Comments on: Why Ajax?

By: portrait artist

portrait artist — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 06:30:17 +0000

Great read. Although Iâ€™ve read about more complicated stories and essays about AJAX yours is by far the simplest yet well thought.

By: online shopping

online shopping — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:37:29 +0000

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 â€“ 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 â€“ but some of your statements sounded borderline religious :)

By: Gevorg

Gevorg — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:30:25 +0000

Sorry I forgot to say http://www.soongy.com register here.

Thx,
Gevorg

By: Gevorg

Gevorg — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:29:04 +0000

I agree AJAX changed the web. If you don’t agree try this out ;)

By: Aashee

Aashee — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:14:35 +0000

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 .

By: westereng

westereng — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:02:12 +0000

Look at zimbra http://www.zimbra.com, now thats Ajax for you…

By: Niederrhein Blog » Ajax Tutorials und Ajax Scripte - Links und Bookmarks

Niederrhein Blog » Ajax Tutorials und Ajax Scripte - Links und Bookmarks — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 15:45:47 +0000

[...] Why Ajax? Chris Cornutt – September 7th, 2006 [...]

By: Giorgio

Giorgio — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 02:32:46 +0000

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?

By: mr skin

mr skin — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 16:37:02 +0000

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 :).

By: Walter Tak

Walter Tak — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 23:30:58 +0000

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.

By: Christian 'Snyke' Decker

Christian 'Snyke' Decker — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 20:52:52 +0000

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…

By: Kris Zyp

Kris Zyp — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 23:13:16 +0000

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.

By: Flux Amm

Flux Amm — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:41:51 +0000

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.

By: Christian 'Snyke' Decker

Christian 'Snyke' Decker — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 16:17:31 +0000

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 ^^

By: NSPrasad

NSPrasad — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 07:33:12 +0000

NCR Said:
The whole Javascript+HTML â€œscriptingâ€ stack is a joke for serious application development. You will start to see it crumble under itâ€™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 IDEâ€™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 doesnâ€™t think HTML platform can scale well, especially to support custom 2D/3D components.

By: » Ajax Quellensammlung - Dr. Web Weblog

» Ajax Quellensammlung - Dr. Web Weblog — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 15:02:15 +0000

[...] Why Ajax? Chris Cornutt – September 7th, 2006 [...]

By: links for 2006-09-09 » Vinny Lingham’s Blog

links for 2006-09-09 » Vinny Lingham’s Blog — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 02:22:38 +0000

[...] Ajaxian Â» Why Ajax? AJAX (tags: AJAX) [...]

By: Tahir

Tahir — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 22:15:19 +0000

This article is pointless â€¦ 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 â€¦ 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 donâ€™t even understand what AJAX is â€¦ 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.

By: Colin Kingsbury

Colin Kingsbury — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 02:36:39 +0000

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.

By: gneheix

gneheix — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 01:30:59 +0000

Great post.

But, you know what? You might need a post tool with a spelling checking.