Posted on March 9, 2007 - by Khaled

No future for AJAX?

Many predictions here and there all over the web are stating that we’re going towards a web that will be mostly based on RIAs. So of course the platforms technology for these RIAs is very important! Now we are talking a lot about AJAX… But I guess you all know it is not that easy to make it cross-platform… You will most probably develop it on one platform then go through a tweaking nightmare to make it behave the same way on all the platforms you’re targeting and all the browsers etc…Looking at what has always happened on the net I believe that the pressure on the major companies to improve their services and productivity will probably lead them to replace AJAX techniques to build richer Internet Applications faster and with nicer, better and easier development process than what is available now with the XMLHttpRequest stuff…
Flash/Flex would be a nice alternative, this makes sense in my opinion especially if you’ve heard about the new online version for Photoshop,seeing how this will look/behave will certainly give us a nice example to follow… as it always takes one big company to develop a valuable technique to make others adopt it (Youtube you say?). The only problem with flash/flex, In my opinion, in comparison with AJAX is that Flash/flex is designed, controlled and sourced by one single company… But then Java is widely used in programming despite the fact that it is proprietary and controlled by a single party…
On the other hand we have the open source OpenLaszlo platform that is written in XML and JavaScript and then compiled to Flash and DHTML, so it is a kind of advanced AJAX application platform and it looks promising as it offers a lot of possibilities…

The replacement for AJAX should be more responsive and more interactive, with a bigger penetration and ubiquity, with a better and nicer development experiences and processes, offers a java-like cross-platform development and with reasonable cost…

I am thinking this is happening quite soon!and as I’ve said before the release of the photoshop online version by Adobe (which was my starting point for all these thoughts) will give us a better idea about the future of RIAs…

May be you’re thinking it is too soon to discuss this… but who knows…

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