, one XMLHttpRequest at a time.
“..a way to break free of the opression (sic) of the normal page load..”
“It allows us to realize our web-based dreams, one XMLHttpRequest at a time.”
Passionately-written, I’ll say that much. A little sappy perhaps, but overall a nice read.
Now if we can keep web standards, accessibility, speed and performance all up with this newfangled Ajax stuff - *then* we will truly have a revolution! ;)
“Now if we can keep web standards, accessibility, speed and performance all up with this newfangled Ajax stuff - *then* we will truly have a revolution! ;)”
Scott welcome to HIJAX - Progressive Enhancement with Ajax - viva la revolution!
“I dare to say that it’s had the most significant impact on the way we use the internet in it’s short life…”
Rubbish. For designers, maybe; for users, nonsense.
A 6 years old technology has changed the web. Funny. Java Applet should be the next, Web 3.0.
So you want I should go out and push a young virgin man into a volcano in Ajax’s name or something?
Ajax is the biggest over-hyped piece of “sticks-and-stones” technology I’ve ever seen. To believe that we’ve reached the pinacle of web development using JAVASCRIPT, ROFLMAO!!
The whole Javascript+HTML “scripting” stack is a joke for serious application development. You will start to see it crumble under it’s own hype-infested weight over the next 5 years as a new wave of REAL built-from-the-ground up rich client internet technologies come alive.
NCR, You got my intrest, what REAL technologies are coming down the pipe?
NCR is too cool for meee
Java Web Start?
“Java Web Start?”
*PUKE*
I don’t know about all the hype, but Ajax has helped me tremendously in my work. I don’t see it as the end all, but I don’t think people are going to wake up one day and say “Hey, I don’t like webpages that update on demand and do more”. I think ajax will go away eventually, but the concept of dynamically pushing/pulling content on the page never will.
XAML looks promising to me.
Good post Chris.
Scott: I agree with you on the starndards question, and you might be interested in a recent post of mine, Ajax makes browser choice irrelevant…but we still need standards“.
NCR: I think some of what you say is right, but you might be throwing too much out. IMO the next generation of rich clients will only really take off when developers start to get their minds around the new requirements, and Ajax is far and away the best stepping-stone to this we’ve had. In other words it’s not the final answer, as Chris H says, but without it, I believe we’ll never get to where we most probably all would like to go.
If I might illustrate; for a number of years now my company and I have been presenting, demoing, writing, and developing around XForms. We did ‘Amazon search’-style demos years ago that just called web services rather than refreshing the page, but we often got the same response as Chris C. describes for Ajax; that it was a toy that wasn’t applicable to “my corporate site”. (Don’t get me wrong, we got some customers too…luckily.)
But today, the idea of what XForms is trying to do is a whole lot easier to explain to people thanks to the incredible applications that are built with Ajax. I see the mind-set of XForms and Ajax as one and the same, and I agree wholeheartedly with the main post, that this is an incredibly exciting time for software development.
Mark
Mark Birbeck
CEO
x-port
http://www.formsPlayer.com/
What people often don’t realise is that Ajax is a technology (is it really a technology after all or just a way to use existing stuff? *confused*) that helps _improve_ sites, and not something to rely on entirely while developing web services. We see hundreds of “Ajax” and “Web2.0″ Pages today that are just rubbish. The really good ones use it under the hood, to add some nice little features to existing services. It is a hype yes, but we can actually filter out the noise and get some pretty cool enhancements, I for example just love the fact that Ajax is pushing towards making content available as XML-Feeds or JSON, enabling developers to access this data from their application (Semantic Web here we come ^^).
Regards,
just a tutorial writer that got fed up with the noise…
Great post.
But, you know what? You might need a post tool with a spelling checking.
One thing that needs to get some credit is that the browser space is a lot easier to deal with than 5 years ago, when you had NS4, IE4, and IE5 all crawling around. XMLHR has been around since what, 2000, but 5 years back you couldn’t rely on IE and Netscape to render basic HTML the same, let alone the serious Javascript/DHTML stuff AJAX relies on.
Now, why didn’t IE-only AJAX catch on sooner? It wasn’t for lack of exposure-Outlook Webmail probably had an installed base in the millions years before gMail came out. Plenty of engineers and web designers used it every day at work, and wondered, “how’d they do that!?” I know that I just assumed it was some proprietary MS skullduggery and it never occurred to me there was a magical philosopher’s stone object sitting there for me to use. MS didn’t really go out of their way to tell us about it, and lacking an open community to develop chatter in, it sat there neglected. It’s an interesting case study in where their very closed and proprietary culture may have worked against their own goals. Think about the number of IE-only websites that would have been built, the opportunities for MS to layer in all sorts of wacky extensions… Web 2.0 could have all played out very differently. Instead it’s brought back exactly what MS feared in 1996–that a generic browser could someday replace the thick desktop.
This article is pointless … why AJAX?
I have been working with ActiveX objects for more then few years, similar to what “Colin Kingsbury” said, due to lack of documentation and today’s blogs, many people assumed its just IE magic and left it that. Others like “Mark Birbeck” who tried to use it for main stream use, were shot down by uneducated stakeholders.
Now days with many blogs, discussion forms and ability to read about latest craze, same stakeholders who didn’t want a toy … today they want to say “AJAX” in their meetings or blogs. Thus the AJAX hype / craze was born. Believe it or not many CEO’s in companies don’t even understand what AJAX is … they call anything flashy AJAX, where in reality, it has nothing to with it, its just JavaScript.
AJAX hype in new upcoming developers is similar to what happened with frames in early 90’s, when people discovered you can create two small pages and link them together instead of one page, many started using it. After a little while the hyper wore off and developers have cut down on framesets. Then when Netscape six came out, iframes became cross browser and many used iframes just like how AJAX is used today, the difference was that they didn’t call it HIJAX.
I agree with “Robert” and “NCR”, you can’t say a old technology has changed the world, if you do then are nothing more then just glorified front end developer and clearly haven’t done anything besides HTML+JavaScript, and probably have just obtained your “Web Developer” certificate from an online course. I am not knocking down AJAX, I love it and use it often, but enough of the hype already.
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[…] Why Ajax? Chris Cornutt - September 7th, 2006 […]
NCR Said:
The whole Javascript+HTML “scripting” stack is a joke for serious application development. You will start to see it crumble under it’s own hype-infested weight over the next 5 years as a new wave of REAL built-from-the-ground up rich client internet technologies come alive.
Nblade asked:
NCR, You got my intrest, what REAL technologies are coming down the pipe?
I think, XAML/WPF/E is a great client, but from Microsoft/Vista. Flex2 is also a good candidate.
Then, we need good tools and IDE’s that can match Windows/VB++. There are many contenders to fill this gap. For example, one of my friends GUI Classes:
http://www.cbsdf.com/misc_docs/online-apps-rock.htm
He doesn’t think HTML platform can scale well, especially to support custom 2D/3D components.
I have to agree with NSPrasad, JavaScript is not the way this will go on forever, it is however a nice thing that Ajax is pushing the bounds of feasability for Web-Applications and -Services and shows the clients what can be done. It basically is an avantguard for upcoming, web-centric, applications, that may or may not be based on Javascript and related technologies.
ThinkFree is a really nice example to this ^^
AJAX helps bring down the priestocracy of expensive, dedicated systems to stream data. Perfect example is with what Yahoo is now offering in constantly updated quotes.
I agree with the underlying concept that AJAX permits the desire of information to be free to get closer to that level.
I think it is quite clear that it is impossible to separate the movement to rely more on JavaScript from the AJAX movement, and these discussions highlight that. What I believe is a really important revelation in current web development, and that is the true power of JavaScript. It is not just the most widespread language (in every browser), but I believe it is actually more powerful than Java, and a signficantly better platform for major application development. Closures, delegates, object augmentation are all features of the dynamic JavaScript language that a static language like Java can not handle, and as the web development continues to become more and more dynamic, just as static html became outdated, I believe that static languages will start to show their antiquity. I believe this is going to be highlighted as persistence becomes more and more a part of everyday programming, and object lifetimes become non-transient and static object structures become more limiting.
What happened over the last decade was an excessive swings towards thin clients. This was great for deployability, but writing good client/server applications requires understanding what part of the application is best for the client and what is best for the server, the AJAX movement is partly about restoring the art of creating well balanced client/server applications, and the nice thing is that we haven’t lost deployability.
I have to disagree with Kris, JavaScript is all but a stable and reliable base on which to build applications:
- It has major Cross-Browser issues
- It is not really high performance either
- Not to mention memory and caching issues
All these problems are adressed with Java, which may rely on a really wide set of opensource and reliable Libraries that can be easily reused (which speeds up development process) and it smoothes the bumps in the different Browsers so that we can use a uniform platform and we don’t have to care about them ourselfs.
Although I’m a big supporter of the whole Web 2.0 movement, I’m convinced that Ajax is nothing but the first step towards more interactive and reactive applications, maybe Java is the next step, maybe we’ll be stuck in the JavaScript world for a long time…
It’s good to have a matured set of scripts (aka ajax) that give me the option to dump my old sources from 2003 that did (and still do!) the same as Ajax but in a different and now inefficient-looking way (by loading javascriptised data in a hidden iframe for example). Now other ppl do the bugfixing, testing and develop new features on Ajax which saves me time like some many other open-source-coders. The quality of the software increases because of the scale -> more users = faster bug-detection and more coders = faster bug-fixing. Nobody can’t argue that. But it’s not that breathtaking as many might think. Old expert developers have used that xmlhttprequest object for lotsa things ever since it was introduced in Internet Explorer 5.
Furthermore it’s pretty easy to do all kinda things in (Adobe/Macromedia) Flash which don’t require complex javascript-libraries and is cross-platform and is reasonable fast and is reliable as hell and is user-friendly and fully customizable and can even run stand-alone (projector .exe) if you don’t need online data. imho.
Boy, Sawyer sure turned around from the jerk to a seemingly likable guy. And I think him and Kate will be having a baby soon :).
I just launched a (non Ajaxian) site where I enabled caching of the main menu bar, and this it does not reload, and it feels like an Ajax app. If reloading is such a big concern, why not play around with the browser caching stuff?
[…] Why Ajax? Chris Cornutt - September 7th, 2006 […]
Look at zimbra www.zimbra.com, now thats Ajax for you…
In my humble opinion the internet was lacking one thing when compared to the desktop..(a good user experience) develepments like Flash were all steps to try and give the user an experience online similar to that they had when offline. Clicking on pages and waiting for them to load wondering “hmmm is anything happening”might have been ok before broadband ( you just blamed it on your 56k :-) ) but now that users are spending more and more time online…their expectation cant be met with web1.0..when i used google docs the one thing i loved about it was the similarity to word in terms of usability. Ajax can offer this and I hope it continues to develop further. is my small contribution…nice work Ajaxian keep it up.
Its really greate to have a tool like AJAX ,but for the web pages which have the ads changing after every page refresh this tool is futile.If the developer codes that in such a manner only that part of the page gets refreshed /connected to server then,that again uses the traditional approach .
I agree AJAX changed the web. If you don’t agree try this out ;)
Sorry I forgot to say www.soongy.com register here.
Thx,
Gevorg
hmmm… you may have taken things a tad too far in this post. Well, your passion is most certainly commendable, but do you think it really has totally revolutionized things THAT much? To be sure, it has done much – but only to an extent. There is a heck of a lot going on outside of AJAX that you don’t seem to be giving much respect for. And, truth be told, there are even some circles where AJAX is not really that well known and they’re doing some hectically groundbreaking stuff. I, of course, wouldn’t expect any less at a blog such as this one – but some of your statements sounded borderline religious :)
Great read. Although I’ve read about more complicated stories and essays about AJAX yours is by far the simplest yet well thought.
Well, I think it’s a great place since it’s possible to get plenty of useful and fun tips that you haven’t thought about yourself or that you have been searching for but not found before.
Dolores, IT Professional currently working on the hypothyroidism medication project.
Well, I think it’s a great place since it’s possible to get plenty of useful and fun tips that you haven’t thought about yourself or that you have been searching for but not found before.
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