Recent
Articles |
Structure Versus Query
Over the weekend and Monday, there was an interesting thread on CF-Talk. You can read the complete thread here. The basic problem involved getting a particular piece of data to show up in the final feed xml, in...
Three Lines Of Code To Boost Your Search Engine Traffic
In the world of Web building, an opportunity to develop/code something quickly is a rare occasion. Mostly, you need to spend hours on research...
ColdFusion 8's Ajax Debug Works Well With Spry
Wow - this was a surprise. I was trying to debug a Spry issue this morning and not having any luck at all. I was using Spry's debug panel which you enable like so: Spry.Data.Region.debug = false; And I was...
What Facebook ToS Change Means For Developers
Facebook pulled the wildly popular music sharing Audio one week after it changed its terms of service. While this is a good for Facebook, it does put limits on what developers can put up as an application.
|
|
|
09.26.07
AJAX - Too Much Choice
By Savio Rodrigues
Last week I spoke with Todd Hay, VP of Marketing at ActiveGrid.
"Too often, we fight ourselves in the AJAX community. For customers, there is too much confusion between AJAX libraries such as Dojo, JQuery, Prototype or the tens and hundreds more. Customers get overwhelmed and look towards Adobe or Microsoft. Other times, customers want to use an open source library and there is no support option available."
Considering that we're still early in the product lifecycle for Web 2.0 runtimes/libraries/technologies, the average customer doesn't want to make a bet on a product (or company) that may be gone in a few years.
In these cases, choosing Adobe or Microsoft feels safer.
I can understand when a customer selects Adobe AIR or Microsoft Silverlight because of some capability or feature not sufficiently available in an OSS AJAX framework/library/product. But selecting AIR or Silverlight to reduce the confusion between OSS AJAX frameworks/libraries/products signals a problem for AJAX communities and vendors. There appears to be a need for some overarching standards for AJAX-based frameworks.
These standards would enable customers to choose between various implementations with confidence. The OpenAjax Alliance is working towards "Standardizing Ajax Development" (as their logo says - note that ActiveGrid, Adobe & Microsoft are all members of the Alliance). But there is definitely more that could be done, and done faster.
To this point, Todd explains:
"We recently acquired TurboAJAX Group, a company that had 2 of the top contributors to the Dojo project. We are committed to the Dojo community and will be offering subscription support offerings for Dojo and for TurboAJAX products, which are built on Dojo. Next, we're going to release TurboStudio under the GPL to minimize barriers to adoption. We're also going to work with other members of the AJAX community on ensuring a greater degree of collaboration."
Releasing TurboStudio under the GPL (coming soon) is great news . However, I think that the more important goal is getting some degree of collaboration and standardization across the AJAX world. Choice is good, but without standards, choice leads to confusion, which in turn leads to many customers making the 'safe choice'.
Comments
About the Author:
Savio Rodrigues is a product manager with IBM's WebSphere Software division. He envisions a day when open source and traditional software live in harmony. This site contains Savio's personal views. IBM does not necessarily agree with the views expressed here.
|
