AJAX in Action
Saturday, September 24th, 2005Went to a nice talk on “AJAX - Time for The Transformation of Web Applications” presented by CHI*A, an off-shoot of the ACM organization here in Atlanta. Though the talk did have a sales pitch at the end, and some shameless plugs, they were bearable — and actually the company who sponsored, ClearNova, actually has a pretty good product. I’m no fan of frame-works on top of frame-works, but hey if it works (then, it works).
The speaker, Steve Benfield, had a few really good points about AJAX that we’ve all heard, but it was nice to hear them again in good context. The first being, that yes, it’s just a name given to a set of technologies that have been around for a while — that in itself is a “good thing.” Being able to classify a form of rich, user-interactive web-site building tools, however dorky and technically incorrect some feel the acronym may be (see my previous post), is not the important part. The important part is the fan-fare and hoopla, and research, books, frameworks, interest, and talks that ensue. And so they ensue.
The other interesting point was that because it is a new term and a spankin’ new technology, people always wonder, will it stick around. The answer, our speaker says, is absolutely. Main reason being: Users Like It. If a user is shown on one hand, a web-app with nicely AJAX-ified features, and on the other hand a standard form/post/response web-app on the other — it’s guaranteed they’ll go for the more responsive, more intuitive web-app, for sure.
In other news, my pal Bart just got a crazy-wicked job for the Washington Post working on some (yup, you guessed it), AJAX-ified web-app projects that sound really, really cool. Behind all the bitter jealousy, we’re all happy for him. 
Good luck Bart!
