Cutting Through the Ajax Hype

An anonymous reader writes "If you're thinking about building an Ajax application of your own, this article would be a good place to start. It's an introductory-level guide about when and how to implement Ajax. It provides a balanced discussion about where exactly using Ajax makes sense, and where it does not."

Isn't it sort of saddening...

[urbanradar]

...how much time passed in between stories about said AJAX hype hitting Slashdot and stories about "Cutting through the AJAX hype" hitting Slashdot?

Ajax Hype

[John Sokol]

Oh man, I had written a chat room in back 1996 using what I called server push Java Script and nobody paid much attention, although it was on many adult video chat sites. Example at http://www.videotechnology.com/chatroom.html [videotechnology.com]

    We did many of the same things using that technique that people are doing now in Ajax, interactive games, and database etc using it.

  Suddenly some marketing guy calls it "Ajax", which is almost doing the same thing is all the rage.

Hypes

[El Lobo]

Once every2-3 years it seems like "the new big thing" is hyped. Call it Java, ASP, php, Ajax... The enterprise world is then ready to show you that the curent hype is the Holy Grail and the best thing since a cold beer.

Ajax is getting hyped to the point where it isn't funny anymore. I bet it will go the way of XML - simple and interesting at first, then the "Enterprise" folk run away with it and within 2 years we have W3C AJAX standards that span 1000 pages. Wanna bet?

Cutting through the ajax hype-hype

[not already in use]

Whenever a great technology comes about (or in this case a fusion of existing technologies) you always have the people who gotta play devils advocate, you know, the guy nobody likes to hang out with because he's negative about everything. Here's one of my favorite parts FTA:

"Last month, I was on my way to visit a friend. It was dark and I got lost, and I tried to find his address in my computer. His coordinates were included in the e-mail he sent me that day. Unluckily for me, that e-mail message was sent to my GMail account, and, being disconnected from the Internet, I was left with quite a negative experience. In one split second, all the benefits of zero-install, a cool UI, labels, free targeted advertisements, an extremely useful search engine, and platform independence were annihilated when I could not find my friend's address because I was out of range of a Wi-Fi hotspot."

GOD DAMN YOU AJAX, CLEARLY YOU HAVE NO COMPASSION FOR THE ILL-PREPARED!! This would have never happened had you been using a non-ajax internet mail application, or even GMail's HTML only version. Ajax isn't only overhyped, it's out to get you. Here's another great snippet:

"JavaScript applications run in a browser, and can be easily reengineered. By loading JavaScript files on demand, you can fool Internet Explorer users; but other browsers, such as Firefox, will eagerly show a user the current DOM in its entirety through the context menu's View Selection Source option. If someone really wants to see your application's entire JavaScript source and analyze it, a simple script built with the Mozilla® Greasemonkey extension, a debugger like Venkman, or a custom Internet Explorer toolbar would do the trick."

Yes folks, he is correct here. Ever since ajax has come about, all the sudden your javascript and DOM is viewable to anyone with enough inclination to do the digging. Before "Asynchronous" and "and XML" came along, this certainly wasn't the case, I liked the good ol' days when it was just "J."

I could go on and about the evils of ajax, but what I would really like to point out, as this guy already has, is that the heart of this evil scourge is the internet itself. Never mind the fact that any 16 year-old girl going to meet a sexual predator on mySpace has the capacity to print a map out before hand because clearly, the intarweb will no longer be available once she has departed on her journey. But thats beside the point. Uninstall your browsers immediatly.