Agile Ajax

Stomping out the Misconceptions

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, May 22, 2006 @ 9:00 am

A reader pointed out this blog entry from Infoworld, Mercury: AJAX has its drawbacks. It's from the middle of April, but it is still worth responding.

"AJAX is incredible where people are starting
to adopt it and it immediately causes a lot of problems because it's
not very structured," said Rajesh Radhakrishnan, vice president of
Application Delivery at Mercury. Several Mercury executives met with
InfoWorld editors at Mercury offices in Mountain View, Calif. on
Tuesday morning.

"We've seen tons and tons of problems," with AJAX, Radhakrishnan
said. In testing for functionality and regression, Mercury has seen an
increased number of regressions in AJAX, said Radhakrishnan.

As a workaround, Radhakrishnan suggests using AJAX for the cutting
edge part of UI development, to enable interactions between the client
and server in which the server is able to respond to client requests
later. "For the rest of it, you don't really use AJAX,""Radhakrishnan
said.

It is precisely using AJAX for the "cutting edge" parts of a UI that causes the problems. Calling an architectural principle like AJAX "not very structured" betrays an ignorance of the topic. It's like calling web service "not very structured" because people are using raw java.net sockets to do everything.

This post is from April of 2006, not 2005 when this sort of comment would have been excusable. Now there are several stable intermediate forms such as DWR that allow for fairly structured development of AJAX solutions on top of existing webapp frameworks. Further, there are already some more advanced forms such as Tibco GI, OpenLaszlo, ZK and Echo2 that allow for development of sophisticated desktop-type apps.

Mercury may be trying to discourage folks from developing AJAX apps until they've had a chance to update their testing software to keep pace. I suggest that they work harder on their next release instead.

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agile ajax Agile Ajax

Comments: 3 so far

  1. The only real problem with Ajax is the inconsistent (or lack of) ways screenreaders handle it.

    At the moment accessibility is a ‘priority’ which means newer (as in old but renamed) technologies like ajax just aren’t an option.

    While you still have to do the old method of get/post it makes the new method redundant.

    Comment by fkr, Monday, May 22, 2006 @ 12:14 pm

  2. Check out this http://www.ajaxdiff.com site which is a new community platform for comparing AJAX frameworks. It is completely open for community contributions allowing adding and updating framework details and indexing related publications. The platform was aired today with initial content and is waiting for you guys to start pumping information to it.

    I will be happy to receive feedbacks. The site is built upon a dedicated framework that will be updated with your ideas.

    Thanks,
    Joe Abrams

    Comment by Joe Abramsy, Thursday, April 5, 2007 @ 4:16 pm

  3. My main concern is that you can’t guarantee every page of your website will be included in the SERPs. Considering I’m constantly adding new products to my company’s website, I need to be sure that customers can find them as soon as possible.http://www.seoptimizerz.com

    Comment by SEO, Monday, July 23, 2007 @ 9:50 am

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