Tue, 13 Jun 2006

An axe to grind with Ajax

I've been putzing about with AJAX myself of late, and I must say I'm pretty impressed. The author's right in that there's nothing really new about it: AJAX is as much of an attitude and a process as it is a technology. As for why Java never really caught on to do the same things that AJAX is now doing, well ...

Java applications (and applets) tend to look very different on different platforms, and they are not nearly as cross platform as the specs would have you believe. The real problem here is adherence to standards and maintaining a standard implementation across platforms. Java is practically native code on Mac's with OS X, but on Windows, well, it depends which system you have and how Microsoft implemented the runtime engine for that version.

Java has a much bigger footprint than AJAX, and since it's excluded from browser caching in many instances, can consume bandwidth and other resources all out of proportion to it's real needs.

About the only thing that Java can do that AJAX can't is write files on the client: and that's considered a security hazard anyway!

My money's on AJAX for Web 2.0 applications - Java's so 1990's. Given the position of the author in a "code integration" company, methinks the ax being ground here is as much an economic as a technological one.

A lot of people believe AJAX will revolutionize the software world. CodeMesh co-founder Alex Krapf is not among them.

(link) [CNET News.com]

Update: Thudfactor grabbed a bit of inspration from this and really ran with it! A much more thorough defense of the rationale behind AJAX than I presented here, that's for sure. And it's screamingly funny to boot! Check it out!

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