A new AJAX convention cropping up in a few places, one that is easy to implement and has real benefit to end users. I haven’t found a description of it anywhere, so I thought I’d write it up here.
The basic idea is that user controls (typically for editing the displayed data) should be hidden from the user until needed. At “rest”, an area of the screen displays information in read-only fashion.
On clicking an “edit” button, the div expands to display the widgets for changing the data.
AJAX
Tooling comes to the AJAX World
Apache just received a proposal to bring AJAX tooling to the Eclipse IDE. The proposal is sponsored by IBM and Zimbra, and is championed by Sam Ruby. Toolkits that will be incorporated into the intial version include Zimbra AjaxTK and Rico. [via]
Taking the pulse of the open-source AJAX community
A recent survey by Ajaxian (writeup here, raw results here) revealed that the 40% of developers working with AJAX are not using any higher-level APIs or toolkits! This is really disturbing: trying to make javascript work across all browsers is really hard, and developers are buying themselves a great deal of pain by not standing on the shoulders of those who came before them. Why aren’t more developers using these frameworks?
Flash: what is it good for?
Flash gets a bad rep among programmers. The programming model is very different from typical programming languages, and the uses of the technology have typically been annoying (banner adds, skip-intro splash pages). More recently, AJAX has emerged as an extremely popular way of introducing dynamic behavior into web pages. So why do we even need Flash?
LaszloMail service about to be launched
LaszloMail, the new email service from LaszloSystems, will be opened to the public in the next week or so. I was lucky enough to get a beta account, and spent some time playing with the application.
New Yahoo Maps kick ass with Flash
The new Yahoo! maps (released just over an hour ago) is amazing. The app is very smooth and slick, and makes heavy use of yahoo yellow-pages data. It’s integrated with real-time traffic info as well. The experience of dragging and dropping the map, and zooming in and out, is _nearly_ as smooth as google maps (hey for day one that is terrific. There’s lots of room for optimization with this kind of code).
Yahoo! is playing the fast follower game, and playing it well (see also an earlier post on the new Yahoo! email client). And they’re obviously thinking hard about using the right technology for the right job, rather than simply copying the google approach.
Googlenet: It’s all about mobile AJAX!
The google proposal to provide wireless access to all of San Francisco is a bold move by google to increase the mobile use of web-based applications among early adopters.
Megatrend alert: Rich Clients, Web Services, and On Demand Software
The major trends in IT today reinforce each other in a powerful way. The two technology trends (Web Services and Rich Clients) are tailor-made for the new business-model trend (On Demand Software). The two technology trends also reinforce each each other, creating a self-reinforcing web of interactions that will accelerate once it gains momentum, and may not stop until it has absorbed most of the software world as we know it!
Why will AJAX win?
AJAX Info writes about the network effects that are driving AJAX adoption in the enterprise and consumer space.
Programming languages in general benefit from network effects. To boil this down we could say that as more people use a particular language, the value derrived from using it increases exponentially. An example of this might be that as more people start using Ajax, more resources, information, and 3rd party components become available.
Another key point is that AJAX is a continuous, rather than a discontinuous technology. It builds on existing skillsets that web developers have in a way that some other technologies don’t.
Ajax offers something else too. It`s a way for web developers to leverage their current skill sets to achieve the first goal: build better applications. JavaScript and DHTML aren`t new, and more importantly: corporations are loath to acquiring 3rd party software components that use technologies their in house developers have no skills with. It doesn`t make business sense to jump into technologies that have rarified skill sets unless you have to because it`s expensive to be retraining your employees or outsourcing development work to specialized consultants.
He also presents a nice comparison of AJAX to some alternative rich client technologies. The upshot? Vendor Independence and Skill Set Transferrance are the major differentiators. Read the whole thing!
flash && AJAX: two great tastes that taste great together?
Alex Bosworth articulates a vision of what Flash is good for that matches what I’ve experienced. Specifically, Bosworth mentions video (one or two-way) / audio (one or two-way), combined with data sockets (“push” instead of “pull) making Flash a crucial component of next-generation web applications. Macromedia recognises this, and is working hard to make Flash and Javascript work and play well together.
Why don’t more people think of using Flash in this way? In a word, positioning. Bosworth writes: I do think there’s a very distracting red herring here, and that’s Flash’s rich user interface abilities. Every flash demo I’ve ever seen focuses on great looking shiny buttons that look like you took a slick win32 app and plopped it down in a browser window.
jonathanboutelle.com 