Again on Scalability

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, April 21, 2006 @ 2:32 pm

Since my rant started flowing, I just thought I'd pull this out of the comments section at Ajaxian.com:

Beyond becoming multi-threaded, AJAX is beginning to open up
the web to new types of applications, ones that are document centric
(word processors, modeling tools, etc.) rather than data and
transaction centric, i.e. all those rectangular CRUD applications that
make up 99.9% of webapps. It also means that the sorts and types of
rich client interactions are going to dwarf the traffic that we see
today.

That means 1. abandoning the forms-and-reports way of
writing webapps (which will break when you try to write something like
rational rose as a webapp) and moving to the component GUI model (like
Swing, Winforms, etc.) and 2. being very clever about the frequency and
size of your XHR conversations with the server. From my unscientific
tests (Yahoo mail and Google calendar)
it seems that some are winning and some are losing the battle on fat
XHR. I don’t think any amount of JSON or compressed XML magic will
solve the problem of poor design.

I think the right way to
achieve all of this is by moving AJAX/Webapp development to component
GUI application frameworks. Properly done, they have the potential to
hide all of the messy bits like exposing too much of your business
logic on the client side, optimizing XHR requests for components that
have empty server-side event listeners, reducing the impedence mismatch
between the Javascript/CSS/XHTML world and the business logic.

Those
who don’t move in this direction will be stuck building and maintaining
ever more complex applications because they didn’t make the shift to a
new design. It’s time to think of the browser simply as a display server.

agile ajax

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