geosocial.net

[For all my posts on AJAX/ATLAS see All My Thoughts on AJAX/ATLAS http://blogs.imason.com/scott.howlett/ajax_atlas.aspx]

Been having a chance to do a little more research on AJAX and to do a little more thinking about what this means in terms of trends for web applications and web application development.  I’m a tad concerned that some folks here at imason might jump all over me for anything positive I might say about AJAX, so let me be entirely clear from the start about my current position.

1. The benefits of AJAX-styled applications are dramatic for end-users.  Just use Google Suggest, Google Maps, Virtual Earth or Live.com.  This will convince.
2. Javascript/AJAX is totally inferior for writing web applications compared with the two dominant platforms .Net and Java.  Writing applications in Javascript is a step backward (maybe by about 25 years).
3. The sweet spot, then, is for frameworks to evolve such that writing web apps (in .Net or Java) in an AJAX-styled manner is no more difficult than current approaches (or maybe even easier). 

When this happens, you get the end-user benefits of AJAX without the crippling productivity hit of doing extensive development in Javascript.  This is the domain of Microsoft ATLAS initiative.  More to come…

Originally posted by Scott from Scott’s musings…