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Web2.0: JavaScript Cousins to AJAX Appear
With so many new technology announcements being made over the past few month, it’s really an exciting time for web developers . After a few years of dominance by the fragile and cryptic JavaScript-based AJAX, next-generation RIA frameworks like Adobes Apollo, Sun Microsystems JavaFX, and Microsofts SilverLight seem to be popping up now on a regular basis.
AJAX is now being challenged even on its own turf by newer JavaScript contenders. Google Gears, for example, while not a head-on competitor to AJAX, provides a new paradigm for creating off-line browser-based applications, allowing the developer the ability to cache and serve up application resources locally — and it is Javascript based.
Another example is Sun Microsystem’s Project Flare which is directly positioned as an AJAX alternative. Project Flare is an Open Source research project that is scheduled to be released later this year. Dan Ingalls, chief investigator on the project describes it as “a self-supporting Web programming kernel that’s all written in JavaScript”.
While it’s not easy to find many details about the project since it is still in development, it should be noted that the project is separate and parallel to Sun’s JavaFX product.
But what’s different about Project Flare compared to AJAX? It’s not dependent on what Ingalls refers to as “junky” technology, like HTML, the Document Object Model (DOM), and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
While not yet available, it is hard to judge, but some have criticized the Project Flare approach. Dropping the ability to use XHTML and CSS in effect means Project Flare is recreating the basic web framework. Trying to replicate and surpass the flexibility and capabilities of HTML and CSS will be difficult.
Forrester comments that the criticism isn’t fair because the target of Project Flair is a more limited set of developers that are now struggling with some aspects of AJAX. And when viewed from a different level, all the new RIA frameworks are attempting to move onto successor technologies to HTML.
