The Current State and Progress of AJAX

 
Aug 13, 2005

by Judith Dinowitz

Dion Hinchcliffe's blog entry about AJAX is engrossing, and I would say it's a must-read for anyone interested in the technology. He succinctly describes what AJAX is, points to important links on the subject, and provides a great diagram of an AJAX application in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. He points to the way AJAX frameworks have proliferated. (Both Tibco and Microsoft are developing commercial AJAX frameworks, and several open-source options have come on the scene.)

What makes this article great food for thought is Dion's discussion of AJAX's importance. He does not just see AJAX as a technique for building web pages that offers a more compelling user experience than traditional HTML web pages. He says that AJAX has gotten so much attention because it is "a sincerely compelling synthesis of the ubiquitous features found in the most popular Internet browsers ... Practitioners of Ajax get high-intensity user interaction (end-user productivity), asynchronicity (efficient background processing), web browser access to web services (web service access, reuse, and interoperability, as well as SOA integration), platform neutrality (browser and operating system agnosticity), and the Ajax feature set can be delivered as a framework you don't have to create yourself (developer productivity)." (Dion Hinchcliffe, Blog Entry, August 18, 2005) When you take all of these advantages together, Dion says, you get something that has the potential to completely revolutionize application development.

Dion does point out some of the problems of using AJAX currently, such as the need for rigorous testing. As support for some of these technologies (JavaScript, DHTML, DOM (Document Object Model), and XMLHTTPRequest) all vary slightly between browsers, the AJAX developer has to test his application heavily to account for the differences.

The advantages that Dion ascribes to AJAX are not limited to AJAX, but AJAX gets the bulk of the credit for them simply because it's become a new buzzword. For example, Dion says that AJAX creates a more compelling user experience because "1) it doesn't reload the web page, and 2) it runs asynchronously allowing background server-side requests for information to be issued, all while the users clicks, types, and otherwise interacts with the application in the foreground." Well, Flash can do the same thing. So can ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise, using asynchronous processing (and Doug Hughes recently showed us how to do the same thing with CFMX 7 Professional using ColdFusion's underlying Java classes.) AJAX is a great technology to learn, and another tool to add to your own resume, but it's one of many that are following the call to build better user interfaces that have less trips back and forth to the server, or at least less perceivable trips.

So though I don't believe that AJAX is as crucial to application development as Dion states, I would highly recommend reading his article, and learning more about AJAX so you can add it to your own developer's toolkit.

State of AJAX: Progress, Challenges and Implications for SOA (Dion Hinchcliffe's blog, August 18, 2005)

(Thank you to Jared Rypka-Hauer for explaining the concept of Service-Oriented Architecture.)

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