Lewies Blog

I’ve used AJAX in many home-brew applications such as Chat, a Chatbot (ELIZA), Seti Statistics, a Color Picker control, and a guestbook. It gets really complicated really fast. For those who don’t know what AJAX is, it is a relatively new term slapped on technologies that developers have been using for a while. It is simply using JavaScript to communicate Asynchronously with your server via XML over HTTP. This method allows developers to communicate directly with the web server without the end-user having to click links and wait for the entire page to load again.

On an article at Builder AU, Charles Fitzgerald (Microsoft’s general manager for platform technologies) was quoted with the following:

People who do (AJAX development) are rocket scientists. In some ways, this papers over the mess that is JavaScript development. It’s easy-to-build ’spaghetti’ code.

I don’t believe that I’m a rocket scientist. Those guys have brains beyond imagination. They probably have a lot more stress as well. Think of how many lives and millions of dollars you are responsible for as a rocket scientist.

Any how, one thing that helped me out is that I made some genaric libraries to help me interface with xml on the server depending on what browser you are using. Every browser deals with Xml in a different way. By creating one interface, it was easier to code with.

I think one problem that people don’t realize is that Internet Explorer itself can’t make use of this technology in Government Web Applications. The reason is that it uses the XmlHttp Active-X control. The government doesn’t like anything dealing with Active-X controls. You usually have to jump through some high hoops to get what you want. The XmlHttp object comes with the default installation of Internet Explorer, but you still run into problems trying to use it.

So while AJAX is catching pretty quickly, Microsoft has some Active-X issues to work out. It would have been better if they built Xml rite into the browsers DOM rather then making it a seperate Active X control.

Tags: AJAX, Atlas, Microsoft, Active X, DOM, XML, HTML, XmlHttp, JavaScript, Programming, Development, Technology

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 at 11:53 am and is filed under Computers, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.