This GoGolian post pretty much says what I’ve been willing to put down in a rather sarcastic blogpost a while ago, after reading yet another post about how cool and revolutionary the whole AJAX/Web 2.0 thing really is.
It’s not revolutionary, it’s just a bunch of old stuff in a new jacket that gets a lot of hype. Oh yeah, it’s old stuff alright, because people have been using AJAX-like things for years now. As said in the linked post, LinkaGoGo uses it to some extend, and I remember the old mp3 music site AudioGalaxy used a neat little trick to confirm your file downloads without having to refresh the complete page. They used JavaScript and dynamic image loading to do it, which isn’t as hip as using XML of course, but it did the trick.
But in a way it is a new thing, because this ain’t something that’s going to go away. This is how web applications will be able to compete with desktop applications, and that is a new thing alright. GMail for instance kicks Hotmails ass bigtime because of it’s speed, and AJAX is what it’s running on. AJAX makes things like only Word Processing applications possible (like Writely) which is something I didn’t see happening a few years ago. It’s old stuff taken to the next level, it’s like how hardcore turned into drum’n’bass. Old samples, next level.
Cool!!
And it’s easy too, check out the Simple AJAX framework code if your fingers are itching to get down and dirty with the next big thing…. euhm, well, you know…
4 replies on “ajax is an old woman (with a makeover)”
Yeah, it’s typical isn’t it. A few years ago suddenly everything had to be using XML somehow, and it would appear on product sheets etc, “XML enabled” blablabla…
it’s just a piece of technology, not a feature on it’s own, but somehow, they keep doing it anyway…
I’ve been saying this same thing around the office – cautioning upper management not to throw the word around so flippantly as if it were an actual commodity or “thing”. It is not a thing, it is a collection of ideas. Stop telling everyone we “do” AJAX. Or we’ll “just use AJAX” to do something. Clients are suddenly demanding it. We must have AJAX! As if it were something they could purchase… Either way, it’s nice to see the web moving in this direction. Also interesting, a coworker points out that one of the earliest examples of AJAX happens to be Microsoft webmail for Outlook/Exchange.