AJAX Hype, etc.

So the AJAX buzz has officially reached the point maddening annoyingness. Every PHB is talking about it like it is some new technology and “we've got to use it now!”.

Before I go into official rant mode, let me just say that in a lot of cases, using the JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object to asynchronously get data and update a webpage, probably by manipulating the DOM with JavaScript, makes a lot of sense a lot of the time. I really like it when web applications do this well. It's just that the buzz and hype has gotten SO annoying. “AJAX” is being treated as some magic technology that is the silver bullet for all web applications.

A similar hype emerged a couple of years ago. I couldn't open a web browser, go to a meeting, or read a trade mag without hearing that “web services” were going to change the world, and that web services were the “silver bullet” to solve all of our technological problems. Time has passed and, indeed, web services are being used a lot to solve a lot of problems. But web services weren't and still aren't our magic pixie dust. Hell, just like AJAX, people were doing the things labeled as web services well before the term was coined, before the buzz machine went crazy.

Of course, we all know that AJAX is not new. Basically, as Paul Graham recently said, it's just that now JavaScript mostly works.

Really, I believe that the primary reason that “AJAX enabled” web applications are finally taking off is that Internet Explorer has been stagnant for SO long that the web development rock stars have figured out how to work around all of IE's problems and lack of standards support, while Safari and the Mozilla flavors do a mostly good job of supporting standards, giving us a pretty known base to work on. Previously, from about 1998 to 2002, using CSS and DHTML on IE with it's inconsistent and lack of standards support was a nightmare. But now we've had a pretty well known IE 6.0 for going on 4 or 5 years. God knows what we'll have to deal with when IE 7.0 comes out, but luckily I think Microsoft is showing signs that it knows that it is in it's best interest to start playing nice with their browser.

So, I am really annoyed at the use of the AJAX term. I believe that the original article that coined the term was well written and actually explained the concept pretty well and was very careful not to call AJAX a “technology” and really didn't lead people to believe that this method of programming web apps was a “silver bullet”. But now people are using AJAX to mean, basically fancy DHTML in a web application, with or without asynchronous data retrieval from the web server. Maybe I am just being nitpicky here, but that's not what “Asynchronous JavaScript + XML” really means. To me, if you're not pulling data back from the server asynchronously, without doing a traditional request/response page reload, you aren't doing AJAX.

Actually, to me anyway, the fancy DHTML and DOM manipulation is the harder part of an “AJAX” app. Doing the data retrieval has become quite simple with the many excellent frameworks such as DWR out there.

So, in closing, go ahead and cautiously use AJAX-ish development to create really nice web applications. But let's call it what it is, not something new, but a hack. Luckily, it is now a hack that works most of the time if done with care. Not that a hack is necessarily a bad thing. Hell, the wheel is a hack, but it works. Storing ones and zeros as charged bits of magnetic material in hard drives to represent things in the real world is a hack, but it works. Let's just work a little harder to inform that PHBs that this AJAX thing is not new and should be used with care.

Tired of your job? Need to hire developers? Visit DZone Jobs: great people, great opportunities.