Ajax hype
Ajax is getting hyped to the point where it isn’t healthy anymore. On the squeak-dev mailing list, Brad Fuller asks about Seaside, Ruby and Ajax. My response:
“Seaside includes Ajax-y things - you can do asynchronous processing without writing a single line of Javascript.
(In fact, I used ‘Ajax’ in a VAST WebConnect project, and I’m quite sure that the IBM guys never considered that possibility. Ajax, stripped to the core, is dead simple)
Ajax is the most overhyped thing at the moment. My predictions for it are, therefore, dire. I will bet it will go the way of XML - simple and interesting at first, then the “Enterprise” folk run away with it and within 2 years we have W3C AJAX standards that span 1000 pages. Wanna bet?
In the meantime, XMLHttpRequest is a nice feature. It can really help to make web applications more usable. Use it in any environment (want to see “CGI Ajax support”? Takes a whopping 1 minutes probably to implement it).
Ruby or Smalltalk? I’m a productivity whore and relatively immune to hypes. So I prefer Smalltalk. YMMV.”
To continue the ramble: it is a tool. A means, not an end. A badly named tool, at that. AJ is a necessity (Asynchronous Javascript describing the XMLHttpRequest object that enables all this power), the X is not - in my uses of the XMLHttpRequest object, I have chosen to return a simple comma or slash-separated line. No XML involved. So, not even a tool - just a trick.
Remember when the trick of the day was making website funkier using Java applets?
Please don’t repeat that with Ajax. Thank you.
Stumble it!
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January 17th, 2006 at 12:42 am
“In fact, I used ‘Ajax’ in a VAST WebConnect project, and I’m quite sure that the IBM guys never considered that possibility.”
I’m one of the “original” VAST WebConnect “guys”. Actually, half of the development team was female. You sexist!
It’s been 10 years since I’ve worked on it or used it.
I think it’s a little unfair to say that we never considered that possibility. IIRC, we did play around with JS a bit, but it was very crude back then. I don’t think there was anything close to being able to do XmlHttpRequest back then. I mean, frames were freaking new!
I was clearly thinking about REST though (the ’server’ side of AJAX, and clearly the more interesting side of it for WebConnect), as you can see from some of my wanderings here:
http://c2.com/doc/web96-pat/pat.htm
(follow the image link of a hand pointing right)
Notes from folks on the panel are here. Funny looking back 10 years. IIRC, Ward did his presentation by writing on slides on an overhead projector, making it difficult to keep around for posterity (did we even have scanners back then?)
http://c2.com/doc/web96.html
Curiously, I think I generated that HTML for the presentation with a hacked Smalltalk compiler where the presentation itself was a class, and each method was the HTML of the slide body. ahh … the good old days of hacking the IDE and compiler
January 17th, 2006 at 10:57 am
I deeply and humbly apologize. To my defense I can only say that “guys” is often used in a gender-neutral sense…
Anyway, that the WebConnect team never considered the possibility was not meant as a criticism of WebConnect (I have my opinions on WebConnect, but that’s maybe for another post), merely as an indicator that there’s nothing special about AJAX support (either client- or server side), and that any decent environment will allow extensions in this direction.
REST is not necessarily the server side of AJAX - Seaside is decidedly unRESTful and works just fine. But in any case, thanks for the links, I’ll sure read them.
January 18th, 2006 at 2:04 am
No harm. I couldn’t resist posting *something* since you mentioned “those WebConnect guys”.
I have and had my own opinions of WebConnect, btw. I’ve actually never been much of a fan of visual programming, so I’m betting I made sure it was somewhat usable without the visual goop.
January 18th, 2006 at 8:43 am
Yup. The most maintainable forms I have in this little app are those that don’t have any visual “goop” on them. A blank form, everything handled in good old honest Smalltalk code. At the moment, it’s only some simple stuff, but for the next project I’ll have to have an alternative for that visual stuff…
(Michael Lucas-Smith has something that could provide just that - he did a re-implementation of a nice web environment he did in a previous job and it looks promising. Or I’ll buy a VW license for the customer and work with Seaside
).