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< EuroOSCON: Quickly Building Modular and Maintainable Applications with RIFE   re: RIFE with automatic CRUD scaffolding worth looking at >
Ajax, the stink is already bubbling up

I talked numerous times with people about which platform to adopt for RIA development. While I never have been a huge Flash fan, I've been continuously saying that using it instead of Ajax is still the best solution and that OpenLaszlo's choice of Flash makes a lot of sense.

Just look at the innerHTML Gotchas blog post over at ajaxian.com. Some weird compatibility problem with Internet Explorer makes it impossible to dynamically add rows to tables. Can you believe that? It's not like adding table rows is some esoteric capability that nobody would ever use. This is just one of the many compatibility problems. To me, all this smells like the DHTML flop from 6 years ago all over again, except that they're doing it asynchronously this time :p.

It's simple, people, unless you have infinite resources (like Google), building a complex RIA using Ajax will just make your development team drown under the 'odd little compatibility problems'. And, after all the effort, you'll still target less users because the adoption of 'supported browsers' is less than the install base of Flash player 7.
posted by Geert Bevin in Laszlo on Oct 24, 2005 5:14 PM : 5 comments [permalink]
 

Comments
Re: Ajax, the stink is already bubbling up
very well said. Ajax is ok for the most simple autocomplete stuff, but i would never ever create a full blown RIA with it. Take a look at Google Reader, even with their infinite resources, there are still some major flaws in the UI, although acceptable ones.

I must admit, i am also nearly sold on OpenLaszlo (OL) and god knows that i hate proprietary stuff, especially when it is based on an engine coming from a graphic tools company. But i can live with it in the case of OL. There are commercial (like Zen/Wingz or Flex) and noncommercial alternatives (thinlet) alternatives but OL looks indeed very promising with an excellent site and good docs.
posted by Marc Logemann on Oct 24, 2005 6:43 PM
Re: Ajax, the stink is already bubbling up
There's always an disillusion after a hype. When I heard about AJAX the first time, I've got immediately to think about DHTML which never worked out.

My second though were security issues, which in fact also proved to get true.

While GMail is awesome, I doubt a medium-sized company could work out something like that. I'm shivering when I think about all those work-arounds they had to implement.

Although I really never started to like Flash, it seems a much more viable way for doing RIA to me.
posted by Hynek Schlawack on Oct 24, 2005 11:14 PM
Generating regular HTML is hard enough
A web application is technically code (say in Java) that generates code (HTML/XHTML) that needs to work on different platforms... Add to the generated code the complexity of async communications, the numerous bugs of CSS/DOM and the fact that JavaScript is a huge mess and you start getting into a problem.
This problem gets worse since you have to maintain duplicate application state both in the client and the server... Even gmail still gets it wrong on many occasions and is limited in many ways when compared to "fat" applications. I use it but I'm not giving up on thunderbird just yet.
posted by Shai Almog on Oct 25, 2005 8:41 AM
Re: Ajax, the stink is already bubbling up
What about framework like echo2 They build an entire framework using ajax and Java swing like code. Although you have th constraint of writting your whole application in java code, the result is quit impressive and the final release isn't yet there !!! Therefore with such framework taking care of the browser issu at low level, you could imagine big project using ajax. In a second effort they will be prociding eclipse plugin for gui design wich could lead webapp creation very much fun.8)
posted by beben on Oct 29, 2005 9:24 PM
Re: Ajax, the stink is already bubbling up
The problem of this is that I don't like the Swing-component approach of Echo2. I don't want to be forced to adopt a certain way of writing the server-side just to be able to have a richer client.
posted by Geert Bevin on Oct 30, 2005 9:27 AM

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