Pathfinder Development » Ajax Turkeys for 2007

Ajax Turkeys for 2007

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 5:32 am

Every American school child has heard vague rumors that Ben Franklin once suggested that the Turkey would make a better national symbol than the Bald Eagle. What they haven't heard, of course, is that the Turkey is "though a little vain and silly, a Bird of Courage," compared to the Bald Eagle which was "a Bird of bad moral Character." I wouldn't put too much stock in old Ben's suggestions, though. After all, he once proposed that the Rattlesnake was the most appropriate symbol of America's temper and conduct.

So in the end it is still appropriate to use the Turkey as a symbol of failure or incompetence. So, without further ado, my Ajax Turkeys for 2007:

GMail 2.0 - this puppy should be put back in the shed. It fries browsers from coast to coast. If there was ever and argument against the bloated Ajax beast, this is it.
ECMAScript 4 - the bastard child of JavaScript, Java and Ruby, this beast tries to please everyone and instead falls between the chairs. If you want the advantages of both dynamically and statically-typed programming languages, make sure the browser can run more than one language (VM and compilers, anyone?).
Thinwire - any framework that makes you specify position and calculate height and width of every widget is a productivity killer. Update: I was wrong on ThinWire. The Layout Managers simplify this. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
The Book of JavaScript, Second Edition - I didn't have the heart to review this one when it came out. Thau was "the man" back in the 90's when it came to JavaScript. If you wanted to validate a form or set a radio button, Thau's tutorial's were your first stop when it came to learning the ropes. Well, it's 2007, and if you want to learn how to validate a form or set a radio button, you've come to the right place. As far as OO JavaScript, DHTML and XHR? Sorry. The state of the art has passed him by.
GWT wrappers for Rialto - if you and your widgets are going to jump on a bandwagon, make sure you get it right. These widget wrappers didn't subclass Widget. Please fix.
Vista - nuff said. (OK, IE7 and Vista.)
Framework fanatics - don't get me wrong, I love the frameworks, but the JQuery and Mootools fans can really get on your nerves. They remind me of Ron Paul supporters (also known as "Paulbots") -- someone mentions Ron Paul and immediately the post gets 500 "Ron Paul is great" comments.

Well, that wasn't so bad. I'm sure everyone has their favorites or may in fact disagree with some of my gobblers. Who made your Turkey list?

Technorati Tags: ajax, editorial

Topics: Editorial

agile ajax

Comments: 18 so far

Ron Paul is great. Sorry, you were asking for that

Comment by jDave, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 6:55 am
Hooraay for Mootools!.. ^_^

Seriously though, have you tried GMail 2.0 on the new Safari 3 Beta?.. It’s like the killer combo!..

Comment by Keeto, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 9:55 am
I think a Rattlesnake is actually quite an appropriate symbol of America’s temper and conduct, especially in the Middle East.

Comment by digitalspaghetti, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 11:11 am
Ron Paul is great! So’s JQuery and Mootools!

Comment by Sean, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 11:47 am
You don’t have ASP.NET on there? Come on

Comment by Charles, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 11:58 am
-= Mootools is G*R*E*A*T =-

(can we get it up to 500 before turkey day is over!?!)

Comment by Marat Denenberg, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 12:04 pm
Gmail 2.0 was a rollout for later changes to come and I’ve yet to experience this Ajax beast some folks speak of. Has anyone actually done any profiling to prove these statements?

Comment by Dustin Diaz, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 1:34 pm
M O O T O O L S !

better than lots of porn.

Comment by Ray, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 1:53 pm
RON PAUL IS GR… WAIT! I MEAN MOOTOOLS ROCKS!

Comment by Tyler, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 2:46 pm
M O O T O O L S !
still better than porn (lots of)!

Comment by Ray, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 3:14 pm
Happy turkey day Americans, seriously though JavaScript 2. Or is that getting fattened for next years roasting?

Comment by HeavyWeightGeek, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 4:24 pm
Yeah, ThinWire is such a productivity killer. I mean, sure it allows the developer to only work with one technology and in one language, and it completely manages the communication, and state maintenance is retardedly simple, it has a rich set of widgets, but dear God it uses absolute position, therefore it is completely unusable. Yes, that is a very logical and well stated position.

Comment by Ted Howard, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 10:44 pm
I mean seriously? You’re putting our little framework in the same category as ECMAScript 4 and Vista? I mean, I’m somewhat flattered and yet not sure what to think. In any case, please read up on the framework’s you bash in the future. We strongly encourage developers to use one of our layout managers (TableLayout or SplitLayout). Our use of absolute positioning is no different then how Visual Basic, Delphi, Swing and other RAD environments use absolute positioning. It’s just a dependable foundation on top of which many sophisticated layout systems can be built.

Comment by Joshua Gertzen, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 11:00 pm
ThinWire a productivity killer - I ported a Java Swing application to ThinWire in 6 months that contained 25k lines of source code and never once used absolute positioning. I guess I missed the chapter that says I needed to calculate height and width of every widget when I selected this framework.

Comment by j-w-f, Friday, November 23, 2007 @ 9:48 am
I’ve been using GMail 2.0 since the day it was announced, and it’s run fantastic for me.

I use it on Windows XP (Firefox 2.0.0.9) and in Ubuntu (Firefox 2.0.0.8 & Firefox 3.0b2), and it’s been a significantly speedier experience for me.

Comment by Sohail Mirza, Friday, November 23, 2007 @ 12:11 pm
ThinWire is a fantastic framework, you’ve totally missed the point! With Thinwire we have managed to build a complex browser ui using just Java - no coding of jsps, css, javascript, html, struts, et al (the productivity killers). It would have taken longer (albeit very difficult) to build the same app using just html.

It took 2 developers just 2 weeks to build the entire gui… i estimate it would have taken at least twice that using struts/tiles. And with Thinwire we end up with a windows like application interface - perfect for business applications.

I can’t believe you would label Thinwire a Turkey. You really should do a little more research before being so publically judgmental.

Comment by owen, Thursday, November 29, 2007 @ 5:43 am
Thinwire does not need to absolute position for the widgets! We built our app by specifing little to none x y co-ords. You use TableLayout’s, like a web page:

cell, cell, row, row - in that cell i want a label, in the next cell i want a textfield……

Comment by owen, Thursday, November 29, 2007 @ 5:49 am
Are you out of your mind???
There’s not a single web framework out there that comes close to the ease of use of ThinWire. It took me less than an hour to setup ThinWire in eclipse and get a webapp into tomcat. A similar webapp (just a little more than a hello world, with rpc) with GWT had me going through programming conventions and hoops I wouldn’t foster on my enemy.

My only concern is that ThinWire might go the way of Betamax - great technology - not enough marketing.

I guess any press is good press - so “thanks” for the negative and completely inaccurate review of ThinWire.

And by the way - we use ThinWire in a production application that was originally a swing application - the entire app took us 3 staff months to migrate to the web. Were it not for ThinWire, it would have taken over 8 staff months to do the same with any of the other frameworks we had evaluated - struts, tapestry, gwt are some on that list.

ThinWire definitely could be improved and enhanced (comet support, EXT support, reduce chattiness over lower bandwidth, etc.)

Kudos to a well thought out framework.

Comment by zmang, Thursday, December 6, 2007 @ 9:56 am