Comments on: State of AJAX

By: asp_funda

asp_funda — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 08:09:47 +0000

Sometimes you can get away with things like innerHTML (if you’re strictly catering to an audiance that uses the browsers that support it)

Etnu, the innerHTML is buggy in IE Mac otherwise it works in all browsers!! :)
see here http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/w3c_html.html#all

By: paulbb

paulbb — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 14:56:04 +0000

In reply to point 3) of Etnu’s list.

It will be interesting to see what Microsofts ensuing “attack” on Macromedia, in the form of Sparkle will lead to.

We should get a better idea of this at the upcomming “Professional Developers Conference” in september, Microsoft will apparently reveal some details of their upcomming plattform.

By: z0s0

z0s0 — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 06:51:07 +0000

Etnu, on what do you base your comment that SOAP and XML-RPC are getting more efficient? The feeling I get when using these technologies is that they instead get more bloated and cumbersome each year.

Re: point 2, a good architect does this “work” once, and once only. The gains from being able to unit test this stuff – in stark contrast to innerHTML voodoo – far outweigh the cost of slightly more verbose code.

By: Etnu

Etnu — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 04:18:31 +0000

That last paragraph is patently false. Apache’s new keepalive system is designed explicitly for delivering small bits of data in rapid-fire succession. And that’s just one piece of technology. SOAP and XML-RPC get more and more efficient every year, and are ideal for this sort of thing. The biggest limitation that AJAX has right now is browsers, namely:

1.) IE still implementing the system using ActiveX, a system that most security experts tell people to disable.

2.) The amount of work necessary to create a large number of elements on a page in a cross-browser fashion, i.e. document.createElement(). Sometimes you can get away with things like innerHTML (if you’re strictly catering to an audiance that uses the browsers that support it), but there are additional limitations there.

3.) The relative limitations of animation. This could be solved with something like flash, but unfortunately flash wants to be delivered as an application instead of as a piece of media (e.g. an image type).