Ajax promotion and status quo: technologies that change the portal experience

Richard Monson-haefel, a senior analyst at Burton Group in midvale, utehe, believes that when talking about the widely publicized rich Internet application (RIA) technology, even less is better. This technology can greatly promote the user's web experience, because there is no need to refresh the page from the server, the Ajax style is a single page interface. However, he said in his recent short video about Ajax that over-use will make navigation difficult.

He said that the main advantage of Ajax over other RIA technologies is seamless HTML integration, so it can be used in large quantities without changing the existing web content. "Think of it as a Web site seasoning. The risk of doing so is very small. Ajax is irrelevant to the background and does not require any plug-ins. Ajax is a powerful tool used in combination with other RIA technologies, such as Macromedia Flash ."

However, this technology is not yet mature, and tools and frameworks are not yet supported. Monson-haefel said: "Ajax is not suitable for you if you do not like toolsets and class libraries ."

Burton Group defines that "rich" Internet applications can provide functions based on standard HTML frameworks and links. Google maps is such an excellent Ajax example.

Unlike Ajax, JavaScript has existed for a long time. It is based on JavaScript/ecmascript, Cascading Style Sheets, document object models, and xml http requests. Initially, it was difficult to design Ajax-style applications across different browsers. But now, mainstream browsers have evolved to support the implementation of Microsoft technology and become the most common feature.

Today, the dominant Ria technology is Macromedia's flash/flex. Other RIA technologies include the user interface markup language developed for the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, known as the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML ). There are also Mozilla's XML-based user interface language XUL, droplets, Java applets, and Windows Presentation Foundation/everywhere (WPF/E) to be launched by Microsoft ).

Monson-haefe said: "Flash is a good technology that is suitable for enriching animations and graphics, But Flash is like a big fish in a small pond. The real market is not so big now, so it is still a question as the market grows, whether it can occupy the market. Microsoft will launch WPF/E as a strong competitor ."

Microsoft also plans to launch an Ajax framework extension called Atlas. Monson-haefel thinks it is very promising. He said that other integrated development environments of Ajax have not yet become mainstream. This includes JavaScript Synthsis Technology (JST) of morfik technology, intellij idea 5.0 of jetbrains, tibco general interface (GI) of tibco software), jackbe company visual GUI builder, backbase B. v. the company's backbase and open-source Ruby on Rails framework.

He said: "It has built-in Ajax functions that enable you to write Ajax applications in Ruby programming language ."

Monson-haefel said: "The tibco tool for compiling Ajax applications is very good. Jackbe is also a good Ria technology, and backbase may be a better one now. The advantage of IDE is the WYSIWYG development method, but you have purchased their GUI, and you are also constrained by the perception ."

In addition to ide and framework extensions, Monson-haefel also mentioned that there are many available Ajax UI tools and remote tools, including private and open-source products. He said, there is only one part. According to a recent survey by Burton Group, among the 488 Ajax developers, the most popular tool set, class library, and framework extension are Javascript frameworks with MIT-style certificates-prototype, javascript class library -- script. aclo. us, direct Web remoting with Apache 2.0 certificate, Dojo UI tool set with academic free license v 2.1, and Ruby on Rails.

As for data, the focus on AJAX is mainly on B2C web sites, but Monson-haefel points out that AJAX is actually closely related to Web Services and SOA, which can affect enterprise portals.

"Some people believe that Ajax will become a major recovery factor for portal solutions. The portal has been publicized for a long time, but it is not actually called a silver bullet. The combination of Ajax presentation layer and portal will promote the experience of all users ."

Monson-haefel warned that AJAX is easily abused. "If developers do not understand the use of theory, they will randomly apply it and people will deliberately avoid JavaScript. My reasoning comes from the browser pop-up window. This technology comes from an available feature, but because it is abused, it has become a lower-level citizen of web technology, and people no longer use it ."