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Microsoft

Microsoft to Release AJAX Framework 292

Posted by CmdrTaco from the way-of-the-future dept.
An anonymous reader writes "News.com is announcing that Microsoft has announced plans to release a JavaScript client framework library for use with ASP.NET 2.0 that makes AJAX style browser clients easier to code. Developers who attend Microsoft's PDC conference in September have been promised an early release of the code."
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Microsoft to Release AJAX Framework More

Microsoft to Release AJAX Framework

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  • And let me guess...... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @09:53AM (#12941340)
    It only really works well with IE...
    • If that's the case, I'm sure it will be every bit as successful as Visual J++.

    • Re:And let me guess...... (Score:4, Funny)

      by TCM ( 130219 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:01AM (#12941412)
      ...and bends over to the next website that wants to run the trojan of the day on your box.

      "Microsoft has announced plans to release a javascript client framework library for use with ASP.NET 2.0 that makes AJAX style browser clients easier to code"? Alarm bells are ringing.
      • ASP.NET (in .net 1.1) already doesn't work without javascript more or less.

        • Re:And let me guess...... (Score:3, Informative)

          by ergo98 ( 9391 )
          ASP.NET (in .net 1.1) already doesn't work without javascript more or less.

          ASP.NET can downgrade to both scriptless and cookieless operations, which was one of the major selling points of it. In fact out of the box it presumes too little out of most clients, though thankfully you can update the browsercaps quite easily.

      • Re:And let me guess...... (Score:5, Funny)

        by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:51AM (#12941856) Journal
        This was a very funny article. My favorite bits:

        A growing number of proponents argue that applications created with AJAX perform better than today's Web browser-based applications.

        Because as we all know, AJAX applications don't run in the browser.

        "People who do (AJAX development) are rocket scientists," Fitzgerald said.

        While I do feel that the intellect of rocket scientists is greatly overrated by the general public, I don't think he was commenting as to the simplicity of AJAX here. Which begs the question, if you think AJAX is complicated, Mr. Fitzgerald, what exactly are you doing in the IT profession? AJAX is about as complicated as a ruler. Perhaps you should stick to playing with brightly colored bits of string and leave the thinking jobs to the "rocket scientists".

        • Lets face it;

          90% of the programmers in the MS area are morons. They are not interested in the higher aspects of computer science, nor do they give a shit about compability or efficient code. They care about one thing.

          Does it do what I want?

          This might sound fine and good to a lot of people, unfortunatly it isn't very so. We all remember the MESS frontpage created on the internet, zillions of so called webmasters broke the gates of pearls we had between THEM and US, the programmers. Now they're back, and t
    • Why wouldnt it? They dont have to be compatible with their competition.

      And dont give me the ' they were declared a monopoly ' garbage. They tossed that ruling back in the face of the (US)government and went on about their business like nothing happened..
    • Your guess is likely wrong.

      See this: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/06/28/ 416185.aspx [asp.net]

      and, in particular, this comment by the blog author:

      "Atlas will work with all modern browsers. It will also work on non-Windows platforms."

  • client side callbacks? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by drewfuss ( 872683 ) * on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @09:53AM (#12941342) Homepage
    Is Atlas any different from Client-side CallBacks [microsoft.com] which is a long known feature of asp.net 2.0? I suspect it is not different. If not, it's interesting how Microsoft's marketing department got several news outlets [google.com] (eWeek, InformationWeek) to report a long known feature as news.

  • Interesting (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @09:54AM (#12941343)
    Now maybe I'm just entirely on crack here, but didn't Google recently announce or imply that they're going to be releasing their own internal AJAX framework?

    • Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)

      by cuerty ( 671497 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @09:57AM (#12941374)
      No, what they do is relased it here [sourceforge.net]. It's an XSL-T parser in JavaScript, really cool stuff.

      • Re:Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)

        by suitepotato ( 863945 )
        My sense of doom is tingling. What are the chances of this being taken to the logical idiot extreme and every site being given to fattening everything but doing the fattening on my side? Great, I save bandwidth in downloading, but I eat processor cycles translating and building on my side.

        Just wondering what the future of Web Pages That Suck will be like in ten more years with all these "wonderful" systems and frameworks being promulgated all willy nilly without regard to the central focus being conveyan

        • Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

          by kryptx ( 894550 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:25AM (#12941614)
          Just look at it as distributed computing. The clients do the visual transformation so the server doesn't have to. The effects of this are two-fold:

          First, reduced bandwidth. Not for you, though. Nobody (aside from you) cares how much bandwidth you have to use to view a single web page. People care how much bandwidth it takes to serve their own page thousands of times. Minimizing this figure saves money.

          Second, server load. Again, thousands (or in some cases hundreds of thousands) of hits tends to put a strain on systems like this. If we offload visual transformations to the client, we save time on our server and our web pages are sent out faster.

          Both of these result in reduced costs for website owners. It's what's going to make sure the internet stays as free as it can be.

          Kumbaya.
  • With AJAX you have to do a check on how to instantiate an XMLHTTPRequest object. MS implements it via ActiveX (read: really stupid).

    I've got money that says their "framework" starts like this:
    var req = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); ... and doesn't even bother checking of window.XMLHttpRequest is a valid object (i.e. the correct way of doing things).

    Of course there's any number MS only javascript methods that'll probably litter this "framework" as well.
    • here [west-wind.com] is what it looks like

    • Re:You know this is how it'll start (Score:5, Informative)

      by enkafan ( 604078 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:12AM (#12941499)
      I'll take that bet. Scott Guthrie (project load on the Web Platform and Tools Team at Microsoft) has stated that Atlas client script will work on all modern browsers, and will not be restricted to any web server.

      You can read more on his weblog. [asp.net]P
      • Yeah, but...Mr. Guthrie's blog talks about Atlas being used to produce web apps using, among other things, DHTML, which if I understand rightly is non-standard and very different between IE and Netscape--so what difference does it make if Atlas itself is portable?

    • ActiveAjaX (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mfh ( 56 )
      With AJAX you have to do a check on how to instantiate an XMLHTTPRequest object. MS implements it via ActiveX (read: really stupid).

      ActiveX by itself is bad. ActiveX with Ajax would be worse because it would enable spyware writers become more agile.

      Why is Microsoft helping spyware writers? Surely they would have known this could be a bad combo... right?? /rhetorical

    • Re:You know this is how it'll start (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:33AM (#12941696)
      You've not used ASP.NET have you? All of the generated HTML and Javascript is guaranteed to work in all major modern browsers. True, some of the cooler DHTML stuff only works in IE, but other browsers get less cool but still functional equivalents.

      Or, you know, you could just mindlessly bash MS, it's your choice.

    • Re:You know this is how it'll start (Score:5, Informative)

      by phusikos ( 784802 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:34AM (#12941702)

      While I agree that Microsoft's way leaves much to be desired (primarily because AJAX on IE requires that you leave your browser open to ActiveX insercurities), I'm afraid there isn't really a "correct" way to do it. Your way (testing for the native XMLHttpRequest object, and then falling back to the ActiveX object if necessary) is certainly the best way, however.

      IIRC, Mozilla's XMLHttpRequest object was created to mimic the functionality of Microsoft's ActiveX version, and then Safari and Opera (to a certain extent) followed suit. However, the XMLHttpRequest has never been part of ECMAScript [ecma-international.org] (the standard that Javascript is based on) nor the W3C DOM [w3.org]. It has always been an "extension" that Microsoft has foisted upon the world, much like the <marquee> tags and layers we love to hate.

      As such, it is inconsistently supported -- particularly in Opera and Safari 1.3/2.0 [infocraft.com]. There are also minor differences (e.g. the number of arguments that the send method accepts) that arise due to the lack of a standard specification.

      Fortunately, because of its immense utility in creating modern web-apps, it has become a de-facto standard and thus rather reliable. I would love to eventually see browsers support a standards-based version of AJAX (something like the W3C Level 3 DOM Load and Save [w3.org] specification), but until then, there is no truly "correct" way to do it.

    • I seriously doubt they would introduce AJAX for IE only - if you've used the .net framework you'd know that it's pretty friendly to non MS browsers. (Not perfect but not intentionally broken)

      Besides if I don't like how it implements the client side of it, I can just make an inherited class and override what I want. Again something else you'd know if you'd ever worked with this "framework".

    • Atlas--which is a downloadable piece of JavaScript code--gives developers a more structured environment for building applications, providing time-saving services such as an object model and debugging, he said. It will work across any Web browser that supports AJAX technologies.

      And Microsoft also plans to make sure that ASP.NET 2.0 works well with Safari, Opera and Firefox. The last thing they want is for their web apps to generate HTML that breaks 10-15% of the market out there because that's enough no

    • Re:You know this is how it'll start (Score:5, Interesting)

      by neil.pearce ( 53830 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:42AM (#12941762) Homepage
      Simple enough to bang in some workarounds with Greasemonkey I reckon?

      function ActiveXObject(name) {
      if (name == "Microsoft.XMLHTTP") {
      if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
      return new window.XMLHttpRequest();
      }
      }
      return undefined;
      }
    • Sarissa [sourceforge.net] is a cross-platform XML and XSLT library (more like a wrapper actually) for Mozilla and IE.

      I'm sure AJAX development can be simplified with sarissa. It won't work with other browsers, of course since not all of them support XSLT.

  • They should call it... (Score:4, Funny)

    by vmcto ( 833771 ) * on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @09:59AM (#12941399) Homepage Journal
    HIJAX...

    Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal...
  • This is a transparent attempt on Microsoft's part to avoid being crushed by the rising juggernaut of web app development that is Ruby On Rails [rubyonrails.com]. If RoR has an AJAX framework, then ASP.NET has no choice but to follow in its footsteps in hopes of eking out some meager semblance of survival on David Hansson's waste products.

    Bow, Microsoft, bow before your Ruby masters!
    • There is an AJAX framework for ASP.NET - I coded it about a year and a half ago. I think what you mean is "built into the dev environment/framework".
    • but.... hahahahhahhahahahahahaha

      Ohhh god... it hurts... soo bad...

      hahahhahahahahaha...

      Ruby on Rails has like what... 5 people using it? Okay lets be generous.. 100...

      Juggernaut?? Please... the project will probably be abandoned in less than a year like all the other half-assed frameworks. (Though really, I'm sure that's what all the PHP haters said too.)

      PHP and Java is who they're really fighting against. In the web dev. world PHP wins over ASP.NET in almost every situation. For all the other situ

      • hahahhahahahahaha... Ruby on Rails has like what... 5 people using it? Okay lets be generous.. 100...

        You realize that the beta of the new Pragmatic Programmer Rails book has sold more copies than that on iteration 1? The demand is absurd.

        I'm a Rails novice. My abilities with Rails are only marginal compared to the gurus of the framework. And I am turning down consulting jobs. I work on Rails at work now, both professionally (see where I work in my description and be shocked) and in my current consu

    • hilarious stuff, man
  • that this has the same name as Duckman's idiot son or merely foreshadowing?

  • Cross-platform (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FTL ( 112112 ) * <(slashdot) (at) (neil.fraser.name)> on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:03AM (#12941435) Homepage
    > "People who do (AJAX development) are rocket scientists," Fitzgerald said.

    Pfft. AJAX is easy. It's cross-platform AJAX that's brutally hard. You expect us to trust Microsoft to create a framework that will allow perfect portability between Opera, Safari, Mozilla and MSIE? Uh huh.

    • Don't worry I just emailed Bill Gates this code:

      // branch for native XMLHttpRequest object
      if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
      {
      objHttpRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();

      if(bAsync)objHttpRequest.onreadystatechange = ProcessCallBack;

      objHttpRequest.open("GET", url, bAsync);
      objHttpRequest.send(null); // branch for IE/Windows ActiveX version
      }
      else if (window.ActiveXObject)
      {
      objHttpRequest = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
      if (objHttpRequest)
      {
      if(bAsync)objHttpRe
  • The nice thing about AJAX is that it works in all modern browsers. (And it makes for dynamic pages too.) So a framework that requires .NET is a step backwards.
  • IMHO, this is going to make serializing data in ASP.NET into javascript easier ... that's all. Just because they say it is AJAX doesn't automatically mean it is simple or anything.

    Truthfully, if macromedia would loosen their purse strings from Flash a bit more - we'd see more stuff like OpenLazlo come up.

    Btw, I plan to work on a wsdl2javascript wrapper over XmlHttpRequest. I think we should be able to make SOAP calls from javascript directly - that would solve all these stupid XSD schemas and SDKs for eac
    • I think we should be able to make SOAP calls from javascript directly - that would solve all these stupid XSD schemas and SDKs for each and every REST webservice they use with AJAX.

      I wrote a mozilla based application about 3 years ago that used simple javascript SOAP calls.
      As far as I could tell at the time, this wasn't supported by IE. I don't know if it is yet or not.

      Here [oreillynet.com] is an O'reilly article from 2002 talking about how to do it.
  • There are already several javascript libraries that make ajax development easier such as Sarissa [sourceforge.net]. Sarissa makes it possible to use XMLhttpRequest in IE and makes avialable certain IE only parsing functions in other browsers.

    I've tried working with some others with varried success.

  • And the open-source alternative is: (Score:3, Funny)

    by commo1 ( 709770 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:15AM (#12941518)
    Comet!

  • Do they have a template? (Score:5, Funny)

    by RealProgrammer ( 723725 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:17AM (#12941537) Homepage Journal
    For press releases, that is.
    Microsoft has announced plans to release [standards-compliant tool] for use with [Microsoft product] that makes [cool-sounding things] easier to code. Developers who attend Microsoft's [upcoming event] in [3-6 months] have been promised an early release of the code.

    Perhaps Slashcode could be enhanced to provide the functionality. That would make this kind of story much easier to put up.

    Hint: the input just needs to be standards-compliant tool. The program should already know which Microsoft product handles the cool-sounding things and be able to choose the upcoming event for the given market segment. The time period should be long enough to allow the code to actually be written, or long enough for the announcement to be forgotten.

  • Planned for ASP.NET 2.0 for over a year... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperJason ( 726019 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:18AM (#12941550) Homepage
    If you ever saw the book called "A first look at ASP.NET 2.0", it had some demos of the new technologies that would be in ASP.NET 2.0. Once of them was an AJAX style client-side callback.

    People act like AJAX is some magical new technology, when in reality, it's been used for years. Microsoft is just one of the companies who offered a "framework" to make it easier to develop. If they end up integrating it into their controls, it will be huge.

    And for reference, I believe their demo worked in Firefox as well.

    If anything, the AJAX popularity will just give them a little kick in the ass to move more quickly.
  • This is great for AJAX. Microsoft's imprimatur will make AJAX easier to everyone to sell to business people, even when no Microsoft technology is involved in the implementation.

  • Before we start bashing Microsoft... (Score:5, Informative)

    by 0kComputer ( 872064 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:28AM (#12941647)
    Lets remember that Microsoft created the XMLHTTP objects that AJAX is built on.

    Ok, resume bashing.
    • Thing is, that part of AJAX is dead easy to do. The tricky part of it isn't talking to the server. It's writing code to manipulate the DOM that works in different browsers.

      None of the rest of it is really rocket science. It's just Javascript and XML on the client, and whatever-the-hell-you-want and XML on the server.

  • Huh? (Score:2)

    by ooze ( 307871 )
    "People who do (AJAX development) are rocket scientists," Fitzgerald said. "In some ways, this papers over the mess that is JavaScript development. It's easy-to-build 'spaghetti' code."

    Well, while JavaScript surely needs some further development, it's actually not that hard. That what made my JavaScripts usually hard to maintain and in the end a pretty ugly piece of code is working around deficiencies of the IE...

  • Didn't see this link yet (Score:4, Informative)

    by prostoalex ( 308614 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:33AM (#12941697) Homepage Journal
    More or less official announcement [asp.net], coming from MSDN Blog. But they've been doing it all along:

    All of the pieces of AJAX - DHTML, JScript, and XMLHTTP - have been available in Internet Explorer for some time, and Outlook Web Access has used these techniques to deliver a great browser experience since 1998. In ASP.NET 2.0, we have also made it easier to write AJAX-style applications for any browser using asynchronous callbacks, and we use them in several of our built-in controls.
  • I just cannot help noticing that the name of Microsoft's software "Atlas" appears in the text only three times, while the detergent name is in almost every paragraph, a whopping eight times. Is Microsoft pushing someone else's "technology" in their press releases, or is someone else spinning their release in their favor ?
  • "In some ways, this papers over the mess that is JavaScript development. It's easy-to-build 'spaghetti' code."

    Only at Microsoft would that statement be used to describe something good. Everywhere else, spaghetti code is a reason to yell at someone.
  • This is amazingly timely because 10 minutes ago I finished writing an article for our internal newsletter (a "feel good" thing for our developers) about how to use Ajax.

    I wrote a quick demo page with less than a screenfull of javascript and that included browser detection, a reusable main function and it's callback, plus a function specific to my example.

    Ok mod me down because I didn't read the article (yet) but why is a "framework" necessary.

  • xmlhttprequest frameworks... (Score:4, Informative)

    by draed ( 444221 ) on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:49AM (#12941829)
    there are a lot of them...

    Sarissa - http://sarissa.sourceforge.net/doc/ [sourceforge.net]
    Prototype - http://prototype.conio.net/ [conio.net]
    Dojo - http://dojotoolkit.org/ [dojotoolkit.org]
    SAJAX - http://absinth.modernmethod.com/sajax/ [modernmethod.com]
    DWR - http://www.getahead.ltd.uk/dwr/ [getahead.ltd.uk]
    JSON-RPC-Java - http://oss.metaparadigm.com/jsonrpc/ [metaparadigm.com]

  • I have to laugh (Score:4, Insightful)

    by serutan ( 259622 ) <snoopdoug&geekazon,com> on Wednesday June 29, 2005 @10:54AM (#12941888) Homepage
    AJAX may be the acronym du jour, but these techniques have been around for YEARS, ever since IE5. AJAX is just a simplified way of doing it, just like every programmer in the world creates their own little libraries of routines for handling db connections and the like. AJAX doesn't do anything new, it just repackages it for those who never heard of it.

    When I first learned about XmlHttpRequest in the IE5 days, I thought it was going to revolutionize the web. All the problems of session state maintenance would disappear and web pages would become little client-server apps. MS had this capability first with the ActiveX control. They could have hyped this capability and taken the lead with it back in 1999. ASP.Net would have been another great opportunity to showcase this feature and create standards. Instead the ASP.Net philosophy seemed to be to make as many trips to the server as possible. For a while MS virtually abandoned the idea of out-of-band requests. So now, years after introducing this feature, somebody at Microsoft finally realizes what they had going and decides to jump on the bandwagon. Good job guys, but a little late.
    • Mod this up. It is amazing to me that .Net is viewed as an 'enterprise' technology for this very reason. You either end up with tons of server-side components or you end up fighting the MS name mangling of every component of the web page so you can 'hack' your own javascript responses. It will be a wecomed relief if MS would stop the name mangling nonsense and make it easy to use javascript.

      Since the javascript is a pain, we end up (overusing) server components. This means that we need multiple web se

    • While I mostly agree with you, there is onething I would like to clarify.

      AJAX is just a simplified way of doing it, just like every programmer in the world creates their own little libraries of routines for handling db connections and the like. AJAX doesn't do anything new, it just repackages it for those who never heard of it.

      AJAX is merely an acronym that descibes an abstract idea (that, as you say, has been around for years) it doesn't repackage anything, and it doesn't simplify anything. every pro
  • After all, he was the guy who lost to Odysseus fighting over Achilles armor (you know, of the heel fame?). Later, he went mad and began slaughtering cows. He then killed himself.

    Sadly, most people will think "what you cut dope with"...

  • The HTML and JavaScript sepcifications upon which web browsers are built are good and all, but were they built with the idea of hosting an application versus a webpage? It seems to me that AJAX is sort of a hack to turn a web browser into an application container; why not build a new, open specification designed from the get-go to be an applications container and not merely an HTML display mechanism?

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