October 10th, 2005
UIConf: Ajax Everywhere
by Joshua Porter | 
4 Comments
I’m sitting in Hagan River’s session on web applications and something is explicitly clear: developers all over are using Ajax. Last week when I was at Web2Con everyone was using Ajax there, but that was expected because it was all about brand-new, first-time apps.
At UI10, the attendees aren’t working on start-ups. Most are working in entrenched applications for universities, Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and other places that don’t need to be cutting edge. They just need stuff to solidly work. Usable applications are a must.
That’s why I’m surprised that so many people are talking about and using Ajax. In most cases when a new technology comes along, it takes years to get into the mainstream applications. Ajax, it seems, doesn’t fit that model.
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Comments ( 4 Responses so far )
1. Andrew on October 10th, 2005 (Comment) #
One reason might be that although the UE aspects are (arguably) tricky to integrate nicely into applications, Ajax is technically pretty simple. It’s much easier for developers to say yes to an idea when it doesn’t really involve much new to learn or new conditions to worry about. Grab one of the several good Ajax javascript libraries, make some very minor changes to the way pages are generated, and you’re good to go.
2. Andrew Bidochko on October 10th, 2005 (Comment) #
Completely agree with Andrew. AJAX is just a mix of already known things - this is great.
From other point of view any web-application can be easily modified to work as web-service once it was written using AJAX(this means that UI was completely separated from business logic).
3. Jon on October 11th, 2005 (Comment) #
The name is new, but the technology isn’t. Speaking as someone who works at an organization that must rely on stable technology for enterprise applications, all of the pieces of AJAX are proven.
But AJAX needs good hardware on both sides of the line to perform well. We’ve recently reached that point.
Having a few examples to lead the way certainly helped. As did a catchy buzzword.
4. tkouts on October 19th, 2005 (Comment) #
I wouldn’t say that AJAX as a technology is something totally new. I would only agree that it is new as a term. The first application I saw using AJAX was Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access, about 4 years ago. I’m surprised that Microsoft didn’t invest more on this technology.