VIA Interaction

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

New BuzzAcronym: AJAX

An engineering friend and I used to commiserate with each other about the difficulty of building Web applications. In addition to the obvious browser-level incompatibilities between Netscape Navigator and Mircosoft Internet Explorer, there were nuances and subtleties about the way they implemented CSS and the way their JavaScript interpreters worked that made building a robust, cross-browser application exceedingly difficult - and expensive.

Those nuances and bugs created what for developers is a surprisingly common problem (that most managers probably don't know about): the software simply did not do what the manuals said it could do.

My friend came up with a nice little catch-phrase about that: "JavaScript is not your friend."

The world has changed in the last few years. Netscape Navigator is no more, and the Mozilla organization and even Microsoft have moved to more standards-based browsers.

JavaScript is also more robust. In conjunction with CSS and XML, you can create quite complex user interfaces (under the hood, at least) that make it easier and simpler for the person using the interface.

The combination of those technologies in client-side application development is is known as AJAX - short for Asynchronous JavaScript plus XML. Information Week has an article about it, Fuel For The Web, in its July 4 edition.

The big breakthrough for AJAX is that it enables Web pages to make "behind the scenes" requests for information to supplement what is already available on the client side. In other words, Web applications behave more like traditional GUI applications.

The HTTP protocol that the Web is founded upon is based on a simple request-response model. That's why checking out of an e-commerce store requires seven screens and seven trips back to the server.

Flash and Java were intended to solve this problem, but neither has really taken off. Java suffered the same client-side problems that JavaScript and CSS did. Flash has earned a place in the designer's tool kit, but not in the interface developer's toolkit - at least not yet. And in my opinion, the development environment for Flash is one of the most confusing and difficult to master that I have worked with in 10 years of dabbling in software development.

As the Information Week article points out (mostly in criticisms from the Java and Flash folks), there are still myriad challenges posed by AJAX when it comes to cross-browser implementations.

But the developer base should be larger (just try and find a Flash designer who can also master programming), and the end result is likely to work better on a wider variety of platforms than Flash or Java now provide. Despite Flash's claims of ubiquity, we have never implemented a Flash-centric site that did not suffer from incompatibility problems.

AJAX is worth following closely.

posted by Tim Beidel at 7/06/2005 11:46:00 AM

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