{"id":10,"date":"2006-02-17T10:38:48","date_gmt":"2006-02-17T18:38:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=10"},"modified":"2006-02-17T10:38:48","modified_gmt":"2006-02-17T18:38:48","slug":"ajax-a-one-year-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/ajax-a-one-year-anniversary\/","title":{"rendered":"AJAX — a one year anniversary"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary since Jesse James Garrett<\/a> at Adaptive Paths<\/a> first coined<\/a> the term AJAX<\/a> (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).\u00a0 It was a term he created to describe some of the high-profile highly-interactive Javascript browser applications, like Google<\/a>‘s Gmail<\/a>, Suggest<\/a>, and Maps<\/a>, and Yahoo<\/a>‘s Flickr<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There’s been an incredible amount of activity<\/a> and hype in the one year following the introduction of the term AJAX.\u00a0 But AJAX is really just a term for technology that had been around for some time.\u00a0 Microsoft led the development of the technology behind AJAX with it’s introduction of Outlook Web Access<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One year later, after looking over\u00a0a list <\/a>of companies using AJAX and ‘Web 2.0’<\/a> technology, it’s a little disappointing to see\u00a0that Wikipedia, Flickr, del.icio.us, and Gmail are still leading the list and\u00a0the rest of the sites are much smaller\u00a0and don’t command much name recognition.\u00a0 I think the bottom line is that there’s been a lot of talk, but AJAX development hasn’t gone mainstream yet.\u00a0 One reason has been that AJAX<\/a> has not at all been easy to use — Javascript and the underlying document DOM models\u00a0are very quirky, inconsistent, and difficult to debug because of a lack of good tools.<\/p>\n

That may be changing.\u00a0 This week eWeek has an article<\/a> about the AJAX craze.\u00a0 New developer tools are popping up everywhere.<\/p>\n

IBM is leading a group of companies that are collaborating on a new initiative called Open AJAX<\/a>.\u00a0 The supporters include BEA Systems, Dojo Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Google, Mozilla, Oracle, and others.\u00a0 Absent from this list is Microsoft.\u00a0 That’s probably because Microsoft is working on its own AJAX toolkit for .Net called Atlas<\/a>.\u00a0 And that’s not to say that Open AJAX members have all signed up to speak with one consistent voice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yahoo<\/a> announces its User Interface Library Controls<\/a>. It includes Design Patterns and Higher-level DOM and Event managers.\u00a0 It looks very interesting.<\/p>\n

Tibco<\/a> has announced the Tibco General Interface<\/a> AJAX toolkit is now free.\u00a0 Oracle’s<\/a> JDeveloper 10g IDE comes now with AJAX enhancements<\/a>.\u00a0 There’s also the Zapatec AJAX Suite<\/a>.\u00a0 And Sun<\/a> has had AJAX technology in its Studio Creator<\/a> product for some time.
\nOne might suspect that these kinds of initiatives will put stress on browsers to evolve by introducing new features, further pushing the browser envelope.\u00a0\u00a0That’s probably a good thing.\u00a0 But with two or more\u00a0competing camps, this is likely to lead to even more browser incompatibilities.\u00a0 Another chapter to the browser wars may be starting.<\/p>\n

Why I bring up AJAX and Web 2.0\u00a0is that at Formtek<\/a> we are looking to see how to best bridge the gap between our client-server and web technology applications.\u00a0 Are the new AJAX tools relevent for our development, and could some of this newer technology make the browser more feature-rich and responsive.\u00a0 I think the answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’.\u00a0 There’s a lot that AJAX brings to the developer, but there are still limitations\u00a0imposed by\u00a0the browser environment where it runs.<\/p>\n

Moving a client-server application to a thin-client browser-based paradigm has had its challenges.\u00a0 Managing information stored as document and records involves intensive interaction and collaboration that is file-based.\u00a0 The standard browser has\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This is especially true when we’re talking about a large number of files.\u00a0 Despite all the usability issues being addressed with AJAX, file handling restrictions still apply — Applets or ActiveX workarounds\u00a0appear to be currently the only options.<\/p>\n

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Tomorrow is the one year anniversary since Jesse James Garrett at Adaptive Paths first coined the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).\u00a0 It was a term he created to describe some of the high-profile highly-interactive Javascript browser applications, like Google‘s…<\/span><\/p>\n

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