I was always skeptical about
AJAX. This technology can be useful for Google , Yahoo, or Amazon, and the like . Because regular businesses can not afford it. They can not hire a team of experts to find workaround for dozens of serious problems browsers/JavaScript introduce. Browsers/JavaScript is not an application development environment.
Have you ever been invited to an event, where every person has an assigned seat, and a perfect personalized goody bag is waiting for you on the table? No, I’m not talking about a wedding. This was
Sys-Con’s AJAX seminar in
Manhattan. I’ve been to a couple of other events during the last year. This one was the best so far.
At 7:50AM they gave me 120 sec for the book pitch right before Jesse James Garrett's keynote. (Jesse came up with the AJAX name for technology existed for years).
Ten other speakers were talking about AJAX after Jesse, and there was an evening panel featuring Jesse, David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails) and three other AJAX luminaries.
I was prepared to ask specific technical questions about AJAX problems, but every presenter was talking about lots and lots of issues they were facing while developing AJAX applications anyway. No sales whatsoever. This was the most honest team of presenters ever. After hearing all their testimonies about the plethora of AJAX issues, I decided to ask a generic question, if the panelists believed that AJAX would be around in three years. Most of them answered that it’ll be around in three, but they were not sure about 5 or 7 years from now. Fair enough. I had an impression that all of them enjoyed the technology, understood the issues, and were willing to try to solve them… somehow. I wonder if there are people who are developing Web application in the Assembly language? Just s thought...
The only thing I do not believe in is AJAX frameworks. Any of them is a colossus on clay legs. When a technology has so many issues, what’s the point of hiding them behind the developer-friendly tools?
Having said all this, I respect people who are fighting with AJAX, I wish them all the best, but I’m not joining their legions just yet.
tags: ajax
links: digg this del.icio.us technorati
When the panelists said they are not sure if AJAX will be here in 5-7
years, what will happen to it?
