The Next Web
AJAX. That’s the buzz around the web these days. So much a buzz, in fact, that some people are pointing it out as a major part of “Web 2.0″ or “The second coming of the web.” Regardless of where you stand as a developer - webdev, desktop, server-side, what-ever, you will probably need to keep an eye on this emerging trend as it is a real desktop killer. Never before has software deployment been as easy as typing “www…” with all the rich benefits of desktop applications. It’s like the browser is becoming an operating system on its own, and many companies are lining up their developers, hoping to bank on the concept of rich applications delivered via the browser. It opens up a whole new gateway to the SAS (Software as a Service) business model for salesforce.com wanna-be start-ups and even established companies as well. And the biggest company of them all, Google, seems to be at the forefront of the AJAX campaign, leading the way with apps like Gmail. With such promise, what concerns can there be?
Well, for one, there are still drawbacks to browser apps. Latency will always be there, and you can bet desktop-based apps will continue to one-up the browser apps with snazzy GUIs and rich features hard to deliver over a text medium. One thing that really irks me personally is the lack of the right mouse button. I know, this is probably some trivial matter, but as a society, we’re so used to using the right mouse button for quick access, that sometimes, I find myself right clicking away in Gmail to no avail. Without the emersive feel of rich-clients, AJAX apps will find themselves as merely a mean to the “zero-footprint” end. In many ways, there are just some things, some processes that can’t be taken from “my desktop” to “your server.” The hope here for Microsoft is that rich-clients continue to be a viable business - and thus Windows continues to be a viable business. The only way this hope becomes a reality is if the desktop outpaces the browser somehow (if that is even possible).
Secondly, what’s up with Adobe/Macromedia? Ever since the merger announcement, the company has been laying low. AJAX is Flash’s competition, because there can only be one standard for cool rich browser application development platforms. When you consider the ubiquity of SWF on modern browsers, you realize there is still room for flash to move in and take away some mindshare in terms of developer loyalty. The combined force of PDF + SWF can make for a whiz-bang client-side development platform even considering the fact that on the server-side, ColdFusion is almost non-existant in deployment.
While I couldn’t call these concerns “challenges”, they are probably the only roadblock for massive AJAX adoption. That and the fact that AJAX development requires understanding a huge array of languages and concepts including CSS, HTML, JavaScript, XML, PHP/Perl/Python, etc. Given that I am partial to LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) development, I won’t hesitate to mess around with AJAX on my pre-existing websites. But as I’ve already experienced, the programming environment is not as cozy as the ones well-supported by bigtime vendors like .NET and Microsoft for example.
Only time will tell, but my guess is that within the next few years, our idea of what a web-app can be is in for a fundamental shift. The next paradigm is the rich web and it looks like the industry of computing is in for a ride.
- LW