* Posts by Anton Venema

1 publicly visible post • joined 22 Jun 2008

AJAX browser wishlist call goes unanswered

Anton Venema
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Why wish? Make something better.

I think we can all agree that security is a significant concern for asynchronous web development, as it is with all forms of development. I also think it's somewhat naive to believe that AJAX (or HTTPRequest, whatever your flavour of verbage) is going to go away or somehow be "replaced" by proprietary technologies like Silverlight or Flex. (I'm always wary of packages that attempt to be all-in-one solutions, especially for a technology that's immature and under active developmental scrutiny.) I would like to see developers go back to the core of what it is that makes AJAX so useful, and then re-invent it under today's vision. ...then make it backwards compatible with IE6. Just kidding.

To me, AJAX development still seems hackish and awkward. Far from the elegant code we can produce to support a desktop application. Even with support from the great JavaScript libraries made freely available by selfless web idealists, we fall short of the seamless integration and robust development practices I know we are capable of. Maybe we don't even need to re-invent AJAX - just re-invent our approach to it. We shouldn't have to spend our time figuring out where our client-side application is going to link back to our data access layer, or how the heck we're going to make it work in Internet Explorer. All those little things should be inferred from our interface design. How they are inferred is of little concern to me in the long run, so long as the end result is cross-browser compatible, and continues to support major browser versions. What I wish for is a framework that allows us to develop single-page rich Internet applications using a familiar, robust language for the back-end, such as C#, where we aren't concerned with server/client communication, but can focus entirely on the business model. Throw in a serving of generated code with a sprinkling of sugar, the ability to re-use client-side JavaScript components, good extensibility, and a slick set of graphics, and I'd be hooked.