Unfortunately the second always win and AJAX is good example of such trend.
It began as a small feature in next version of IE: an ability to send asynchronous request to the server and replace only small part of the page instead of replacing the whole one as it is done in usual web-application behavior.

Now AJAX usually is presented as a "silver bullet" for web-development. It is used to build very functional and complicated "desktop-like" applications such as word processors or spreadsheets.

But the technologies and tools underlying AJAX were not designed for such using.

First part of AJAX's base is HTML (XHTML) + CSS. These languages were initially designed to describe the structure (HTML) and presentation (CSS) of STATIC documents not applications.

Another one part is JavaScript - just another one SCRIPTING language. If you take a look into Wikipedia or any other resource for the meaning of the word "script" you will see that scripting languages are used "to control another software application" but not to develop the application itself. In our case JavaScript was created to control such application as web-browser e.g. to print something in browser's status line, to highlight some text in document when mouse cursor moves over it or to open another one browser window.

But now a lot of programmers around the world writes huge JavaScript libraries (or even frameworks) which provides some abilities not available in "base" JavaScript such as working with collections, emulating windowing, handling of graphic objects and many other features which are not necessary at all since all these functions are usually implemented in operating system (Windows, Unix, MacOS, etc). So all that army of developers just ignores one of the base programming principles - code reusing.

As for debugging of the AJAX-applications: I will better say nothing about it. If you already know something about this subject - you understand me well, if not - I do not want you to see nightmares when you go to sleep :-).

So, the question is: when we should do with such terrible circumstances? I just can not tell you. I just hope that the industry will propose us some more powerful and more easy-to-use platform for development of rich web-applications. At least I would like to see some set of tools where I would able to use 1 or (in extreme case) 2 languages (one for code, second - for presentation) instead of 4 languages used now in AJAX: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and some server-side language (for example Java).

Actually several such platforms are available on the market for quite long time (for example Java WebStart), other ones have been started during last 2 years or even just announced (Adobe Air, Microsoft Silverlight, Mozilla Prism). So I hope that at least one of these platforms will finally become more popular then AJAX and we will get really "rich" web-applications at last.

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Posted by Sergiy Korzh on April 16, 2008 11:25:00 AM EEST #