AJAX — a one year anniversary

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary since Jesse James Garrett at Adaptive Paths first coined the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).  It was a term he created to describe some of the high-profile highly-interactive Javascript browser applications, like Google‘s Gmail, Suggest, and Maps, and Yahoo‘s Flickr. 

There’s been an incredible amount of activity and hype in the one year following the introduction of the term AJAX.  But AJAX is really just a term for technology that had been around for some time.  Microsoft led the development of the technology behind AJAX with it’s introduction of Outlook Web Access.

One year later, after looking over a list of companies using AJAX and ‘Web 2.0’ technology, it’s a little disappointing to see that Wikipedia, Flickr, del.icio.us, and Gmail are still leading the list and the rest of the sites are much smaller and don’t command much name recognition.  I think the bottom line is that there’s been a lot of talk, but AJAX development hasn’t gone mainstream yet.  One reason has been that AJAX has not at all been easy to use — Javascript and the underlying document DOM models are very quirky, inconsistent, and difficult to debug because of a lack of good tools.

That may be changing.  This week eWeek has an article about the AJAX craze.  New developer tools are popping up everywhere.

IBM is leading a group of companies that are collaborating on a new initiative called Open AJAX.  The supporters include BEA Systems, Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Google, Mozilla, Oracle, and others.  Absent from this list is Microsoft.  That’s probably because Microsoft is working on its own AJAX toolkit for .Net called Atlas.  And that’s not to say that Open AJAX members have all signed up to speak with one consistent voice. 

Yahoo announces its User Interface Library Controls. It includes Design Patterns and Higher-level DOM and Event managers.  It looks very interesting.

Tibco has announced the Tibco General Interface AJAX toolkit is now free.  Oracle’s JDeveloper 10g IDE comes now with AJAX enhancements.  There’s also the Zapatec AJAX Suite.  And Sun has had AJAX technology in its Studio Creator product for some time.
One might suspect that these kinds of initiatives will put stress on browsers to evolve by introducing new features, further pushing the browser envelope.  That’s probably a good thing.  But with two or more competing camps, this is likely to lead to even more browser incompatibilities.  Another chapter to the browser wars may be starting.

Why I bring up AJAX and Web 2.0 is that at Formtek we are looking to see how to best bridge the gap between our client-server and web technology applications.  Are the new AJAX tools relevent for our development, and could some of this newer technology make the browser more feature-rich and responsive.  I think the answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’.  There’s a lot that AJAX brings to the developer, but there are still limitations imposed by the browser environment where it runs.

Moving a client-server application to a thin-client browser-based paradigm has had its challenges.  Managing information stored as document and records involves intensive interaction and collaboration that is file-based.  The standard browser has  limitations involved with the upload and download of files that can prove to be very frustrating in creating apps that are as interactive and productive for users as the client-server versions of the apps.  This is especially true when we’re talking about a large number of files.  Despite all the usability issues being addressed with AJAX, file handling restrictions still apply — Applets or ActiveX workarounds appear to be currently the only options.